mon 23/12/2024

book reviews and features

Richard Vinen: The Long ’68 review - more impartial than impassioned

Liz Thomson

Born into the late 1950s, I was too young to be a 68er, though I remember watching it all on TV: the protests in Red...

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Irvine Welsh: Dead Men's Trousers review - Renton and Begbie make it safely to middle age

Matthew Wright

When it came out in 1993, Trainspotting was probably the most shocking novel since Lady Chatterley's Lover. It’s rumoured to have missed out on a Booker shortlisting...

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Listed: The 10 Best Biblical Novels

Michael Arditti

From the myths of the Old Testament to the miracles of the New, the Bible has been as much a source of...

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Lynne Murphy: The Prodigal Tongue review - two nations divided by a common language?

Liz Thomson

For as long as I can remember, and long before I set foot in America for the first time at age 24, I have...

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Richard Sennett: Building and Dwelling - Ethics for the City review

mark Kidel

All the great sociologists, in the tradition of Georg Simmel, Max Weber and others, are on a mission. They cannot help wishing to change the world. Science should be value-free, but the social...

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Agnès Poirier: Left Bank review - Paris in war and peace

Marina Vaizey

There are too many awestruck cultural histories of...

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Matthew Sweet: Operation Chaos review - paranoia and insanity in the Cold War

Jasper Rees

In 2017 the documentary series The Vietnam War told the story, from soup to nuts, of America’s misadventure in south-east Asia. It now seems the comprehensive...

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'In order to write my book I had to kill Jane Austen'

Rachel Halliburton

My heroine would not have appeared in a Jane Austen novel. Brilliant, arch and incisive though Austen...

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Stephen Walsh's Debussy - A Painter in Sound - extract

stephen Walsh

All this time La Mer had been brewing. It was almost a year since Debussy had written to Colonne...

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Lisa Halliday: Asymmetry review - unconventional and brilliant

Katherine Waters

Lisa Halliday’s striking debut novel consists of three parts. The first follows the blooming relationship between Alice and Ezra (...

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