A heady mix of vice and voodoo
1 December 2012
Seeds of Fiction: Graham Greene’s Adventures in Haiti and Central America Bernard Diederich, with a foreword by Pico Iyer
By any standards, Haiti represents a great concentration of misery and dashed hopes. From the air, the Caribbean republic is a sun-scorched clinker; deforestation, caused by a ruinous cutting of… Read more
3 November 2012
The Eagle Unbowed: Poland and the Poles in the Second World War Halik Kochanski
Was a nation ever so beset by calamity as Poland? During the second world war, Polish cities were bombed, fought over hand-to-hand and crushingly shelled. Beyond their ideological differences, Hitler… Read more
1 September 2012
NW Zadie Smith
For good or ill, black West Indian culture is synonymous with youth culture in Britain today. Even among white teenagers, a Jamaican inflection (‘buff’, ‘bruv’) is reckoned hip. The ‘Jamaicanisation’… Read more
23 June 2012
My Song: A Memoir Harry Belafonte, with Michael Schnayerson
Port Antonio, in Jamaica, radiates a torrid, hothouse air. At night the inshore breeze smells faintly of bananas. Port Antonio was once Jamaica’s chief banana port, shipping out an average… Read more
2 June 2012
The Second World War Antony Beevor
The long summer that led up to the last days of peace in Europe in 1939 — the vigil of Hitler’s assault on Poland and the subsequent Phoney War —…Read more
19 May 2012
Harry H. Corbett: The Front Legs of the Cow Susannah Corbett
The other evening my wife came home to find me watching re-runs of Steptoe and Son. The washing up had not been done, and everything was in a state of… Read more
31 March 2012
Under the Same Stars Tim Lott
Back in the Sixties, if you wanted a fruitful, freakout-free LSD experience, you might have called on Mrs Aldous Huxley in Los Angeles, where she lived as a beatifically attuned… Read more
Bookends: A network of kidney-nappers
18 February 2012
Raylan Givens, an ace detective in the Raymond Chandler mould, has encountered just about every shakedown artist and palooka in his native East Kentucky. His creator, Elmore Leonard, is a… Read more
28 January 2012
The Last Holiday: A Memoir Gil Scott-Heron
At a funeral in New Orleans in 1901, Joe ‘King’ Oliver played a blues-drenched dirge on the trumpet. This was the new music they would soon call jazz. A century… Read more
7 January 2012
The New Granta Book of Travel edited by Liz Jobey, with an introduction by Jonathan Raban
We are all tourists now, and there is no escape. The first thing we see as we jet round the world is a filth of our own making. Resort hotel… Read more
10 December 2011
Stephen King’s latest novel is a time-travel fantasy about the assassination of John F. Kennedy. At almost 750 pages, 11.22.63 is drawn-out even by blockbuster standards. Critics have bemoaned its… Read more
Cocktail Hour Under the Tree of Forgetfulness by Alexandra Fuller
5 November 2011
Cocktail Hour Under the Tree of Forgetfulness Alexandra Fuller
There is always a special risk, says Alexandra Fuller, when putting real-life people into books. Not all those who recognised themselves in her terrific memoir of 1960s and 1970s white-ruled… Read more
17 September 2011
Murder in Notting Hill Mark Olden
One of the great books to have come out of the British-West Indian encounter is Journey to an Illusion by the Jamaican journalist (and former London bus conductor) Donald Hinds.… Read more
