Books Archives

A foolproof way of predicting the future

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A peek at the horoscope, puzzling the meaning of dreams, wearing lucky socks, having a method for choosing lottery numbers – many otherwise rational people retain a vestigial interest in prediction to ensure favourable outcomes. I’ll happily admit to a fascination with Tarot cards – and I do seem to be an archetypal bossy Aries. Christopher Dell’s Prophecies demonstrates just how widespread a belief in divination has always been across cultures, however peculiar or unsavoury the methods. In ordering his vast material, Dell sets out some ‘categories of convenience which allow us to impose some structure on a naturally amorphous topic’.

Sarah Moorhouse

In praise of uncertainty over hollow conviction

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When I met Brian Dillon in February 2023, he seemed to have a lot on his mind. We had arranged to speak about Affinities, the newly published final instalment of Essayism, his sprawling three-part survey of literature, art and aesthetics. That morning, as he sipped decaf coffee in a quiet corner of the Barbican Kitchen café in London, he still didn’t know what his book was about. ‘At this point you don’t,’ he confessed. But even though he hadn’t made up his mind about Affinities, Dillon had already begun to think about his next project. It was to be a memoir of his education, called Ambivalence. This has now come to fruition.

Benjamin Myers

The land of missed opportunity: The Left and the Lucky, by Willy Vlautin, reviewed

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Were arriving aliens to be introduced to the concept of the USA via the work of Willy Vlautin, they would find a country populated by quiet people enduring quiet struggles. Family dysfunction, the repetitiveness of minimum-wage work, crushing loneliness and the detailed grind of daily existence (rarely has a writer said so much through groceries bought and meals cooked) are dominant themes, though always backlit by the suggestion that goodness prevails. Even entertaining the idea of the American Dream is an indulgence when the reality of simple survival is far more urgent. In this sense Vlautin is the son of John Steinbeck and Raymond Carver.

Francesca Peacock

The art of printmaking in all its glorious complexity

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Do you know your aquatint from your drypoint? Your intaglio from your lithograph? The appearance of any one finished print can vary so much from another – the feathery delicacy of etching replaced by the bold forms of linocut or the carved sinews of a woodblock – that it can be difficult to believe they all derive from the same initial process. What image appears when an object – be it carved, chemically altered, or engraved – is covered in ink and pressed into a piece of paper? As Holly Black explains, it is difficult to know when this technique first originated. Was it with the work of monks carving woodblocks in the mid-9th century to print the lines of the Diamond Sutra (now held in the British Library)? Or does it have its origins centuries earlier?

Jon Day

A meditation on reality: Transcription, by Ben Lerner, reviewed

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Near the beginning of Ben Lerner’s new novel the unnamed narrator recalls visiting an exhibition of botanical models made by the father-and-son glass artists Leopold and Rudolf Blashka in Dresden in the 19th century. Like Zeuxis’s grapes, so lifelike that birds would come and peck at them, the models, ‘impossibly delicate things’, challenge the narrator’s sense of the real: I kept seeing the flowers as organic one instant and as artificial the next, a kind of duck/rabbit effect, not between things the object might represent but between nature and culture, the given and the constructed. Transcription, like Lerner’s previous three novels, is an autofiction about the tension between the given and the constructed. It is arranged in three acts.

Maggie Fergusson

Weeds, bugs and lichens must now thrill the imagination

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In the summer of 1992, the Times sent me to Orkney to interview the poet George Mackay Brown. He was notoriously wary of media interest – perhaps the only author ever to have asked his doctor for anti-depressants when shortlisted for the Booker prize – and I could hardly get a word out of him. His council flat didn’t yield much either: a sofa, a table – a Formica surface which Brown cleared of crumbs after breakfast and then wrote on till lunchtime. But behind his rocking chair, a huge banner, embroidered in bright wools, blazed out across an otherwise monochrome room: O let them be left, wildness and wet Long live the weeds and the wilderness yet.

