Books

Making a miserable meal of mythbusting

The writing is laced with the sins of myth-making: boring, trite, incoherent, lazy and unfunny

Burmese days: for good and ill

There was much naivety in depicting the Anglo-Burmese engagement as one of mutual enlightenment

Here be flagons

The temperance campaigners realised that a picture can achieve more than a thousand words of argument

This is what feminism looks like

“Gender critical” feminists have represented the best of feminism

Murders for June

Murders haunt the longest days as well as the shortest

New life for a dying trade

The book world is on its last legs. So how we can bring it back from the dead?

Losing the battle, losing the war

The most pernicious effect of aligning art with political activism is that the distinction between the two is lost

Eyes on the prizes — and the surprises

Every literary season has a book that comes from nowhere and seems to gallop ahead of the competition

Europe between the Seine and the Tiber

It is time for Paris and Rome to rethink sovereignty and their relationship with the EU

The triumph of the Classical

Modernism has failed and it is time to return to diligent study of the best of traditional architecture