Book Review
In Darwin’s dreamland
A two-year stint on an island in Lake Victoria makes for a poignant and memorable memoir
Murders for March
Parties and post boxes make beguiling settings for this month’s mysteries
Brass and bullshit
Influencer is just another name for snake-oil salesman
Smashed stereotypes or revisionist reveries?
Why judge prohibitionists by their words when we can judge them by their actions?
What’s behind that enigmatic smile?
The author of a new novel about the Mona Lisa explores the history of the world’s most famous painting
When bad reviews attack
Book reviews are not the preserve of the literary dilettantes — they have real power
Golden boy turned starstruck rube
The self-justifying self-portrait of a journalist who never made it
On and off the road
Jack Kerouac’s reputation should rest on his whole oeuvre — not just his most famous novel
How to be a literary editor
Done well, book reviews have never been more important
Stumbling blocks
Owen Hatherley offers a vital but frequently flawed guide to post-war British architecture
Most Read
The establishment is still living in an immigration fantasy land
It is influential left-wingers, not the broader public, who have deluded themselves on mass migration
American strategy in Iran is wiser than it seems
President Trump’s intervention will leave the world safer than it was
Saint Nicola
Nicola Sturgeon wants sympathy for her husband’s crimes—but after years spent avoiding awkward questions, her latest reinvention may be the hardest sell yet.
On Britain as a capitalist command economy
It is neither neoliberal nor socialist but a secret third thing
Rewatching the English
English identity has become too surreal and discomfiting to define
Oldham, new problems
How changing demographics have reshaped culture and politics in Greater Manchester
Beauty from the ruins of war
Painting gave artists and their viewers a temporary way out of the grim wartime reality
Let’s pay MPs less
MPs are getting another inflation-busting pay rise — even as the country they govern grows poorer
Game of Thrones star steals the show
Steal, Amazon Prime’s enthralling new six-part financial crime thriller
Zelda Zingari
Arty types: the fashionable poet
No gods, no monsters
We should stop projecting our neuroses onto foreign leaders
Paean to a green and pleasant land
The finest living example of that perennial English type, the countryman-writer
The pro-nature case for regulatory reform
England’s environmental regime hasn’t delivered a restoration of nature — only decline, delay, and bureaucracy
No taxation on expatriation
With no navy and minimal evacuation efforts, the UK’s demand that citizens abroad pay up is ludicrous
A carnivore’s arcadia
Bowled over by a de luxe fillet steak
The right does need religion
Christianity is politically valuable as well as, you know, true