The powerful reportage of a friend and rival is greater than the sum of its partsTo read a great newspaper reporter's work in a collected volume is entirely different from the cumulative effect of the articles over time. One gets a sense β perhaps a false one β of coherence, or even teleological destination, though of course there is none. And t
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First published in the early 1950s, Green's story of developing adolescent sexuality remains a brave work of fictionSet partly in an upper-middle-class English home and partly in a boarding school, GF Green's novel describes the early youth and adolescence of Randal Thane. A coddled, sensitive child, Randal develops strong attachments β first to h
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This dark, disturbing story of a wife's sudden disappearance is a contender for thriller of the yearOliver and Barbara, the toxic married couple from The Wars of the Roses, have nothing on Nick and Amy Dunne, the co-narrators of Gillian Flynn's dazzlingly dark, searingly intelligent new thriller. The novel opens as Nick β "I used to be a writerβ¦
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The sixth of Bernard Cornwell's Saxon series taps into a particular kind of male fantasyThis book, the sixth in Bernard Cornwell's bestselling Saxon Stories series, is set during and immediately after the death of King Alfred the Great as the Saxons and the Danes prepare to slug it out for power and the chance to shape what will become Eng
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Patti Pavilion, SwanseaThere's a lovely reading on YouTube of Dylan Thomas's short story Just Like Little Dogs. The text unfurls on the screen as the voice of β I think β Anthony Hopkins speaks the words. If you haven't come across it yet, it's worth Googling. But although Frantic Assembly and National Theatre Wales have taken Thomas's text as t
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Pico Iyer's meditation on the great influences of his life is a book that deserves to be lovedThe last acknowledgement at the end of Pico Iyer's 10th book is to the man within his head, "to the author who, almost in spite of himself, taught me and so many others how to move around the world and even how to hazard trust". This "author", as we know fr
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New print and digital editions of the painter Tom Phillips's extraordinary work mark the artist's 75th birthdayThursday marks the 75th birthday of the artist Tom Phillips and much celebration is in order. He is best known for his ongoing project A Humument, new editions of which, in print and digital, coincide with this anniversary.A Humument is an
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Drawing on a cache of smuggled love letters, Orlando Figes movingly charts a romance that blossomed in the unlikliest circumstances"Death solves all problems," declared Joseph Stalin, adding with his customary brutality: "No man, no problem." Anyone found guilty of threatening the Soviet state by his deeds or even thoughts would be eliminated. Durin
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The illustrated story of Hampstead Heath's three public bathing ponds is a colourful, if rather niche, social historyIf Hampstead Heath were in, say, Doncaster, rather than north London, would anyone publish a 176-page glossy, all-colour coffee-table book on the history of its swimming pools and ponds? Hmm. Well, in all likelihood, probably not. But
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The story of two Afghan sculptures, destroyed after a millennium and a halfIn 2001, in a violent attempt to advance the cause of Islamic fundamentalism, a clutch of men empowered by the Taliban brought down a titanic pair of structures that loomed over their skyline. No lives were lost. The few people living near the Buddhas of Bamiyan, in central A
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The murder in the cathedral revisitedBorn within earshot of Bow bells, and venerated for centuries as the "light of London", Thomas Becket was the most celebrated medieval Englishman (if the French-speaking son of an immigrant Norman businessman can be described straightforwardly as "English"). His brutal murder β that of an archbishop in his own
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A mad scientist, a radioactive element β¦ Simon Mayo's romp includes scientific knowhow and an amiable heroYou'd have to work quite hard not to like Itchingham Lofte. He's an old-fashioned 14-year-old, ordinary but obsessive. He collects elements the way 14-year-olds once collected football memorabilia or stamps. "There was, he thought, no point in
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A gritty debut novel set in a society without safety nets"Eric's β¦ on the lamest power trip in the world β the decider of how long it takes for me to get a tampon," says Anais, a 15-year-old stuck in a care home, as she waits for a social worker to comply with her urgent request. What Fagan depicts in her debut novel, The Panopticon, is a s
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The Ration Book Olympics by Clare Balding, John Goodbody's History of the Olympics and Start the Car by David LloydThe Ration Book Olympics presented by Clare Balding (56mins, Audio Go, Β£9.25)Had they known in 2005 that the London Olympics closing ceremony alone was going to cost Β£90m, would Seb and his entourage have been quite so jubilant? Maybe
