Indonesia, with a population of more than a quarter of a billion, is the fourth most populous country on the planet. It is home to more Muslims than any other country, but also to millions of Christians, Hindus and others. It has long been both an ally of the West and a beneficiary of Chinese […]
The temptation is to call this a dog’s dinner, since Una, Philip Womack’s faithful pooch, has clearly been wolfing it down with great enjoyment. But ‘Ruff Guide’ might be a better description. The original Rough Guide travel books were marketed as a midway point between ‘cost-obsessed student guides and heavyweight cultural tomes’, a category into […]
The word rummage, with all its pleasurable connotations of chance, lucky dip and thrift, couldn’t be bettered as a title for Emily Cockayne’s new book. Both intricately and widely researched, the big picture always illustrated with the telling detail, it is a fascinating historical compendium of the cumbersome detritus of everyday life and how we […]
When Sarah Stewart Johnson was eleven, her father took her to the medical laboratory where he worked and showed her a 141-year-old toenail. It came from one of America’s less well-known presidents, Zachary Taylor, who’d been exhumed so that his untimely death could be investigated. Johnson saw the sophisticated machines that would determine by chemical […]
I was once informed by a guide at the oldest black church in Savannah, Georgia, that African slaves arrived there speaking ancient Greek. My surprise was not shared by other members of the party. Our guide clearly believed it. The elders of the church must have believed it or the guide wouldn’t have said it. And […]
Here is a really persuasive and unsettling book about the future, based not on science or sociology but on economics and demography. Charles Goodhart, an octogenarian British economist who has had a distinguished career in academia and at the Bank of England, and Manoj Pradhan, an American-educated academic who has founded his own macroeconomic research […]
Towards the end of Metropolis, Ben Wilson’s panoramic new history of urbanism, the author lists a number of ways in which cities have served to speed up evolution. In Puerto Rico, lizards can now grip bricks and concrete with their toes. Urban birds tend to have shorter wings, which enables them to dodge traffic, and […]
One day in 1757 the poet Christopher Smart went out to St James’s Park, started praying loudly and couldn’t stop. He was hauled off to St Luke’s Asylum, where a cascade of ecstatic verse proceeded to pour from him, in which he identified his cat companion, Jeoffry, as ‘the servant of the Living God’. According to Smart’s delighted itemising, Jeoffry served the Almighty by catching rats, keeping his front paws pernickety clean and observing the watches of the night. He was a peaceable soul too, kissing neighbouring cats ‘in kindness’ and letting a mouse escape one time in seven. But perhaps Jeoffry’s greatest accomplishment was his ability to ‘spraggle upon waggle’. Both spraggling and waggling, Smart’s magnificat suggests, are deeply pleasing to the Lord. Although Jeoffry has become famous through Smart’s much-anthologised poem ‘My Cat Jeoffry’, he has left no other pawprint on the historical record. We don’t know how Smart found him, or how he found Smart. Nor is it certain
Quartet Books, owned and directed by Naim Attallah since 1976, has long been something unusual and valuable in the publishing world, ready to take chances on authors and books other firms might avoid. It has become even more precious in today’s era, when independent publishers are rare and political correctness is the norm. Attallah’s entertaining […]
Dirt is Bill Buford’s second contribution to the swelling subgenre of middle-aged memoir in which a man or, less frequently, woman of letters endures a traumatic but ultimately rewarding apprenticeship in the fetid air of a restaurant kitchen. In the first instalment, Heat (2006), ‘good home cook’ Buford pulls a drastic career switcheroo, going from […]
In 2003, my The Book of Eels was published to some praise from reviewers and general indifference on the part of the book-buying public. I wondered, at the time, why people could not be persuaded to share my fascination with such an amazing creature. But maybe it was just the timing, for not only was […]
Towards the end of this lyrical and passionate book, the farmer James Rebanks describes how he is moving towards producing food using the minimum amount of artificial inputs, such as chemical fertilisers. ‘Sadly it means earning money away from the farm when we have to,’ he writes. This is a course of action that increasing numbers of farmers will have to pursue as we leave the EU’s subsidy system. But why
In Britain the North Pole no longer enjoys the iconic status of its southern counterpart. We celebrate the men who slogged their way across the bloodless Antarctic ice fields, battling fathomless crevasses, withering blizzards and pesky Norwegians to plant the Union Jack at the South Pole. Yet in the nineteenth century, and at the beginning […]
A few years ago, I set off with three friends to walk the length of the Los Angeles River, a largely parched 82-kilometre deep-walled concrete channel stretching from Canoga Park to Long Beach. Entry into the river is forbidden, and each of us revelled in the adrenaline rush of hopping over the fence in the predawn […]
If public statues can be seen as a measure of contribution to the human good, then Sylvia Pankhurst’s place on a plinth is scandalously overdue. A statue of her mother, Emmeline Pankhurst, was unveiled in 1930 beside the Palace of Westminster, and a plaque to her elder sister, Christabel, was added in 1959 in tribute […]
In 1973, Julie Welch became the first female newspaper sports reporter on Fleet Street. It was an amazing achievement and her account of how she managed it reads like a Jilly Cooper novel. The story she tells here is not just one of ‘clever, attractive, determined female breaks into man’s world to do the job […]
The timing of Robin Lane Fox’s lively reappraisal of the evidence for the earliest Greek ‘rational’ medicine could not be better. Interest in contagious diseases has rarely been so high. But The Invention of Medicine, although covering such famous outbreaks of plague as that which blighted Athens early in the Peloponnesian War, described in such […]
It’s been a good year for birds, so far. During the lockdown, our human world has been impinging rather less on theirs. People have been realising that birds are all around them, even in towns, and, with less noise from cars and planes, they have been hearing, as if for the first time, birdsong loud […]
‘The whole point of this book’, the award-winning epidemiologist Professor Tim Spector informs readers of Spoon-Fed, ‘is not to tell you how or what to eat’ – a refreshing change for those who have to put up with me boring on about the evils of refined sugars and the glories of gut flora, depending on […]
The Victorians had a thing about glasshouses. There was the Crystal Palace, built in Hyde Park for the 1851 Great Exhibition, later moved from its original site to Sydenham, where it finally expired in a heap of molten iron and glass in 1936. Then there was Joseph Paxton’s Great Stove at Chatsworth, which survived from […]
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A review of my biography of Wittgenstein, and of his newly published last love letters, in the Literary Review: via @Lit_Review
Jane O'Grady - It’s a Wonderful Life
Jane O'Grady: It’s a Wonderful Life - Ludwig Wittgenstein: Philosophy in the Age of Airplanes by Anthony Gottlieb;...
literaryreview.co.uk
It was my pleasure to review Stephanie Wambugu’s enjoyably Ferrante-esque debut Lonely Crowds for @Lit_Review’s April issue, out now
Joseph Williams - Friends Disunited
Joseph Williams: Friends Disunited - Lonely Crowds by Stephanie Wambugu
literaryreview.co.uk