When did pretentiousness become such a dirty word?
Dan Fox’s new book sets out to reclaim the P-word with an impressively broad-ranging study of art, literature and culture.
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Ranch rage: the welcome return of Thomas Savage’s The Power of the Dog
The Power of the Dog was first published in 1967 and is now being re-released by Vintage as a “rediscovered classic”,…
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Empire’s martyrs: the British obsession with heroic failure
The British take a perverse pleasure in glorious defeat, as Heroic Failure and the British by Stephanie Barczewski examines.
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Bernie Sanders, the Red Mayor who wanted more
Harry Jaffe’s new book sets out to discover how a “74-year-old Jewish guy from Brooklyn” ended up appealing to college students,…
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Hillary Clinton’s haters and the glass ceiling of American politics
Whatever you think of Clinton as a politician, it’s undeniable that she has been castigated for her ambition in a…
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Gold Fame Citrus is a “cli-fi” novel – the dystopia of choice in the era of climate change
Claire Vaye Watkins’s new novel imagines California after an ecological disaster. But what does it say about our interest in…
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That “happy families are all alike“ line is rubbish – just consider Ian Buruma’s memoir of his grandparents
Their Promised Land: My Grandparents in Love and War is a personal story of two German-Jewish émigrés as they make a life…
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Capturing the reality of life in the Syrian war zone
Two new books encourage us to look past the grand narratives and listen to voices on the ground.
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