Book reviews

How Donald Trump rose to power

Maggie Haberman’s Confidence Man is the best account yet of Trump’s path to the presidency – and a crucial guide…

The Passenger: The phantom world of Cormac McCarthy

In The Passenger, his first novel for 16 years, the great American writer offers a study of living without answers.

How oil become the world’s most contested resource

Keith Fisher’s A Pipeline Runs Through It charts how oil revolutionised transport and war, and continues to shape today’s geopolitics.

Booker winner Shehan Karunatilaka: “You don’t know who you’re going to offend”

The Sri Lankan novelist on growing up amid civil war, turning trauma into satire, and winning the 2022 prize.

How the greatest minds of the Enlightenment united in a small town in Germany

In 1790s Jena a group of thinkers including Friedrich Schiller and Goethe built the intellectual foundations of today’s world.

John le Carré’s acts of deception

Even in his love affairs, the spy novelist used tradecraft. Has his double life come to overshadow his work?

20 May 1977: Almost anybody afloat in a poem from Henry Wadsworth Longfellow’s complete works has reason to regret the…

From Vigdis Hjorth to The Waste Land: recent books reviewed in short

Also featuring essays by Mia Mercado and After the Romanovs by Helen Rappaport.

How the housing crisis shaped modern Britain

The country is blighted by landlordism, homelessness and Thatcher’s legacy.

Why DH Lawrence still gets under our skin

His vexatious, evolving style demonstrates a capacity to face the world as sensitively and honestly as possible.

First review: The Waste Land by TS Eliot

3 November 1923: A first review from the archives of Eliot’s great poem.

Why Annie Ernaux deserves the Nobel Prize in Literature

With clinical precision and revelatory intimacy, the French memoirist reinvigorated the art of life-writing.

Annie Ernaux and the brutal art of memoir

Ernaux understands that writing honestly about her parents is a form of betrayal – but she does it anyway.

The Goldsmiths Prize 2022 shortlist: “creative daring” and political activism

In its tenth year, the award for “fiction at its most novel” presents a politically charged shortlist dominated by female…

The bonfire of the Middle East

Jeremy Bowen’s personal history shows how hopes of peace failed and the region entered a new era of instability.

The cutting wit of Alan Rickman

In the late actor’s diaries, his merciless verdicts on showbiz idiocy are tempered by a deep loyalty and humanity.

We can’t consign Boris Johnson to history yet

Andrew Gimson’s biography of the former prime minister describes a man who can pull off a miracle. With the Tories…

Why “Jerusalem” is the anthem England needs

William Blake’s poem, set to music by Hubert Parry, is viewed by some as patriotic, and others as a progressive…

Is America worth keeping?

Richard Rorty, the philosopher who predicted Trump, was scathing about the US’s failings but believed in the country’s capacity to…

Hilary Mantel: “The writer occupies both past and present. She is never absent from the story”

In the novelist’s final published work, she considered the “creative friction” behind her Wolf Hall trilogy.