Caroline Moorehead

How interwar Germany became a breeding ground for evil

Lead book review

Did no one who lived through the Weimar Republic of 1918-33 see what was coming, asks Victor Sebestyen in his impressive new book. The politicians, the intellectuals, the foreign visitors who converged on Berlin in the wake of the first world war all wrote about the anti-Semitism and violence they witnessed, but virtually no one perceived where Germany was heading until it was too late. A great deal has been written about the Weimar years, much of it in hindsight; but Sebestyen, the author of bestselling books on Hungary and Russia, sets out to relate events as they unfold – to tell the story as it happened. The result is a fascinating portrait of how frighteningly easy it is for a democracy to crumble.

21 April 2026

Peter Carty

Haunting images: The Shadow of the Object, by Chloe Aridjis, reviewed

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What marks out Chloe Aridjis as a novelist is her ability to create atmospheres and ambiences. These often have hints of the uncanny, but rather than making her writing unsettling they give it an appealing intimacy. Her fourth novel begins as the narrator Flora visits her parents in Mexico City. Without warning, the family’s Alsatian leaps up and savages her hand. In hospital, she suffers from insomnia and wanders from her room to encounter ‘a mysterious figure’ at the end of a corridor. This turns out to be Wilhelmina, an elderly German patient with pneumonia, who befriends Flora. Wilhelmina collects antique toys and instruments, and Flora becomes fascinated by a magic lantern in her possession.

A.N. Wilson

A portrait of the fin de siècle in all its morbid decadence

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Everyone I have met who has read Belchamber, Howard Sturgis’s novel of 1904, would endorse Edith Wharton’s judgment that this was a book which was ‘very nearly in the first rank’. I can still vividly remember the week – half a lifetime ago – when my wife and I discovered the little blue World’s Classics edition in a secondhand bookshop and were lost to the world for days. It is Henry James with the gloves off – in some ways quite unbearably vivid. Country house adultery and the sexual mores of London society during the 1890s are upsettingly, even crudely, laid bare. ‘Sainty’ the English aristocrat, an aesthete whose favourite pastime is knitting, fails to satisfy his coarse-grained wife, who provides him with a baby even though the marriage is, of course, unconsummated.

Mark Harman

The potentially catastrophic consequences of reading Kafka

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Rainer Maria Rilke’s claim that fame is the ‘sum of all misunderstandings’ is certainly true of Franz Kafka, whose life, work and reception have long been plagued by myriad misunderstandings. Despite publishing comparatively little in his all-too-short lifetime (1883-1924), Kafka gained a reputation as a writer’s writer, whose work was met with keen appreciation by, among others, Rilke, Hermann Hesse and Thomas Mann. In Kafkaesque, which first appeared in French under the title Dix versions de Kafka, Maïa Hruska charts Kafka’s afterlife through the perspective of ten ‘first’ writer-translators.

Helen Barrett

The nightmare of filming A Hard Day’s Night

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It would be easy to dismiss A Hard Day’s Night, the Beatles film made in 1964, as a throwaway period piece. The plot hurls the Fab Four into a meta narrative, playing themselves while a director – a seething Victor Spinetti – panics as the boys are delayed on their way to a televised variety performance by mishaps, distractions and stampeding fans. The film was thrown together to fit the group’s breakneck schedule – scripted over a few weeks in January by Alun Owen, shot by Richard Lester by May and out in cinemas in July. In her absorbing, concise book, Samira Ahmed sees the film not as a cursory promo but as a watershed in British culture – ‘a kind of cinematic big bang’.

Diana Hendry

Why it’s permissible to betray family secrets

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Blake Morrison is the quintessential man of letters. More exactly, he’s a man of genres – poet, novelist, playwright, essayist, librettist and, most notably, memoirist. (Four memoirs so far, each a prize winner and/or bestseller). Although in the introduction to On Memoir he refutes the notion that he established the genre of life writing in the UK (he was professor of creative and life writing at Goldsmiths University, London for 20 years) or that he has ‘encouraged its growth’, he has somehow become its guru, the critic every literary editor turns to on the publication of yet another raw family story or celebrity revelation.

