Commemorative Modernisms by Alice Kelly
Review by Rob Spence Modernism has always resisted precise definition, and in recent years it has been normal in literary-critical circles to use the plural form in order to emphasise…
Circles and Squares: The Lives and Loves of the Hampstead Modernists by Caroline Maclean
Review by Karen Langley The early part of the 20th century was a period when modern art was flourishing. New ways of living were being explored, abstract art forms were…
Love Lives by Carol Dyhouse
Reviewed by Harriet It’s probably a common experience among people who read a lot that sometimes two books will overlap in unexpected ways. This has just happened to me. I…
Hidden Valley Road: Inside the Mind of an American Family by Robert Kolker
Reviewed by Lory Widmer-Hess Schizophrenic. The very word is a trigger for aversion, a signal to run away, with its spiky, spluttered consonants and imprisoned vowels, four foreign syllables meaning…
Heavy Light: A Journey through Madness, Mania and Healing by Horatio Clare
Reviewed by Peter Reason It was on a family skiing holiday that Horatio Clare finally went mad. This was the culmination of a period of high activity and stress, coupled…
Hyphens & Hashtags* by Claire Cock-Starkey
Reviewed by Liz Dexter Subtitled “The stories behind the symbols on our keyboards” (the subtitle linked to the main title via an asterisk rather than a colon), this is a…
Notes From Deep Time: A journey through our past and future worlds by Helen Gordon
Reviewed by Rebecca Foster Deep time has been a persistent theme in British nonfiction over the last couple of years, showing up in books like Time Song by Julia Blackburn,…
Henry ‘Chips’ Channon: The Diaries 1918-1938, edited by Simon Heffer
Reviewed by Elaine Simpson-Long When I was a little girl I kept a diary. It was pink and fluffy with a lock and a key, easily broken if anybody had…
Keats by Lucasta Miller
Reviewed by Harriet It may not have escaped your attention that 2021 is the 200th anniversary of the death of John Keats. Yes, on 23 February 1821, the 25-year-old poet…
Let Me Tell You What I Mean by Joan Didion
Reviewed by Basil Ransome-Davies Joan Didion knows that language is not a windowpane. Clarity, yes; transparency, no. To report a fact requires arranging words. That entails expressing an attitude, a…
Cary Grant, the Making of a Hollywood Legend by Mark Glancy
Review by Elaine Simpson-Long There is a scene in Charade, a 1964 film which Cary Grant made with Audrey Hepburn, in which the following exchange takes place: Reggie Lambert (Hepburn)…
The Panic Years by Nell Frizzell
Reviewed by Harriet ‘Every millennial woman should have this on her bookshelf’ says Pandora Sykes on the front of Nell Frizzell’s new book. New in the sense that it’s just…
She Come By It Natural by Sarah Smarsh
Reviewed by Basil Ransome Davies Forty years ago I spent some time on the motel strip at Pigeon Forge, Tennessee, to do some hiking in the magnificent Smoky Mountains. At…
Grayson’s Art Club: The Exhibition (Manchester Art Gallery, 2020)
Reviewed by Liz Dexter Back at the beginning of the first lockdown, Grayson Perry, potter and tapestry maker extraordinaire and no stranger to intimate and challenging TV shows, ran an…
Biography & Memoir, Diaries
Ecology & Environment, Natural World
History & Politics, Feminism, Sociology
Non Fiction
Thin Places by Kerri ní Dochartaigh
Review by Peter Reason I have been totally absorbed in Kerri ní Dochartaigh’s Thin Places since it arrived in the morning mail and I read in the Preface: ‘The right…
Chauvo-Feminism: On Sex, Power and #MeToo by Sam Mills
Reviewed by Anna Hollingsworth Remember the 1990s? It was a decade where lads’ mags decorated magazine shelves in supermarkets and where Men Are from Mars, Women Are from Venus with…
This Time Next Year We’ll be Laughing by Jacqueline Winspear
Reviewed by Harriet Jacqueline Winspear was born in 1955. Her debut novel – the first of her award-winning Maisie Dobbs mysteries – was published in 2003. Counting on my fingers…
Unfinished Business: The Fight for Women’s Rights, edited by Polly Russell and Margaretta Jolly
Reviewed by Liz Dexter It used to be that we attended exhibitions and treated ourselves to the catalogue in the shop on the way out. Now, it’s more a case…
Reviewer’s Choice: A New Sublime – Ten Timeless Lessons on the Classics by Piero Boitani
While Shiny New Books concentrates on the new, occasionally, we give our reviewers room to share previously published – ie: ‘not Shiny New Books’ – they have been reading. A…
The Fresh and the Salt: The Story of the Solway by Ann Lingard
Reviewed by Peter Reason When I was a small boy—and this memory must reach back to around 1950—I played with a wooden puzzle made up of the historic counties of…
The End of Everything (Astrophysically Speaking) by Katie Mack
Reviewed by Terence Jagger Katie Mack is an American astrophysicist, but her writing is very informal and almost journalistic or chatty – which is great for a subject like this,…
The Passenger: Japan
Reviewed by Terence Jagger Early last year, Europa launched a new imprint “for explorers of the world”: The Passenger. Now, the list includes Berlin, India, Turkey, Brazil and Greece. But…
The Frozen River: Seeking Silence in the Himalaya by James Crowden
Reviewed by Peter Reason Opening this book, I am immediately drawn in: ‘Silence, snow and solitude have got hold of me and will not let me go. I am possessed…
The Stubborn Light of Things by Melissa Harrison & The Consolation of Nature by Michael McCarthy, Jeremy Mynott & Peter Marren
By Rebecca Foster The Stubborn Light of Things collects five and a half years’ worth of Melissa Harrison’s monthly Nature Notebook columns for The Times. The book falls into two…