Thank the deities, it is spring. The almost-forgotten poet Charlotte Mew wrote a beautiful poem about spring called ‘May, 1915’. It includes the devastating lines ‘Let us remember Spring will come again/To the scorched, blackened woods, where all the wounded trees/Wait, with their old wise patience for the heavenly rain.’ Mew wrote many beautiful and devastating poems. She has her admirers, but... read more

This 5 May will mark the bicentenary of Napoleon’s death on St Helena. The occasion will no doubt be marked, as was the bicentenary of the Battle of Waterloo six years ago, by a flood of new books about the emperor, adding yet more to the estimated 200,000 already written. Given this saturation, one wonders if there is anything left to say. This fascinating book proves that there is. It does so by focusing on... read more

Among the dozen or so figures who dominated American writing in the half-century following the war, Philip Roth stands as the great defier of his times, and of time itself. Author of The Counterlife, a novel built on realising parallel possibilities, as well as the counterfactual The Plot Against America, he was a chronology scrambler, a walking... read more

On the morning of 12 April 1961, an orange dot appeared in the sky over the Russian village of Smelovka, growing as it fell. A government official reported what he witnessed: ‘A spaceship-sputnik landed with cosmonaut Gagarin Yuri Alekseyevich.’ The official was lying – in fact Gagarin was never there. Villagers arriving at the scene found no one inside... read more

The Battle of Verdun raged for three hundred days – the longest battle the world has ever seen. Forty million shells were dropped, more than six for every square metre of the battlefield. The conflict left behind a desert in which the soil had undergone the equivalent of ten thousand years of natural erosion. After the war, an arc of land around Verdun was deemed too broken and dangerous to... read more

There were times while reading Count Down that I felt I was going to skip to the final part. Not because I wasn’t gripped – I was – but because I needed a dose of the optimism Shanna Swan wisely promises her readers will be coming at the end. For this is a story of potential apocalypse: the demise of human fertility at worst, the emergence of an unsustainable society of oldies at best. We assume procreation is a choice. We rest easy, believing we can utilise this natural ... read more