The Hunger Angel by Herta Muller: review
15 Nov 2012
Herta Muller, who won the Nobel Prize for literature in 2009, is the daughter of a German-Romanian SS veteran. She was born in Romania’s …
Spilt Milk by Chico Buarque: review
04 Oct 2012
Back in the Sixties, Brazil thrilled to a new dance beat called bossa nova. With its languid jazz tones, the music had a hushed intensity and …
Not Me by Joachim Fest: review
01 Aug 2012
According to the Auschwitz survivor Primo Levi, the mentality that judges all Germans as “Nazis” was not so different from the Hitlerite …
Private Empire: ExxonMobil and American Power by Steve Coll
30 July 2012
Review …
Bageye at the Wheel by Colin Grant: review
27 Jun 2012
Most of the Jamaicans who migrated to Britain in the Fifties and Sixties considered themselves Britons to the bone. “UK – Right of Abode” …
Behind the Beautiful Forevers by Katherine Boo: review
20 Jun 2012
In 1971, at the height of the Indo-Pakistan war, my parents took me with them to Bombay. I was 10 and it was my first trip abroad. My father …
17 May 2012
Unknown to the passengers, most international flights have a corpse on board. Airport cargo handlers refer to human remains as “HUM”. …
Curiosity: How Science Became Interested in Everything by Philip Ball: review
02 May 2012
It is only in recent years that science has become, in publishing terms, popular and attractive. But long before Richard Dawkins or Stephen Jay …
Savage Continent: Europe in the Aftermath of World War II by Keith Lowe: review
04 Apr 2012
In the winter of 1948 Graham Greene visited the “smashed, dreary city of Vienna” to begin work on his screenplay for The Third Man. …
St Patrick’s Day in Montserrat: the Caribbean’s Emerald Isle
16 Mar 2012
Languid as you please. …
Joseph Roth: a Life in Letters ed. by Michael Hofmann: review
07 Feb 2012
We leave Roth, embittered and alcoholic, alone in a Paris hostel, awaiting death. …
The Dream of the Celt by Mario Vargas Llosa: review
31 May 2012
“Exterminate all the brutes!” exclaims the European trader, Mr Kurtz, in Joseph Conrad …
Roads to Berlin by Cees Nooteboom: review
24 Oct 2012
With its shadowy Harry Palmer atmosphere, pre-glasnost East Berlin was a melancholy place hemmed in by border …
The Queen’s Agent: Francis Walsingham at the Court of Elizabeth I by John Cooper: review
11 Oct 2011
Sir Francis Walsingham, the spymaster extraordinaire and priest-hunter at the court of Elizabeth I, was devoted to the defence of the Tudor …
A Train in Winter: A Story of Resistance, Friendship and Survival by Caroline Moorehead: review
06 Sept 2011
When Hitler invaded Paris in June 1940, scuffles left a couple of German soldiers wounded outside the Gare du Nord; otherwise the French …
The Emperor of Lies by Steve Sem-Sandberg: review
13 July 2011
On April 19 1943, the Nazis began to liquidate the Warsaw ghetto. It was the day of Passover, when Jewish families celebrated with unleavened bread …
A Pilgrim in Spain by Christopher Howse: review
24 Jun 2011
In the popular imagination, Spain is a country shadowed by death and religious sufferance. Goya, with his etchings of religious flagellants and …