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 »
People who enjoy science fiction love to imagine the future: time travel, spaceships, something wobbly with a green face. But what if those fans really had access to it – the future,... Read more »
‘It’s a drag, isn’t it,” Paul McCartney told reporters quizzing him the day after John Lennon’s murder, a soundbite as dispiritingly muted, even callous, as his reaction to his mother’s death when... Read more »
A storyteller of understated brilliance, Abdulrazak Gurnah was awarded the 2021 Nobel prize in literature for his “uncompromising and compassionate penetration of the effects of colonialism and the fate of the refugee... Read more »
A little over 50 years ago, the American broadcaster Studs Terkel published an oral history based on interviews with 133 workers across the US. This was a time of automation and global... Read more »
In 1931, William Herbert Wallace was first convicted and then acquitted on appeal of the murder of his wife, Julia. Her killer was never found and the case remains one of the... Read more »
Tuppence Middleton was 11 years old when her parents realised something wasn’t right. It was 1998 and they had told their daughter – who was just emerging from a four-month bout of chronic fatigue... Read more »
Curtis Sittenfeld is irresistibly drawn to the awkward: to the geeks, and to those who are not quite as attractive, confident, rich or successful as the peers with whom, often to everyone’s... Read more »
James Cahill’s debut novel, Tiepolo Blue, was full of interesting things but weakened by implausibilities. In his second novel, he gets around this by setting it in the world of modern art,... Read more »