Diary

Long Ling: In the new Beijing, 3 April 2025

“... one of the pros of moving here – you can buy an apartment at lower than market price, and it may turn into a small fortune.’ We drove through the Rongxi section of the city, which occupies the third county that Xiong’an claimed. More than 37,000 people have moved back here. Considering the stagnation of the property market in the rest of the ...”

Rob, Kill and Burn

Youssef Ben Ismail: Massacre in Damascus, 6 March 2025

The Damascus Events: The 1860 Massacre and the Destruction of the Old Ottoman World 
by Eugene Rogan.
Allen Lane, 377 pp., £30, May 2024, 978 0 241 64690 8
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“... into a sectarian conflict. By the spring of 1860, Mount Lebanon had erupted into civil war. In May, Druze fighters attacked several Maronite strongholds, burning villages and killing Christians in Hasbayya, Zahleh and Dayr al-Qamar. More than a hundred thousand Christians were left homeless. In one of his letters to Johnson, Mishaqa reported that ‘rivers ...”

Screaming in the Streets

Lucie Elven: On Nan Goldin, 20 February 2025

This Will Not End Well 
Neue Nationalgalerie, until 6 April 2025Show More
Nan Goldin: This Will Not End Well 
edited by Fredrik Liew.
Steidl, 216 pp., £44, January 2023, 978 3 96999 058 2
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“... was declared.My father wanted his first child to be a boy.Barbara Holly Goldin. Date of birth: 21 May 1946.Sex: female.Family photographs arrange themselves on the three screens, supplemented by Goldin’s more recent pictures. She tells us that Barbara started playing the piano at the age of four and taking lessons aged six. She liked to mother, and later ...”

Dark Propensities

Nandini Das: Opium Inc., 20 March 2025

Smoke and Ashes: Opium’s Hidden Histories 
by Amitav Ghosh.
John Murray, 399 pp., £10.99, January, 978 1 5293 4926 9
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“... juice had been known for its medicinal properties since antiquity. Alexander the Great’s army may have introduced Anatolian opium into Iran, a history implicit in the linguistic connections between Greek opion, Persian afyun and Indian afeem. Mercantile networks across Asia carried it to China, where it was known as yāpiàn. By the 16th century, the ...”

His Galactic Centrifuge

Edmund Gordon: Ballard’s Enthusiasms, 23 May 2024

Selected Non-Fiction: 1962-2007 
by J.G. Ballard, edited by Mark Blacklock.
MIT, 386 pp., £30, October 2023, 978 0 262 04832 3
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“... this argument in his celebrated manifesto ‘Which Way to Inner Space?’, which appeared in the May 1962 issue of New Worlds, and over the next few years in various other essays and reviews, the best of which are brought together in Mark Blacklock’s new edition of the journalism. Ballard’s view was that science fiction should get over its ...”

That Guy

Jeremy Harding: On Binyavanga Wainaina, 24 October 2024

How to Write about Africa 
by Binyavanga Wainaina.
Penguin, 352 pp., £10.99, April, 978 0 241 25253 6
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“... the world’; ‘Africans eat only once a day, in the evening’; ‘Darkness unnerves them, they may flatly refuse to drive after sunset.’ He scorned Kapuściński-land as a ‘left-leaning, Rider Haggard world of strange, voiceless, dark peoples doing strange, voiceless, dark things’.Wainaina’s target is the racist trope. How to Write about Africa was ...”

Blood and Confusion

Jonathan Healey: England’s Republic, 10 July 2025

Republic: Britain’s Revolutionary Decade, 1649-60 
by Alice Hunt.
Faber, 493 pp., £12.99, June, 978 0 571 30320 5
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The Fall: The Last Days of the English Republic 
by Henry Reece.
Yale, 464 pp., £35, June 2024, 978 0 300 21149 8
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“... celebrated the Restoration in 1660 with more enthusiasm than Sherborne in Dorset. It was late May, and crowds piled into the tight streets of the ancient castle town. Wine flowed and hogsheads of beer and baskets of white bread were put out for the poor. Some five thousand troops gathered, on horse and foot, as Sir John Strangways, a local ...”

