Books

War-war leads to jaw-jaw

This is a starkly different interpretation on the proliferation of written constitutions and rams it home with cogency and panache

Television tome that needs tuning

The Magic Box is Rob Young’s impassioned, occasionally impenetrable, psycho-history of the TV of his youth

Murders for August

What masterpieces hide on tired and musty shelves?

The belief system doesn’t add up

How the quest to eliminate sex in civil society taps into a dark truth about male power and sexuality

The veneration of Saint Jacinda

Ardern’s career is a foretaste of a quieter and less frightening world in which workplace feminism has triumphed

The joys and misery of Monica

This is not only an objective biography by a distinguished academic, it is also a warm personal memoir

Beating the wrong drum

The dogmatic insistence that unionists are being pushed towards a united Ireland

Why we’re in the state we’re in

Woolly thinking, cloudy expression, and the possibility that great matters are at hand: two books by a pair of Foreign Office grandees

Scheherazade scoops the pot

Women now dominate the literary landscape

Quackery via cartography

You better believe the earth is flat