fri 01/08/2025

book reviews and features

Sunday Book: Daniel Levitin - A Field Guide to Lies and Statistics

Peter Forbes

Daniel Levitin makes one reference to Donald Trump in this book (to the latter’s claim to have seen on TV...

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Dr Michael Scott: How to make the most of globalisation

Michael Scott

The Guardian called Brexit “a rejection of globalisation.” That’s as may be, but the reality is we cannot, however much we might want to, check out of the globalised world in which...

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Sunday Book: Tessa Hadley - Bad Dreams

Boyd Tonkin

In one of Tessa Hadley’s piercingly smart and subtle tales, a woman whose upwardly-mobile path has taken her from Leeds to Philadelphia works for a firm that manufactures instruments to test the “...

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Sunday Book: James Lee Burke - The Jealous Kind

Liz Thomson

In the heat of a Texas summer, Aaron Holland Broussard comes of age. It’s 1952:  the two world wars still cast their long shadows and, far away, the Americans are fighting the Russians in a...

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Sunday Book: Michel Houellebecq - Unreconciled: Poems 1991-2013

Boyd Tonkin

The American poet-critic Randall Jarrell once entitled a collection of essays A Sad Heart at the Supermarket. He might have enjoyed Michel Houellebecq’s poem “Hypermarket - November”. Its...

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Sunday Book: Nadeem Aslam - The Golden Legend

Matthew Wright

Elegant literary romance and contemporary jihadism are unlikely bedfellows. Yet British-Pakistani novelist Nadeem Aslam has now written a third novel combining the two. While The...

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Richard Adams: 'If I'd known how well I could write I’d have started earlier'

Jasper Rees

Richard Adams, who has died at the age of 96, was the high priest of anthropomorphism. Much his most famous and loved novel is his first, Watership Down, published when he...

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Christmas Book: When Broadway Went to Hollywood

David Nice

Tinseltown's relationship to its more sophisticated, older New York brother is analogous to Ethan Mordden's engagement by Oxford University Press. The presentation is a sober, if slim, academic...

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Sunday Book: Treasure Palaces - Great Writers Visit Great Museums

Florence Hallett

The modern experience of visiting museums is so far from the hushed contemplation envisaged by our Victorian forebears that the very idea is sufficient to induce a rosy glow of nostalgia, as...

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Sunday Book: Ruth Franklin - Shirley Jackson: A Rather Haunted Life

Markie Robson-Scott

When asked about her most famous short story, "The Lottery", Shirley Jackson said, “I hate it. I’ve lived with that thing 15 years. Nobody will ever let me forget it.” Sixty-eight years later, it’...

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