Books

How Niall Ferguson’s Doom fails to make sense of the Covid crisis

The historian’s reading of the pandemic is undermined by theoretical jargon, incoherence and a self-consciously provocative right-wing position. 

Reviewed in Short: New books by Jenn Shapland, Ulrich Alexander Boschwitz, Simon Armitage and Jon McGregor

My Autobiography of Carson McCullers by Shapland, The Passenger by Boschwitz, A Vertical Art: Oxford Lectures by Armitage and Lean Fall Stand by McGregor.

The vegetarian in the abattoir

Henry Mance uncovers the inconvenient truths about our treatment of animals.

The double life of DH Lawrence

The novelist was a megalomaniac fuelled by fantasies of manhood – but his imaginative genius speaks to us still.

Ireland’s forever wars

A new book chronicles the killings that shaped a nation. 

Ireland’s forever wars

Len Deighton and the mundanity of spies

I was sent to prevent the Bolshevik Revolution and to keep Russia in the war,” wrote Somerset Maugham in the…