Books
Marriage blues
Don’t worry, Rosie, the divorces will start soon
Might this win the Booker?
Page-turning, socially intriguing and melodramatic to the point of campness
“I’m afraid the news is not good …”
Our confidence in doctor diagnosis is sadly misplaced
A blunderbuss blast at “progressives”
Progress is too important to be left to the progressives
The promised land
Even when we try to be clear about how land makes us feel, we often get tangled up
How speech flowered from an ancient root
Connective tissue between Classical Western and Indian languages
A heap of broken images
A new book finds some clarity in our unstable world
The ancient pull of troubled waters
Would rivers be better treated by man if they are given legal or spiritual “rights”?
The long afterlife of a literary classic
Luzzi presents a gallery of portraits, each illuminating a different facet of the poet and his work
Out of step with rural Britain’s history
A clarity or stridency that fails to engage with the nuances, contexts and contingencies
Most Read
The Book of JO’B
James O’Brien’s aggressive incuriosity is becoming ever more embattled as his worldview crumbles
A failed war on fags
The black market has taken over the tobacco trade Down Under
Thank God for Brexit
The EU is a bureaucratic monster and Britain is better off out
I don’t trust the British state
British institutions simply are not functioning in the interests of the people they are meant to serve
The lonely death of Henry Nowak
We must draw lessons from a horrendous and disgraceful case
Paean to a green and pleasant land
The finest living example of that perennial English type, the countryman-writer
The malignant mediocrity of managerialism
A country ruled by lawyers and HR managers will be culturally desiccated and politically sclerotic
What does it mean to be free?
Women are caught between different experiences of freedom and loss
An artful chip
Any penalty is at heart a psychological battle between taker and keeper
The imprudence of Dame Prue
Dame Prue Leith is spreading errors about assisted suicide
Infamous five
To most of us, the Cambridge Five are just names
First-place Finnish
Shostakovich: Symphony 1; Moscow Cheryomushki (Philharmonia Records)
Fond portrait of an odd couple
Two irascible, elderly artists and two beautiful younger women in unusual relationships
Auntie’s autumn
Rather than wage war on the Beeb, a Reform government should strip it of its monopoly and force British broadcasting to compete again
Graphics, games and occult entities
A retrospective of Treister’s work reveals the frictions in the artist’s motivations
Grey expectations
Saving England’s native red squirrel will require harsh measures