Books

A good thriller has the ability to surprise the reader. Viewed in that context, Ashwin Sanghi’s The Magicians of Mazda is a gripping success story. The latest novel in Sanghi’s Bharat series that began with The Rozabal Line in 2008, The Magicians of Mazda seamlessly merges facts with fiction. The author’s extensive research allows him to create a wide range of characters from different parts of the world, who contribute to the turning points in the novel.Complex and entertaining, informative and intelligently crafted,…

It’s that time of the year again. Spooky season, goth Christmas, All Hallow’s Eve. Whatever you call it, Halloween is traditionally when attention turns to the scarier end of the bookshelf. For horror fans it’s a period of fun and frustration. On the one hand, our genre gets its moment to shine darkly; on the other, we have to keep screaming that great horror is out there all year round!2022 has been a particularly good vintage. In the case of Ally Wilkes’ All the White Spaces (Titan Books £8.99) and Thomas Olde Heuvelt’s…

In the 1770s an English doctor called Edward Jenner noticed that milkmaids didn’t seem to catch smallpox, the terrifying disease that caused around a third of the people who caught it to die. He thought that their frequent exposure to cowpox, a similar but less severe virus, might be what protected them. In order to test his hypothesis he gave his gardener’s eight-year-old son cowpox and then deliberately infected him with smallpox to see if he had become immune. He had, and Jenner successfully repeated the experiment.…

Poetry for Supper‘Listen, now, verse should be as naturalAs the small tuber that feeds on muck
And grows slowly from obtuse soil
To the white flower of immortal beauty.’‘Natural, hell! What was it Chaucer
Said once about the long toil
That goes like blood to the poem’s making?
Leave it to nature and the verse sprawls,
Limp as bindweed, if it break at all
Life’s iron crust. Man, you must sweat
And rhyme your guts taut, if you’d buildYour verse a ladder.’




‘You speak as thoughNo sunlight ever surprised the mindGroping on…

Dear Reader, It is 1.30 am. I am jet lagged and working late. Suddenly the lights go out. A power cut, you might say - but this is Brooklyn in New York City. I’ve spent the last few days seeing as many skulls and skeletons as people – it's Halloween horror time. Halloween Horrors. The lights out feel spooky. Fumbling through the dark in my daughter's apartment, everything unfamiliar, I make it to the bedroom, crashing into a corner of the bed frame, when suddenly, a single bedside light comes on. The rest of the…

Twenty years ago, the Belgian author Stefan Hertmans discovered that his house in Ghent had been the home of Willem Verhulst, a Flemish nationalist who collaborated with German occupiers during the second world war and joined the SS. The Ascent – a work of autofiction that chronicles Hertmans’s quest to find out more about Verhulst – draws on memoirs, diaries, official documents and interviews to imagine individual lives amid tumultuous historical events and explore family, nationalism and home.Hertmans, whose novel War…

Two hundred thousand of the world’s brightest graduates apply for jobs at McKinsey & Company every year. Each of them, perhaps, does so in the belief that not only will a successful application guarantee a shed-load of cash – those with MBAs might earn $195,000 in their first year – it will also allow them to create, as the PowerPoint slides declare, “change that matters”.The world’s original and most successful management consultancy has, for a century, wanted to sell itself to clients and employees as a…

Breadcrumb Trail Links Life Eating & Drinking Culture Books In The Vegan Chinese Kitchen, chef, writer and photographer Hannah Che draws on the more than 2,000-year-old tradition of vegetarian cooking in China Get the latest from Laura Brehaut straight to your inbox Sign Up Publishing date: Oct 30, 2022  •  33 minutes ago  •  5 minute read  •  Join the conversation Chef, writer and photographer Hannah Che. Photo by Elizabeth Che Reviews and recommendations…

Bournville, we learn from Jonathan Coe’s notes at the end of the novel, is the fourth in a planned quintet he’s writing under the general title of Unrest. This book also overlaps with the trilogy that began with The Rotters’ Club and continued with The Closed Circle and the Costa award-winning Middle England. All these interweaving plotlines, all the reappearing names, events and, above all, places give the impression of an author whose work is driven by an almost obsessive need to take new perspectives on the past (and…

When he was young, the actor Hugh Bonneville was ambitious and thrusting, but a bit bumbling, too: no sooner had he filed his elbows to a point and aimed them in the direction of his next big break than something would almost inevitably go a bit wrong. Take, for instance, the time he decided it would indeed be possible to appear in three National Theatre productions on the same evening. He pulled it off, but not without making a minor tit of himself while dressed as a Roman legionnaire.At the time, Bonneville was…