The saga of the rise and fall of the Third Reich could be traced by following events in any one of the countries occupied by the Nazis. Jane Rogoyska has refined this approach by focusing on what happened in a single building, a fashionable ‘grand hotel’ in central Paris, between 1933 and 1945. The Lutetia
Nigel Biggar was not an obvious target for cancellation. A New Labourite, a Remainer and a public supporter of gay marriage and abortion up to 18 weeks, he might have seemed almost right-on – for an Oxford Professor of Divinity, at any rate. Nonetheless, when in 2017 he had the temerity to suggest that the
If you reckon you have an understanding of international politics today, you probably haven’t been listening properly. Vladimir Putin, Xi Jinping, Benjamin Netanyahu and Donald Trump are making history too fast for most of us to keep up. Odd Arne Westad’s The Coming Storm seeks to make sense of the current geopolitical chaos by drawing
The word ‘ghetto’ is said to derive from the Venetian dialect term for ‘foundry’: ghèto. In the early 16th century, on the orders of the Doge, Jews were herded en masse from the centre of Venice to the Ghetto Nuovo, or New Foundry district, where metal workers had long cast cannon for the Venetian fleet.
On the eve of a major retrospective at Tate Modern comes this portrait of Tracey Emin as a painter, told largely in her own words. It traces a remarkable trajectory, from gobby Margate teenager to one of the UK’s most respected and celebrated artists, and a Dame of the British Empire. At its heart is
Unfortunately, Zoe Strimpel has a great point in Good Slut. Why unfortunately? Because as much as I sympathise with her basic argument, I cannot see many people being persuaded by this scattershot polemic with its myriad errors and alarming glibness. Team slut deserves a better advocate. Whether I want to count myself as one of
The semiotics of clothes, especially royal ones, can be fascinating, sending out powerful messages. Think of the jewel-studded, pearl-strewn portraits of Queen Elizabeth I or Princess Diana’s revenge-chic black dress. As a fashion queen herself (Justine Picardie was editor-in-chief of Harper’s Bazaar for more than seven years and has an acclaimed book on Chanel under
Can Xue is an oddity in the landscape of world literature. Greeted mostly with bewilderment or indifference in her native China, her novels have gained a following among a certain type of erudite western reader over the past few decades, leading to an annual flurry of Nobel speculation and more works in English translation than
I think I’d be pretty hostile if I met my doppelganger – living proof of my mediocrity. My fragile ego even balks at being told I’m reminiscent of someone else. But, drawn as they are to the uncanny, authors just love doppelgangers. In As If, Isabel Waidner makes a playful contribution to the literary tradition,
To our jaded century, ‘fairy’ carries connotations ranging from the sentimental to the sickly. It conjures childishness, foolishness, insipidity and softness – Tinker Bell, the Tooth Fairy, the Cottingley photographs that fooled Arthur Conan Doyle, cakes, twinkling lights and a certain brand of soap. Francis Young feels that the word should also be applied to
The subtitle of Walter Reid’s biography of James Ramsay MacDonald refers to ‘the extraordinary rise and tragic fall’ of Labour’s first prime minister. The rise was not especially extraordinary. In the first decades of the 20th century several people from relatively humble backgrounds – David Lloyd George and John Burns from outside MacDonald’s party, and
Whether you went with the two big rugby goalposts, those opposing H’s of Heaney and Hughes, or with Blake Morrison’s quondam super league of world English (or sometimes airport) poets, Brodsky, Walcott, Murray and Heaney, Heaney loomed amiably in the poetry landscape of the late 20th century. I knew him a little and liked him
What biographer would pass up a time-travelling opportunity to meet their subject face to face? This novel’s protagonist, Gavin Mulvany, an academic specialising in Jean-Jacques Rousseau, is somehow able to slip back in time to 1777, a year before the fractious French writer died. He turns from irritating fan to close companion, accompanying Jean-Jacques on
Tony Abbott’s history of Australia comes as a surprise. It has a spellbinding verve which will beguile friend and foe alike. We don’t expect such narrative command from a former prime minister of Australia. In office, Abbott was a believer in the ‘lean and lift’ principle of civic life, with a marked preference for the
In a tiny town tucked into the desert an hour’s drive out of Nevada, a legal brothel operates. Its ‘menu’ of services range from less expensive sexual intercourse to the most expensive, ‘the White Whale’, starting at $20,000. Dr Justin Garcia, there with his colleagues doing research, asked the manager, a woman with bright yellow
‘Pinball games, with their flashing lights and unforgettable names, are the one thread that runs together my otherwise fragmentary life.’ So writes Andreas Bernard in the last sentence of this touchingly Proustian memoir. He hymns a life spent flipping small steel balls up and down machines which, despite their clamorous lights, bleeps and honks, amounted
We all know that an Englishman’s home is his castle, or at least it was. Looking back, it is easy to see how the castle walls were breached – first by mobile phones and wifi, then by the smart speakers and other gadgets that help and also harvest us. The idea that our homes are
Lionel Shriver is a first-rate storyteller. And yet… A Better Life is a satire on the immigration problem that particularly faces the US. All the clichéd arguments on both sides of the debate are laid bare. In fact, the whole novel is a cliché. Yet clichés come into existence because their substance is what everyone
Japanophiles, look away now. A country renowned for inspiring fascination, warm feelings and not a little envy in its rapidly rising numbers of visitors – from crime-free streets to clean and plentiful public toilets – is in the grip of problems deeper and darker than you might imagine. The classic Japan itinerary reveals little of
If it is true that a serious artist is one with the capacity to go on reinventing who they are in their work, Leonard Cohen unquestionably counts as serious. Not that anyone is likely to think of him as frivolous, exactly. While the famously acid description of his songs as ‘music to slit your wrists