Books
Closet hippy of the SAS
Billingham is tight-lipped about his time in the SAS. His work afterwards provides the funniest anecdotes
The all-round smart cookie with a tin ear
Sontag’s influential pieces are rather fewer than this book’s breezeblock dimensions might suggest
Brexlit and the decline of the English novel
Literature’s outraged elitists chose smug contempt over real insight
Sissy porn and trans dirty laundry
Louise Perry reviews Females by Andrea Long Chu
Sharing the pleasure in poetry
James Booth reviews ‘Somewhere Becoming Rain: Collected Writings on Philip Larkin’
A keen nose and sharp prose
David Womersley reviews Waugh on Wine by Auberon Waugh
Why do we review books?
D.J. Taylor reflects on nearly four decades of hard graft on the literary pages
Airline Maps: A century of art and design
An enjoyable visual book that acts as a history of aviation
A good read but variable as history
A Short History of London is good on architecture but a more sophisticated analysis is needed
A flawed first draft of history
Theresa May’s former political secretary on the biography that doesn’t get her right
The price of victory
Benjamin Netanyahu has won battles, but there is no foreseeable end to the war
Tom Stoppard’s Hampstead drama
Best not try to memorise this deceptive Connect Four of relationships — just get into the flow
The iconoclast’s last defence
Artistic excuses for Just Stop Oil are confused and opportunistic
The tragedy of Radio 3
The centenary “celebration” of the BBC Singers summed up everything that has gone wrong
Anti-industrial strategy
Manufacturing has been systematically devastated by successive governments
Why won’t Chris Whitty go away?
He lingers on — a slap-headed Rasputin whispering terrible ideas into the ears of our leaders
Hatred without end
A year on from October 7th, mutual dehumanisation and refusal of moral responsibility characterises our “debate” over the Gaza war
Leave our pubs alone
New public health proposals are missing the pint
Boris the Innocent
The Johnsonian lexicon has yet to incorporate the word “responsibility”
The wrongs of Proudman
Criticism does not amount to discrimination or abuse
A rebel advance in Syria is nothing to cheer
You don’t have to sympathise with Assad to think that the alternative would be worse