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This is a masterful collection of short storiesWhenever a new short-story writer emerges, the custom is to make comparison with a giant of the form: for male writers, Andre Dubus, early Hemingway and, of course, Raymond Carver are the usual suspects, but a close reading of this first collection by DW Wilson, whose story "The Dead Roads" won the 2011
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An examination of a messy family dramaThe title of Stephen May's second novel is taken from the magazines which Billy, the 19-year-old narrator, devours after his mother is killed in a botched mugging in a car park. "I get all those mags now. Chat, Bella, Best, Take a Break β¦ The sort that shout Life! Death! Prizes! in swirly circus writing u
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Can national character really be read from the landscape?"Why, if you look out of an English window β or a window flying over England β do you know that you're in, or over, England?" That seems a reasonable question to ask, and at least it distinguishes Harry Mount's book from the others in the huge pile of books about Englishness, the pile that
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A glimpse through the railings at the history of one of the city's gloriesDespite being surrounded by busy roads, Russell Square gardens remains an oasis of tranquillity amid the clamour of modern London. Designed by Humphry Repton at the beginning of the 19th century, it lies in the heart of Bloomsbury, whose Georgian brick terraces and garden squa
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Dignity by Michael Rosen, The Shrink and the Sage by Julian Baggini and Antonia Macaro and iDisorder by Larry D Rosen, with Nancy A Cheever and L Mark CarrierDignity by Michael Rosen (Harvard, Β£16.95)The idea of "dignity" has over the last century become enshrined in law, but what exactly does it mean? It could be, Rosen observes, a social "rank or
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An inspiring collection of anti-fascist journalismWith the rise of populist parties across Europe, and one gaining traction in Hungary, Stieg Larsson's anxieties as a journalist seem more pressing than ever. This is no cynical exercise, a gathering of Larsson's journalism in order to milk the cash cow of The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo and the other
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Tim Parks mingles secrets and lies with meditationTim Parks's new novel addresses in fiction a milieu and a theme that he explored, with great success, in his memoir Teach Us to Sit Still. The narrator, Beth Marriot, is a volunteer at the Dasgupta Institute, a Buddhist retreat outside London which bans smoking, drinking, and contact between men and
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A collection of 20 years of essential readingThe title poem of Don Paterson's first collection, Nil Nil (1993), tells the sped-up tale of a football team's inglorious decline. Yet its panoramic sweep takes in much more than sport. The comedy and search for ontological significance typify the mix of the quotidian, the surreal and the mystical which r
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The Summer of Dead Toys by Antonio Hill, What Dies in Summer by Tom Wright, The Playdate by Louise Millar and Heart-Shaped Bruise by Tanya ByrneThe Summer of Dead Toys by Antonio Hill, translated by Laura McGloughlin (Doubleday, Β£12.99)A welcome corrective to snow-blindness from too much Nordic noir, Hill's debut novel is set in a sweltering B
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A demi-monde that's all but vanishedThere were three of us: me, Lorenzo Marioni, and a leather-jacketed vicar whose name now escapes me. We were sitting around one of the Formica tables in the New Piccadilly, the last surviving Italian caff on Denman Street β a place run by Lorenzo's family since the 1940s. It was an after-hours do, during which w
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A study of the British empire's spies"If knowledge is power," wrote a military analyst in 1880, "ignorance is weakness." That was Britain's trouble for much of the 19th century. Every schoolboy knows β or used to, when history consisted mainly of boring kings and battles β that when the British army invaded the Crimea in 1854 it didn't even have
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A ludicrous study of Hitler recasts the FΓΌhrer as a precursor of Simon CowellMichael Munn has spent his life β at least as he implausibly tells it β schmoozing with the beautiful and the damned. He bonded with Steve McQueen while riding pillion on his motorbike in Cornwall when he was 17. That same year, the multitasking lad made vigorous love
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Michael Sandel challenges the idea that markets are morally neutral"Dead peasants insurance" is a term that sounds as if it comes straight out of Monty Python. If only that were true. Here's an example of what it means: in 1999, Michael Rice, a 48-year-old employee of the supermarket firm Walmart, collapsed while helping a customer carry a televisio
