Telegraph

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 …

 

Flight by Adam Thorpe: review

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 …