Last month, the Taliban government in Afghanistan indulged in a particularly malicious act towards women, passing a law closing all beauty salons. Having run a truck through all other freedoms, it attacked the one remaining place where women could still find employment and meet and mingle outside the home. Did those heroic religious warriors really see such... read more

‘European societies are still capable of decivilizing themselves today,’ Klaus-Michael Bogdal reminds us towards the end of Europe and the Roma, his magisterial contribution to the understanding of the cultural position of Romani people in Europe. This is not a history of the Roma, but rather a history of how the Roma have been seen, described and treated. As such, it is a ruthless analysis of the cultural... read more

This summer, Arnold Schwarzenegger can be seen shooting bad guys in a Netflix series, FUBAR, and Sylvester Stallone and Dolph Lundgren can be seen shooting bad guys in a film, Expend4bles. Even in 2023, it seems, audiences still haven’t entirely got over their love affair with the terrifyingly muscled actors who punched, stabbed and machine-gunned their way to superstardom in the 1980s, usually with their shirts off. It’s a love affair charted in Nick de Semlyen’s The Last Action Heroes. Having whisked through the CVs... read more

Homer’s Iliad, a poem perched on the cusp of recorded history, is as enigmatic as it is magnificent. Like the earliest parts of the Hebrew Bible, the New Testament, the Koran, the Babylonian Enuma Elish and the Mahabharata, it exerts its prodigious grip on the collective imagination precisely because it is so mysterious. The Iliad was for the ancient Greeks the foundation stone of all civilisation, the classic of classics, but it was as much a mystery to them as it is to us. It was usually assumed in antiquity that... read more

Until I read this interesting book, I had no idea that the postcode in which I live in northeast Essex is the finest terroir for wine in the country. It was all I could do to resist ripping up the lawn and planting vines. Indeed, Henry Jeffreys quotes one of the country’s leading authorities on English wine as saying that ‘England’s answer to Château Pétrus’ could be found somewhere in Essex. Of course it could. Jeffreys has talked to key people in the English wine... read more

The year 1973 wasn’t an uneventful one in Britain. The country entered the European Economic Community, the lights went out and candles made a comeback during the Three-Day Week, and David Bowie killed off Ziggy Stardust. You would expect an ordinary sort of novel about the year to make a lot out of these and other headline-grabbing events. John Cromer, the narrator of Caret, prides himself, however, on not reading the newspapers. His eyes are trained, instead, on the most intimately local occurrences – on what most... read more