Shortly after her release from Ravensbrück in 1945, Comtesse Germaine de Renty attended a dinner party in Paris with old friends. One guest complimented her on how well she was looking, concluding... Read more »
The first thing you should know about Bathsheba Demuth’s Floating Coast: An Environmental History of the Bering Strait is that it is a beautiful book and you should stop reading this right... Read more »
Can a historical novel be morally serious, even tragic, and also playful at the same time? For a writer of fiction, history is a dangerous thing to play with—one doesn’t want to... Read more »
One muggy afternoon in June 2010, Don Heathfield and his wife, Ann, were relaxing over a bottle of champagne with their two sons, Tim and Alex, when they heard a loud knocking... Read more »
Can anything new be said about the second world war? Unexpectedly the answer is yes. Here are just a few of the surprising facts that I learned from this revelatory book. The... Read more »
Joe Dunthorne tells us he originally envisaged this book as a story of his grandmother’s childhood escape from the Nazis; the reality turned out to be more complex. Narrated with the twists... Read more »
The top blurb on Fara Dabhoiwala’s new book describes it as a “remarkable global history of free speech”. But it isn’t, and throwing in an interesting chapter on the press in British-occupied... Read more »
When Han Kang published her International Booker-winning The Vegetarian (2015), translated by Deborah Smith, about a South Korean housewife who gives up meat and wants to become a tree, the novel slotted... Read more »
Through all the blood and ice of Russian history, the national music has been a balm. Composers and performers have given a voice to the soul of their people, in all its... Read more »