Nigel Biggar retired a few months ago from the Regius Professorship of Moral and Pastoral Theology at Oxford. He is a notable figure in the world of moral philosophy, not only because of his distinguished academic career as an ethicist but also because of his persistent refusal to observe the conventional pieties which characterise so much that is written in his field. There are few notions... read more

Tania Branigan reported from Beijing for The Guardian from 2008 until 2015, so Red Memory is part of a long and varied lineage of books about China by foreign correspondents. Most such volumes are of merely transitory interest. A small percentage have enduring value, such as the New Yorker writer Emily Hahn’s... read more

‘Me, I am going to Spain with the boys,’ Martha Gellhorn famously told a friend in 1937 as she boarded a ship sailing from New York to France. ‘I don’t know who the boys are, but I am going with them.’ She knew perfectly well with whom she was going: Ernest Hemingway, who was on the point of abandoning his second wife for her. They... read more

It was strange to meet him halfway across Siberia, at a lonely town on the Amur river. He had already travelled overland some 2,600 miles from Moscow, whereas I had followed the nascent Amur on a wandering route out of Mongolia. He appeared a little studious, even when he was young, pale and lightly bearded, with an expression of faintly unreadable concern. How he was dressed... read more

The day after Putin invaded Ukraine, a Russian friend wrote to me that she was feeling something she had never felt, or expected to feel, in her life. She was, she said, feeling the fear, horror, guilt and shame that a decent German would have felt in September 1939. There is nothing new about the brutality of war. Nevertheless, there are respects in which... read more

There is a particular problem that books detailing an experience of a debilitating malady pose for the reviewer. For an author who has already undergone some gruelling trial, the slings and arrows from a (generally hale) critic might so easily become the last straw in a catalogue of miseries that the sensitive reviewer will be inclined to hold any... read more