Vol. 43 No. 10 · 20 May 2021

Browse other issues from this year

Cover Artist

Jon McNaught

James Wolcott

Philip Roth: The Biography by Blake Bailey. Cape, 898 pp., £30, April 2021, 978 0 224 09817 5
Philip Roth: A Counterlife by Ira Nadel. Oxford, 546 pp., £22.99, May 2021, 978 0 19 984610 8
Here We Are: My Friendship with Philip Roth by Benjamin Taylor. Penguin, 192 pp., £18, May 2020, 978 0 525 50524 2

Letters

Galen Strawson, Peter Baker, Paul Cullen, Lex Miller, Timothy Brennan, Robert Hammarberg, Geoff Payne, Lydia Hill, Liam Shaw, Stephanie Poole

Andrew O’Hagan

At the Half

Francis Gooding

Entangled Life: How Fungi Make Our Worlds, Change Our Minds and Shape Our Futures by Merlin Sheldrake. Bodley Head, 368 pp., £20, September 2020, 978 1 84792 519 0

Adam Phillips

On Being Left Out

Clair Wills

Final Report of the Commission of Investigation into the Mother and Baby Homes  Department of Children, Equality, Disability, Integration and Youth, Government of Ireland, 2865 pp., October 2020

Maureen N. McLane

Poem: ‘Trees’

Nicholas Penny

Painting in Stone: Architecture and the Poetics of Marble from Antiquity to the Enlightenment by Fabio Barry. Yale, 438 pp., £50, October 2020, 978 0 300 24816 6

Peter C. Perdue

What Is China?: Territory, Ethnicity, Culture and History by Ge Zhaoguang, translated by Michael Gibbs Hill. Harvard, 224 pp., £31.95, March 2019, 978 0 674 73714 3

Duncan Campbell

Short Cuts: Courthouse Hotel

Keith Thomas

The Enlightenment: The Pursuit of Happiness, 1680-1790 by Ritchie Robertson. Allen Lane, 984 pp., £40, November 2020, 978 0 241 00482 1

Claire Hall

A Scheme of Heaven: Astrology and the Birth of Science by Alexander Boxer. Profile, 336 pp., £12.99, January, 978 1 78125 964 1

Michael Wood

At the Movies: ‘Nomadland’

Madhu Krishnan

The Perfect Nine: The Epic of Gĩkũyũ and Mũmbi by Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o. Harvill Secker, 227 pp., £12, October 2020, 978 1 911215 99 8

Lauren Oyler

Detransition, Baby by Torrey Peters. Serpent’s Tail, 340 pp., £14.99, January, 978 1 78816 720 8

Emma Hogan

No Modernism without Lesbians by Diana Souhami. Head of Zeus, 464 pp., £9.99, February, 978 1 78669 487 4

Susannah Clapp

At the V&A: ‘Bags: Inside Out’

August Kleinzahler

The Selected Letters of Robert Creeley edited by Rod Smith, Peter Baker and Kaplan Harris. California, 467 pp., £25, March 2020, 978 0 520 32483 1

Mimi Jiang

Diary: Fan Power

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