Mother and Tata

Stephen W. Smith: The Mandelas, 21 March 2024

Winnie and Nelson: Portrait of a Marriage 
by Jonny Steinberg.
William Collins, 550 pp., £25, May 2023, 978 0 00 835378 0
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... a fine equivalent to £4000 today – a paltry price for the dozen killings she aided, abetted and may well have ordered. One of those was the murder by Jerry Richardson, a Mandela United coach, of the 14-year-old activist Stompie Moeketsi, on the suspicion that he was an informer. ‘I slaughtered him like a goat,’ Richardson testified in court. ‘I put ...

Good Vibrations

Frederick Wilmot-Smith: On the Rule of Law, 12 September 2024

Thoughtfulness and the Rule of Law 
by Jeremy Waldron.
Harvard, 326 pp., £37.95, December 2023, 978 0 674 29077 8
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... can be violent. It can be so even if it adheres scrupulously to the rule of law. While the ideal may sometimes seem our best hope for guidance through troubled times, it is, as Waldron says, not the only star in our constellation of ...

Impossibly, a Peacock

Thomas Jones: Domenico Starnone’s ‘Via Gemito’, 26 September 2024

The House on Via Gemito 
by Domenico Starnone, translated by Oonagh Stransky.
Europa, 451 pp., £10.99, March, 978 1 78770 546 3
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... appeared in 2023 and was longlisted for this year’s International Booker Prize. The novel may remind English readers, in different ways, of Karl Ove Knausgaard’s My Struggle (the relationship with the domineering father, the unchanged names, the treatment of time, the reflections on memory, art and writing) or Elena Ferrante’s My Brilliant Friend ...

Prophet of the Past

Oliver Cussen: Blame it on Malthus, 26 September 2024

The Invention of Scarcity: Malthus and the Margins of History 
by Deborah Valenze.
Yale, 254 pp., £45, July 2023, 978 0 300 24613 1
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... its wheat and wheat flour’, despite having only 3 per cent of the world’s population. Malthus may well have helped build the infrastructure of this empire, but he would have been horrified by the way it enabled Britain to live beyond its means and to ignore a natural law designed to stimulate not gluttony, but self-reliance and restraint.Neo-Malthusians ...

Painting is terribly difficult

Julian Barnes: Myths about Monet, 14 December 2023

Monet: The Restless Vision 
by Jackie Wullschläger.
Allen Lane, 545 pp., £35, October 2023, 978 0 241 18830 9
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... of very rich people for whom art is a status symbol. Authenticating a work is difficult, and a lot may depend on it. How might a grateful owner or potential purchaser reward such connoisseurship? The classic example is that of Bernard Berenson – in Hughes’s mocking words, ‘the disinterested, Goethean sage of I Tatti’ – who charged his employer 25 per ...

Rudy Then and Rudy Now

James Wolcott, 16 February 2023

Giuliani: The Rise and Tragic Fall of America’s Mayor 
by Andrew Kirtzman.
Simon and Schuster, 458 pp., £20, September 2022, 978 1 9821 5329 8
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... Rise and Tragic Fall of America’s Mayor’ – is loftier than he deserves. This may be classified as a political biography, but it reads more like an autopsy report from the wax museum. All that’s left to do is to mop up the ...

Punishment by Radish

Emily Wilson: Aristophanes Remixed, 21 October 2021

Four Plays 
by Aristophanes, translated by Aaron Poochigian.
Norton, 398 pp., £29.75, March 2021, 978 1 63149 650 9
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... the teaching of what they call ‘critical race theory’. Lysistrata and Women of the Assembly may seem to propose a radical critique of the disenfranchisement of women in Athenian democracy. But both plays – performed by and for men – reinforce the stereotypical view of Athenian men that women are primarily interested in sex and drinking, and ...

Unicorn or Narwhal?

Lorraine Daston: Linnaeus makes the rules, 22 February 2024

The Man Who Organised Nature: The Life of Linnaeus 
by Gunnar Broberg, translated by Anna Paterson.
Princeton, 484 pp., £35, July 2023, 978 0 691 21342 2
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... botanical name was attached. No matter how many revolutions biological classification systems may undergo – and they have undergone several since Linnaeus’s time, from a basis in morphology to phylogeny to cladistics to DNA – the type specimen and the plant name remain bound. The dried plants, each carefully flattened onto a sheet of paper, are ...