David Profumo

Alone on a vast fjord, surrounded by whales, beneath the midnight sun

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As an angler in pursuit of fish across some 45 countries, I have travelled in a variety of precarious watercraft, from a Tahitian va’a to a coracle in Coorg, and remain convinced that all buoyant vessels are merely looking for somewhere to sink. In his study of the cultural history of small boats around the north Atlantic, David Gange, an academic historian and devotee of the kayak, argues that they are in fact transports of delight, and a key component in the survival of precious maritime communities.

Stephen Smith

Antony Gormley’s lonely figures transfer to paper

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If there’s any consolation to be had in the prospect of AI filling the world with humanoids, it will be the look on their glassy faces when they realise that one of us has beaten them to it. The Turner Prize-winning sculptor Sir Antony Gormley, 75, has installed casts of himself from Crosby beach in Liverpool to Gateshead, from Texas to the Netherlands and western Australia. He and his simulacra might not detain our new overlords for very long, of course, but in the meantime ‘The Gormleys versus the Bots’ is the Doctor Who episode I’m here for. The man responsible for the magnificent ‘Angel of the North’ studied at Goldsmith’s, the playground of Damien Hirst, Sarah Lucas and other YBAs.

Olivia Cole

Farewell to the Calloways: See You on the Other Side, by Jay McInerney, reviewed

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Many of Jay McInerney’s characters had their glory days in the 1980s and 1990s of his vivid early novels, with all of the excesses and freedoms that he captured, most famously in his 1984 debut Bright Lights, Big City. As familiar as New York’s landmarks and favourite haunts remain, the city of 2020 can seem a bewildering landscape for his creations, even before the darkened lights of the pandemic. The Calloways are the literary ‘It couple’ about whom McInerney first wrote in the elegiac Brightness Falls (1992). Now, in See You on the Other Side, friends and acquaintances get hit by #MeToo with the kind of randomness reserved for corked wine or a careless investment.

Peter Parker

An outpouring of jaunty black comedy

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In 2005 Xandra Bingley published Bertie, May and Mrs Fish, an extraordinarily lively and enjoyable memoir of her childhood on a Cotswold farm during the second world war. Much of the writing was glancing rather than straightforward, its narrative not strictly chronological, while its title hinted at something not fully explained in the text. Dispensing altogether with conventional punctuation, the book contained not a single comma or quotation mark, using instead ellipses. This was brilliantly imitative of both the clipped speech of its upper-class characters, particularly when facing disasters large and small, and the hell-for-leather pace of lives spent galloping on horseback across the Gloucestershire countryside.

Michael Moorcock

J.G. Ballard’s surreal fiction continues to resonate through the century

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In 1951, when J.G. Ballard was 20, Pandora and the Flying Dutchman premiered in London. Directed by Albert Lewin and starring James Mason, Ava Gardner and a solid cast of English actors, it was filmed on the Catalan coast by Jack Cardiff in lush MGM colour. Man Ray contributed designs based on the work of de Chirico. Set in an Anglo-Spanish colony, it featured a Surrealist painter, a racing car driver and a toreador. All love the mysterious Pandora, who is unable to love anyone until the Dutchman drops anchor. To prove his passion for Pandora one suitor takes poison while another pushes his beloved car over a cliff.

14 April 2026

Ariane Bankes

Why one of Renoir’s most celebrated paintings languished unloved

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Shimmering off the cover of The Renoir Girls are sisters Alice (aged four) and Elisabeth Cahen d’Anvers (six), portrayed in all the promise and innocence of a pampered childhood by Pierre-Auguste Renoir. Aged 40, Renoir was then the coming portrait painter for the gratin of Paris, as he struggled to make ends meet with smart commissions from wealthy sponsors – a network of Catholic and Jewish banking families that included the Ephrussis (memorialised by Edmund de Waal in The Hare with Amber Eyes), Camondos, Rothschilds and Cahen d’Anvers.

