Books
‘Too bohemian for Bournemouth’: the young Lawrence Durrell
Begged by his mother to go somewhere his behaviour wouldn’t ‘show so much’, the future novelist, aged 19, embarked on a lifetime of travel and rarely visited Britain again
What a carve up! The British flair for disastrous partition
The ‘Great Partition’ of India in 1947 led to the wider division of Britain’s ‘empire within an empire’ – and to most of the problems plaguing southern Asia today
The wolf as symbol of European anxieties
This ‘amoral outcast’ and its thieving trickery is now widely equated with the economic migrant, slipping across borders unnoticed and threatening the status quo
A season of strangeness: The Hounding, by Xenobe Purvis, reviewed
Little Nettlebed is in the grip of serious drought, and the angry villagers are looking for scapegoats in this irresistible page-turner set in 18th-century Oxfordshire
A life among movie stars can damage your health
So Dustin Hoffman tells the teenage Matthew Specktor as they share cigarette breaks at CAA, the Los Angeles talent agency they both frequent
Being stalked by a murderer was just one of life’s problems – Sarah Vine
At times one cannot believe what the Gove family endured during frontline government service, and politics gets much of the blame as Vine looks back over the wreckage
What was millennial girl power really about?
In the 1990s and early 2000s, ‘empowerment’ was a girl’s watchword. But she was empowered primarily to be pleasing to men and, above all, never grow up
The Spectator letter that marked a turning point in gay history
Signing his real name (a brave decision for a homosexual in 1960), Roger Butler sparked a good deal of discussion on a ‘shunned topic’, which eventually led to a change in the law
The rose-tinted view of female friendship shatters
Are women’s relationships with each other today more brittle and less supportive than in the past?
Haunted by my great-grandfather’s second wife – by Alice Mah
An academic specialising in ecology, Mah traces her constant anxiety about the world to a ghostly Chinese forebear
The bloodstained origins of the Italian Renaissance
Prolonged warfare between city states was conducted largely by mercenaries, whose accrued fortunes translated into social status through patronage of the arts
North and South America have always been interdependent
It is impossible to fully understand one without the other, says Greg Grandin. Despite their numerous differences, their relationship is fundamentally symbiotic
The stigma still surrounding leprosy
Though long curable, the disease remains endemic in India, Mozambique and Brazil, with lack of medical funding leaving lepers among the world’s most marginalised people
A small world: Shibboleth, by Thomas Peermohamed Lambert, reviewed
A satire on Oxford university life points up ideological tensions, the pettiness of college politics and the patronising ways of the young and privileged
The secret child: Love Forms, by Claire Adam, reviewed
An anguished Trinidadian divorcée decides after 40 years to search for the daughter she was forced as a teenager to give up for adoption
Comfort reading for the interwar years
The Book Society’s recommendations in the 1930s included novels by Dorothy Whipple, E.M. Delafield, C.S. Forester and A.J Cronin, with popular history from Arthur Bryant
Instantly captivating: the mysterious harmonies of Erik Satie
The French composer’s aesthetic was so influential that he gave us the sound of the contemporary world, says Ian Penman
Is nothing private any more?
We all need a place away from public view – but we should also remind ourselves why our privacy has been so invaded
‘Genius’ is a dangerously misused word
It is best applied not to individuals but to teams or milieux, says Helen Lewis. The idea that a few special people are fundamentally more gifted than their peers is not only corrosive but inaccurate
Should family history, however painful, be memorialised forever?
What to hold on to and what to let go of is Samantha Ellis’s dilemma when trying to explain the complexities of their Judeo-Iraqi heritage to her young son
No escaping mother: Lili is Crying, bv Hélène Bessette, reviewed
A daughter longs to flee her parent’s boarding house in 1930s Provence, but her bid for independence fails in a story of thwarted love and shattered dreams
Vampires, werewolves and Sami sorcerers
Animism, divination and shape-shifting witchcraft continued to be powerful forces in the Baltic long after the conversion of Europe to Christianity
Misfits unite: The Emperor of Gladness, by Ocean Vuong, reviewed
Vuong’s disparate characters in rural Connecticut, including a Lithuanian octogenarian and her teenage Vietnamese carer, find fulfilment not in achievements but in loving companionship
Imperialism still overshadows our intellectual history
Some of Peter Watson’s musings on the empire might have been sacrificed for discussions of music and architecture – and the place of George Orwell in the British imagination
The importance of feeling shame
Stuart Jeffries 21 June 2025 9:00 am
Shamelessness is now ubiquitous in our narcissistic society. But to the ancient Greeks shame was a spur to honourable deeds and synonymous with modesty and respect