Not Corrupt Enough

Sheila Fitzpatrick: Whose Cold War?, 20 March 2025

To Run the World: The Kremlin’s Cold War Bid for Global Power 
by Sergey Radchenko.
Cambridge, 760 pp., £30, May 2024, 978 1 108 47735 2
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The World of the Cold War 1945-91 
by Vladislav Zubok.
Pelican, 521 pp., £25, May, 978 0 241 69614 9
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... height of America’s Red Scare. But don’t be misled by the spin or put off by the fact that you may already have a dozen books on the Cold War on your shelves. Both Radchenko’s and Vladislav Zubok’s new books are ones you want to read. They make comprehensible a Russian perspective on a key question of 20th-century history that we generally see only ...

Travelling Text

Marina Warner, 18 December 2008

The Arabian Nights: Tales of 1001 Nights 
translated by Malcolm Lyons, with Ursula Lyons.
Penguin, 2715 pp., £125, November 2008, 978 0 14 091166 4
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‘The Arabian Nights’ in Historical Context: Between East and West 
edited by Saree Makdisi and Felicity Nussbaum.
Oxford, 337 pp., £55, November 2008, 978 0 19 955415 7
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... overarching narrative: Scheherazade is talking herself out of her fate. The heroes and heroines may live according to thrilling, ineluctable destinies, but Scheherazade is resisting death through the tales she tells, and if she succeeds will redeem her sex.In France, The Arabian Nights influenced libertine fiction: the young Diderot imagined speaking jewels ...

Diary

Patrick Cockburn: Interviewing Hitler, 9 October 2025

... in blood’. Ebbutt concluded that ‘in influential and reasonable circles [in Berlin], the view may be heard that war, especially in continental Europe, is a natural, almost inevitable thing, and that next time Germany has every expectation of having the means to win and every intention of winning.’ He predicted that war might begin in ‘five or six ...

Short Cuts

Peter Geoghegan: Reform’s Disaster Capitalism, 25 September 2025

... from Rotherham who joined Ukip aged eighteen, stood for Reform in local elections in Yorkshire in May 2022. He got 89 votes. In the Wakefield by-election the following month, Reform received less than 2 per cent of the vote. ‘There were only five of us working on that,’ Wood told me. ‘A lot of us were clamouring for Nigel to come back. We knew we could ...

Supereffable

Tom Johnson: Mysteries of the Pearl Manuscript, 25 September 2025

Chasing the Pearl-Manuscript: Speculation, Shapes, Delight 
by Arthur Bahr.
Chicago, 257 pp., £36, March, 978 0 226 83535 8
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... nor to have been known to anybody except the people who owned it. This is even stranger than it may at first seem. In the medieval world, all literary production depended on copying. Texts of many different genres – poems and songs, medical recipes, land conveyancing guides, prayers, charms, sermons – were in continual circulation, passed between ...

No Pork Salad

Edmund Gordon: On the Court, 26 June 2025

The Racket: On Tour with Tennis’s Golden Generation – and the Other 99 per Cent 
by Conor Niland.
Penguin, 294 pp., £10.99, May, 978 0 241 99807 6
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The Warrior: Rafael Nadal and His Kingdom of Clay 
by Christopher Clarey.
John Murray, 356 pp., £22, May, 978 1 3998 1150 7
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The Roger Federer Effect: Rivals, Friends, Fans and How the Maestro Changed Their Lives 
by Simon Cambers and Simon Graf.
Pitch, 287 pp., £14.99, January 2024, 978 1 80150 383 9
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Searching for Novak: The Man behind the Enigma 
by Mark Hodgkinson.
Cassell, 303 pp., £10.99, June, 978 1 78840 520 1
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... but I’m mainly bewildered by how much they care. The biggest constraint on my son’s prospects may be that, as a tennis parent, I don’t have what it takes.When Roger Federer was eight, his parents moved him to a new club, Old Boys Basel, which had the best juniors programme in the city. ‘You could tell he had some talent,’ the head coach, Madeleine ...

No King

Daisy Hay: Burke and Fox break up, 5 February 2026

Friends until the End: Edmund Burke and Charles Fox in the Age of Revolution 
by James Grant.
Norton, 477 pp., £35, September 2025, 978 0 393 54210 3
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... XVI chief among them) who had failed to reform themselves. In a Commons debate on 6 May 1791, Burke attempted to speak on the ‘horrible and nefarious consequences flowing from the French Idea of the Rights of Man’ but was shouted down. Fox seconded the motion that called his old mentor out of order. In his own speech, Fox insisted that the ...