Tom Knowles

Unravelling the infinite mysteries of physics

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Can artificial intelligence become godlike? Can such technology unravel the world’s great mysteries? Can everything, from love and intuition to consciousness and wonder, be replicated by computers and reduced to simply knowing the right algorithm? These are the big questions running through Sebastian Mallaby’s engaging book The Infinity Machine, which charts the rise of DeepMind, the London-based AI research firm owned by Google, and its exceptionally clever co-founder and chief executive, Demis Hassabis. The book’s narrative is centred on Hassabis’s hope to make DeepMind the first company to create AGI (Artificial General Intelligence) in which computers can match or surpass humans at virtually all cognitive tasks, and the morality of such an achievement.

Clare Mulley

Derided as ‘feminists’: the unsung witnesses of the Nuremberg trials

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There are several things wrong with James Vanderbilt’s new film Nuremberg, least of all, some might say, the fact that it fails the Bechdel test. This 1985 metric assesses female representation in film by whether two named women have a conversation on screen about anything other than a man. If you are thinking, ‘So what? All the Nuremberg prosecutors were male, as was every defendant’, then you need to get hold of Natalie Livingstone’s revelatory book. While the public face of the trials was resolutely male, as were the indictments (there was no mention of rape, for instance, within the listed war crimes), the truth is that in the trials, as in the war, women played significant though often hidden roles.

Lee Langley

A dying fall: The Last Movement, by Robert Seethaler, reviewed

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Robert Seethaler is known for celebrating the unsung: commonplace characters – peasants, labourers or shop assistants – who draw us into their quiet lives. But the protagonist in The Last Movement is a celebrated historical figure: Gustav Mahler. For those in search of biographical information, as W.H. Auden put it, a shilling life will give you all the facts. Today we’d go online. How will Seethaler, a distinguished miniaturist, deal with an icon? We meet the composer in 1911 aboard the SS Amerika on his final journey across the Atlantic, homebound and dying. A respectful ship’s boy brings him a tray of tea as he sits on the sundeck, wrapped in a blanket, contemplating the ocean and his turbulent life.

Anna Aslanyan

The typo that spelled death in the Soviet Union

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‘As anyone who has gleefully spotted a typo in a prestigious publication, felt a flicker of schadenfreude at a pompous critic’s downfall, or secretly enjoyed a literary scandal knows, it is possible to love books while delighting in their disasters.’ The sentiment expressed in Rogues, Widows and Orphans is familiar to this reviewer. Rebecca Lee, who has been an editor for two decades, knows very well how words ‘get good’ (to quote the title of her earlier book) and what happens when they go wrong. Her new work ‘offers a lick of every flavour of ick lit’, leaving the reader craving more. Errors and omissions in print have consequences for everyone involved.

Maria Albano

‘A lost generation’: My Year in Paris with Gertrude Stein, by Deborah Levy, reviewed

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In a 2013 interview, Deborah Levy said: ‘Modernism is the soft typewriter of the womb that made me.’ But what made Modernism? My Year in Paris with Gertrude Stein is Levy’s attempt to answer the question. In this novel, an unnamed narrator from London moves to Paris to write an ‘essay’ on Stein, the American patron of the avant-garde. There she meets Eva, an enigmatic illustrator whose blue eyes make everyone go ‘Awww’, and Fanny, a fashionable finance consultant with a thriving sex life. As the three search for Eva’s missing cat (originally called It and renamed Bob by Fanny), the narrator chases after Stein’s many trails but struggles to bring her into focus.

Horatio Clare

The cormorant – symbol of gluttony and the Devil

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Greed, death, hate and clouds of destruction – this is the cormorant season all right. I was hungry to read Gordon McMullan’s book because I love the birds and looked forward to learning their secrets. But I gathered only a little about the green-glossy, serpentine jewel of a fowl I saw in Hebden Beck recently, hunting in the middle of town where I’d never seen it before. Look elsewhere for the creaturely particulars, such as the spur of bone at the back of the skull from which thick muscles link to the lower mandible, giving the corvus marinus a mighty bitey beak. This book is not concerned with what we know about cormorants but with the cormorants that we ourselves are.