Born with a Hitler moustache

Dinah Birch: How to write about fascism, 2 April 2026

Crooked Cross 
by Sally Carson.
Persephone, 360 pp., £15, April 2025, 978 1 910263 42 6
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“... Jews are excluded from public office in April; trade unions are banned and books are burned in May. Step by step, Germany is transformed. Carson spares her readers no detail of the disaster as it evolves. But her impulse to account for the Klugers’ commitment to the Nazis does not waver. Helmy isn’t a monster, though his actions have monstrous ...”

Alien to the Community

Richard J. Evans: Eugenics in Germany, 11 September 2025

The Question of Unworthy Life: Eugenics and Germany’s 20th Century 
by Dagmar Herzog.
Princeton, 312 pp., £30, November 2024, 978 0 691 26170 6
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“... unhelpful neologisms such as ‘Antipostfascism’. The optimism with which she ends her account may also be misplaced. The far-right Alternative für Deutschland, now the second largest party in the Bundestag after doubling its seats at this year’s election, is attempting to revive the stigmatisation of the disabled, on the basis of the populist fantasy ...”

The Beautiful Ones

Jon Day: The Rat in the Head, 24 July 2025

Rat City: Overcrowding and Urban Derangement in the Rodent Universes of John B. Calhoun 
by Jon Adams and Edmund Ramsden.
Melville House, 358 pp., £30, July 2024, 978 1 68589 099 5
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Dr Calhoun’s Mousery: The Strange Tale of a Celebrated Scientist, a Rodent Dystopia and the Future of Humanity 
by Lee Alan Dugatkin.
Chicago, 295 pp., £22, October 2024, 978 0 226 82785 8
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“... have shown that, at least when assessing the potential toxicity of new drugs in humans, rats may be worse than useless. One analysis found that ‘results from tests on animals (specifically rat, mouse and rabbit models) are highly inconsistent predictors of toxic responses … little better than what would result merely by chance – or tossing a ...”

Diary

Patricia Lockwood: Back to the Rectory, 14 August 2025

“... it on the charts’. A wall of weird masculinity supplements behind him and a carnivore dog.You may want to lay off the coffee, we told him gently, when he described how his hands shook when he was trying to install the guitar pickup. On the mornings I have metalsmithing class, I drink green tea, I said. That’s a very good suggestion, Bit, he said ...”

Calling Dr Jekyll

David Runciman: What Kamala Harris got wrong, 22 January 2026

107 Days 
by Kamala Harris.
Simon and Schuster, 304 pp., £25, September 2025, 978 1 3985 5791 8
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“... gracious and measured, and why he isn’t that in other settings I don’t know.’ Then again, he may have been played. In the New York Times, Larry David responded to Maher’s account of his cheery time visiting the commander-in-chief with an alternative version: ‘My Dinner with Adolf.’ ‘It wasn’t just a one-way street, with the Führer dominating ...”

The world the Randlords made

George Rudé, 7 July 1983

Studies in the Social and Economic History of the Witwatersrand 1886-1914. Vol. I: New Babylon, Vol. II:New Nineveh 
by Charles van Onselen.
Longman, 213 pp., £4.95, December 1982, 9780582643833
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“... All the necessaries of life are impudently dear. Miners of England and Australia, however poor may be your lot, however dark your present prospects, let no man tempt you to South Africa with tales of the wages that are paid upon the Rand! The wages are high indeed, but the price the workers pay for them is paid in suffering and blood. Van Onselen, being a ...”

Three feet on the ground

Marilyn Butler, 7 July 1983

William Wordsworth: The Borders of Vision 
by Jonathan Wordsworth.
Oxford, 496 pp., £25, February 1983, 0 19 812097 4
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William Wordsworth: The Poetry of Grandeur and of Tenderness 
by David Pirie.
Methuen, 301 pp., £14.95, March 1982, 0 416 31300 0
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Benjamin the Waggoner 
by William Wordsworth, edited by Paul Betz.
Cornell/Harvester, 356 pp., £40, September 1981, 0 85527 513 8
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“... often sleep on three legs. Jonathan Wordsworth goes on to warn his reader, with a logic that may escape those unfamiliar with recent Romantic criticism, not to ‘overstress the ordinariness of what is happening’. We, like the peasant, would probably see a horse asleep in the moonlight, whereas Wordsworth ‘points out ... something quite different. We ...”