Sir John Lubbock was an exemplary Edwardian Liberal. Growing up under the influence of Charles Darwin, who lived in the same village as him, he had a scientific mind. A truly good man and a philanthropist, he gave us bank holidays and early shop closing. His father-in-law was the great archaeologist Augustus Pitt Rivers, and Lubbock took up archaeology as well; he introduced... read more

Back in the good old days before the new puritanism, I was nursing a lunchtime pint and the political weeklies alone in Annie’s Bar in the Palace of Westminster when the Labour MP Eric Heffer burst in, as he did everywhere. ‘What are you reading?’ demanded the burly Bennite. ‘The Spectator,’ I replied. ‘I prefer it to the Staggers.’ A proud autodidact, Eric looked... read more

Academic critics of Dryden or Pope were not in the habit, the last time I checked, of interspersing their monographs with reminiscences of sex clubs in Manhattan. An affectionate excursus on that subject in Mark Doty’s What is the Grass announces that this is no ordinary piece of literary criticism. ‘And your very flesh shall be a great poem,’ wrote Doty’s subject, Walt Whitman, who, one... read more

Early in the 19th century, there were some 260,000 of them across Britain’s naval and merchant fleets. People called them Jacks, but they are mostly nameless – or nameless to history. Even on surviving muster lists, seamen’s identities can be hidden behind pseudonyms. Some of these – George Million or Jacob Blackbeard, say – express a degree of wish fulfilment. Others are more... read more

I’ve been marooned in Normandy for the last nine weeks, in an isolated, semi-built house in the middle of nowhere, scanning the horizon for any sign of ferries shunting into the port at Caen. My fellow inmate compares us to Robinson Crusoe and Friday, but I feel closer to Tony Last in Evelyn Waugh’s A Handful of Dust, who is trapped for eternity in the Brazilian jungle reading the complete works of Charles Dickens to his captor, Mr Todd. This is because I too am reading the complete works of Charles Dickens. I feel yoked to Dickens in... read more

Whistleblower is a chastening but ultimately uplifting memoir by the now 29-year-old Susan Fowler. The book has its roots in a blogpost, published in 2017, in which she critiqued the harassment culture within Uber, where she worked, and laid the behemoth bare to public scrutiny. The day-to-day toxicity she encountered ... read more