Books
Agencies of disruption
“Heidi Tworek’s shrewd, erudite and timely News from Germany is a work of historical analysis that can also be read as a corrective to the dangerous hysteria over the information games—fake news and all the rest—currently being played over the internet.”
Charisma and catastrophe
“How could one of the most civilised societies on earth become the instrument of a mind of such malice? I confess that my heart sank at the thought of spending any more hours in the company of this personification of radical evil. Yet we cannot wholly avert our eyes”
The pedant of Pompeii
“If you start your account with such a humdinging narrative as the eruption of Vesuvius, then nothing is ever going to be as gripping again”
Rabelais and the likely lads
A posthumous collection of poems by Geoffrey Hill embodies a controversial but impassioned idea of what poetry is and does
Distinguished only by his errors
“Many, perhaps most, books about Israel are full of tendentious delusions. This is one of the worst examples”
Belly of the beast
The Booker-winning Marlon James takes on the fantasy genre with a novel sent in a phantasmagorical version of Africa
Perils of paying off the pirates
Kidnapping remains a lucrative business. Anja Shortland’s new book examines how and where it thrives
In defence of globalisation
Free trade is not without costs — but those costs are outweighed by the benefits. And where costs exist, the answer to “open” is rarely “closed”
Scones and jam in the fridge
The lives of Southern Irish Protestants are almost invisible to external observers. A new book of essays sets out to reveal something of them
Singled out by the stupid
Imperialism has been a fact of historical life, at all times and throughout the world. So why is the British variety singled out? Jeremy Black has raised his head above the parapet, not so much to defend the Empire as to ponder why it arouses such animosity
Why Remoaners should back Boris
“Boris, ironically, now offers Remoaners the best chance of a soft Brexit, or at least a sensible one. And to those who want a second referendum—’the people’s vote’—there may even be a chance of that too.”
On the road
“In the summer of 1980, in the grip of some Kerouac-ish fantasy, I opted to hitch-hike from Laredo to New York”
Discovering the Great War of China
A third of a million Chinese labourers helped the Allies defeat the Kaiser, but their huge unsung contribution ended in betrayal