mon 07/07/2025

book reviews and features

Michael Connelly: The Late Show review - mesmerising and believable characters

Marina Vaizey

Readers have been committed fans since 1992, when the sometime crime reporter...

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Danny Goldberg: In Search of the Lost Chord review - 1967 well remembered

Liz Thomson

I was 10 in 1967 though I remember much about the year, indeed about the era, not least the release of Sgt Pepper and the first live global satellite broadcast, when the...

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Eureka: novelist Anthony Quinn on completing his acclaimed trilogy

Anthony Quinn

I am intrigued by those writers who plan their novels with the bristling rigour of a military strategist,...

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Jonathan Miles: St Petersburg review - culture and calamity

Marina Vaizey

Talk about survival: St Petersburg, Petrograd, Leningrad, now again St Petersburg, all the same...

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Chris Patten: First Confession - A Sort of Memoir review - remembrances of government and power

Liz Thomson

It’s 25 years since Chris Patten lost his seat as Conservative MP for Bath. The 1992 election was called by...

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Brenda Maddox: Reading the Rocks review - revelations of geology

Marina Vaizey

Reading the Rocks has a provocative subtitle, “How Victorian Geologists Discovered the Secret of Life”, indicating the role of...

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John Man: Amazons review - the real warrior women of the ancient world

mark Kidel

As Wonder Woman hits screens worldwide, the publication of a book that explores the myth and...

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David Sedaris: Theft By Finding review - comic literary talent of historic value

Matthew Wright

In a voice of distinctive, high-pitched nasal whimsy, comic essayist and memoirist David Sedaris finds humour with the precision of a mosquito after blood. British...

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Andrew O'Hagan: The Secret Life review – troubling tales from the online underground

Boyd Tonkin

Imagine that you come across a story by a journalist who, writing for the Daily Mail or The Sun, steals the identity of a real young man from a poor neighbourhood of south-east...

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Elif Batuman: The Idiot review - memories of student life and travels meander

Marina Vaizey

University, anyone? Student days? If you were ever an undergraduate, who does not remember the simultaneous sense of dislocation and excitement, the feeling of the familiar combined with a heady...

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I recently heard a BBC Radio 4 presenter use the troubling phrase: "Not everyone agreed on the reality of that." Once the domain of Andre Breton’s...

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