Philip Hensher

A deadly imitation game: the fate of the British teenager who posed as a Russian oligarch’s son

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This story is little more than a brutal anecdote, which Patrick Radden Keefe has chosen to tell at excessive length. It has the kind of fact-checked gravity that indicates a star American journalist bent on perpetrating an entire book. (‘Built in 1923 and originally known as the Empire Stadium, Wembley was the most iconic sporting ground in Britain.’) But it occurred to me more than once as I read it that it has the hallmarks of a particularly black London comedy by Dickens or Ben Jonson or Joe Orton. A violent knave, his activities previously limited to cheating the police, murdering his equally appalling criminal rivals, doing underhand deals and ripping off the rich, acquires an associate.

7 April 2026

Annie Walton Doyle

Motherless friends: Kin, by Tayari Jones, reviewed

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Set in the American South during the Jim Crow era, Tayari Jones’s Kin follows the parallel lives of Annie and Vernice. The ‘cradle friends’ are both motherless, Annie having been abandoned and ‘Niecy’ orphaned, leaving them with a painful ‘wound’. They are as vulnerable as ‘unshucked, naked peas’. Though they are trauma-bonded, the ways in which they approach their lives differ hugely. As her mother is still somewhere out there, Annie becomes fixated on finding her and ‘trying to climb back in her womb’. She’s unable to move forward until she arrives at a resolution. Tracking her mother down becomes ‘the point of her whole life’ – much to Niecy’s dismay: ‘Finding your mama won’t fix you.

Daniel Rey

Singing of arms and the man: Son of Nobody, by Yann Martel, reviewed

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Yann Martel, the author of Beatrice and Virgil and Life of Pi, typically explores competing storylines, narrative reliability and the nature of truth. His new novel, Son of Nobody, pursues these themes in a first-person account written by a scholar who discovers a Greek epic. The narrator is a Canadian called Harlow Donne – a PhD student at a middling university. Offered an ‘unbelievable opportunity’ to spend a year at Oxford, he leaves home, his wobbly marriage and his young daughter. His doctoral supervisor repeats his habitual plea: ‘Just find something to say.’ He does. From ‘hints and scraps’ found at the Bodleian Library and the Ashmolean Museum, Donne stitches together and translates 30 fragments of a lost poem of the Trojan War.

Mark Bostridge

Landscapes of longing in illuminated Books of Hours

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Christopher de Hamel is an outstanding salesman. At Sotheby’s, back in the 1990s, he brokered the sale of the 15th-century Sherborne Missal to the British Library for £15 million, a record-breaking sum. Over the past decade, his reputation as a salesman has fitted a much less conventional mould. In two dazzlingly illustrated books he has set out to sell to the ordinary reader the power and pleasure of medieval manuscripts. His approach combines enthusiasm with scholarly precision and a conversational style that sits surprisingly easily with the fund of knowledge he has gradually accumulated. Conscious that most of us will never encounter these closely guarded treasures at first hand, de Hamel is more than happy to settle down in a library and turn the pages for us.

Ariane Bankes

Defiantly creative to the end: the transgressive Dorothea Tanning

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I received this book for review on the same day that Dorothea Tanning was making headlines in the auction world, breaking records with the sale at Christie’s of a tiny but key early work for more than £4 million. Her prices have risen an astonishing sevenfold in the past year, as collectors cotton on to her significance as a Surrealist; and while she may still be trailing on Leonora Carrington’s coat-tails, she looks to be steadily catching up. Born in America to Swedish parents, Tanning was the very model of a fiercely independent artist, and her works are singular and disquieting like few others. She was largely self-taught as a painter and developed a virtuoso technique.