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Mary Shelley's novel has been recreated as an appFor years now technology has provided opportunities for writers and artists to explore new ways of telling stories. While the world of electronic literature β born-digital, multimodal stories that combine media with text β has thrived online, sprouting hybrid forms that range from the esoteric (th
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A strictly biological view of human relationships leaves too little scope for monkey businessI'm an expert. Many of us are. My first wife never said the word "love" without a sneer; my present wife is a true believer. So I've looked at love from both sides now. But if Robin Dunbar is to be believed, I really don't know love at all.Remember those PG
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Does its po-mo surface diminish this true story?A breezily charming novel, with a thrilling story that also happens to be true, by a gifted young author amusingly anguished over the question of how to tell it β¦ In principle there's nothing not to like about Laurent Binet's acclaimed debut, and HHhH is certainly a thoroughly captivating performance
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By PD SmithTime is "slippery stuff" says Frank, a theoretical astrophysicist. In this ambitious and wonderfully expansive study, he weaves together the parallel histories of personal, lived time with cosmic time β the cosmologies that we have been fashioning to explain the universe since the dawn of human civilisation. Beginning some 40,000 years
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By Victoria SegalPrefaced by a quotation from Francis Bacon ("There is no excellent beauty that hath not some strangeness in the proportion"), Kaplan's account of Frank Sinatra's well-documented first four decades is an attempt to bring the singer to life on the page. While Kaplan never shrinks from Sinatra's "strangeness" β his petulance, selfish
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By Cathi UnsworthPig Iron is a novel of consequences. It's the story of John-John Wisdom, just released from a young offenders institute, and living in a run-down flat on the outskirts of Durham. He's got a job selling ice-creams, and a dream of following his Traveller's blood out of this place. It's also the story of his father, Mac, legendary bare
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By Jane HoushamDon't underestimate the power of this book to get under your skin. Its genuinely disturbing plot lurks behind the homely story of Judy, a forty-something kindergarten teacher in a Steiner school in small-town America. The Steiner philosophy contributes important elements to the book's subtly constructed moral scaffolding: childhood sh
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Tales of the little man in whom a universe residesSartre, intellectual speed-freak, and therefore generally fizzing with energy, proclaimed that "to do is to be", inverting Socrates's "to be is to do". Both these quotes persist in the collective mind because Kurt Vonnegut added: "'Do be do be do' β Sinatra". But I have always reserved my greatest
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Patti Pavilion, SwanseaDylan Thomas, whose short story Just Like Little Dogs inspired this collaboration between Frantic Assembly and National Theatre Wales, would like this show, you would imagine. Bold and spirited, dynamic and raw, it revels in the nocturnal rituals enacted on Swansea's streets and beach. It is as physical in its style as Thomas'
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Tom Paulin's straight talking and mastery of language ensure that his ninth collection of poems is a triumphTom Paulin's Love's Bonfire is as combustible as good conversation but goes beyond conversation β as poetry should. Putting the Pan On is a particularly surprising poem. It takes a singular cast of mind to recognise that an unpalatable suppe
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Tudor times are brought to vivid life again in this brilliant sequel to Wolf HallWhen we last saw Thomas Cromwell, in the Booker prize-winning Wolf Hall, Hilary Mantel's unlikely hero was at the height of his powers. Secretary to the king, his job was to edit Henry's plots: to erase his queen, cancel his inconvenient daughters and terminate those ch
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A timely appraisal of the People's Republic exposes the depth of its problemsQuestion: is China destined to rule the world as the exemplar of a new way of organising the economy and society β or to fall by the wayside, enmeshed by its contradictions and endemic weaknesses? In a country of 1.3 billion people, there is evidence enough for admirers a
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This lively and off-kilter debut collection draws a little too heavily on the examples of Parameshwaran's US peersThis debut collection is subtitled "Love Stories". But Rajesh Parameswaran's intriguingly off-kilter world is far from slushily romantic. The meaning of love for Parameswaran, an Indian-born American, is inventively twisted and often fou
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