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1 month ago | 
newstatesman.com | Michael Prodger |Zoe Huxford |Barney Horner
The curse of the subtitle of Christopher de Bellaigue’s study of the most powerful of all Ottoman sultans, Suleyman the Magnificent (1494-1566), was that the sultanate had no history of primogeniture. The demise of a sultan meant more than one death as his assorted male offspring jostled bloodily for position – brothers and half-brothers suddenly became rivals to be disposed of.
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2 months ago | 
newstatesman.com | Michael Prodger |Barney Horner |Rachel Cunliffe |Zuzanna Lachendro
Paul Theroux ought to know how to do it. The author of more than 30 works of fiction and some 20 of non-fiction, he has been writing for nearly 60 years. Nestled within his voluminous bibliography sit numerous collections of stories – including those written for Playboy in the 1970s and early 1980s. This new gathering displays plenty of the ease and adroitness garnered after all those years.
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Oct 28, 2024 | 
newstatesman.com | Barney Horner
Neel Mukherjee was born in India in 1970, but has lived in the UK since studying at Oxford in the 1990s. He also teaches creative writing at Harvard. His debut novel A Life Apart (2008) won the Writers’ Guild of Great Britain Award for best fiction, and his second The Lives of Others, set among a wealthy but politically left-wing family in late Sixties Kolkata (then Calcutta), was nominated for the Booker Prize in 2014.
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Oct 9, 2024 | 
newstatesman.com | Harry Clarke-Ezzidio |Zuzanna Lachendro |Barney Horner |Nicholas Harris
Taking the Lead: A Dog at Number 10 by John CraceBoris Johnson be warned – another political “big beast” is releasing a memoir this autumn: that of Herbert Hound – Spad, Westminster veteran and… cockapoo. Like any SW1 memoirist, Hound details tales of triumph, failure and enduring feuds – most notably with Larry, the long-serving Downing Street cat, who is threatened by the prospect of quadruped rivalry at No 10.
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Sep 25, 2024 | 
newstatesman.com | Michael Prodger |Zuzanna Lachendro |Megan Kenyon |Barney Horner
Kingmaker: Pamela Churchill Harriman’s Astonishing Life of Seduction, Intrigue and Power by Sonia PurnellReputations, once earned, are hard to shake. Pamela Harriman’s has been particularly tenacious: she is the grande dame of grandes horizontales.
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Jul 2, 2024 | 
newstatesman.com | Finn McRedmond |Barney Horner |Michael Prodger |Will Dunn
Amnesiac: A Memoir by Neil JordanMichael Collins – the sprawling biopic about the Irish revolutionary hero – is perhaps the director Neil Jordan’s most conventional box-office hit. “Give us the future, we’ve had enough of your past. Give us our country back,” Collins (played by Liam Neeson) roars. In Jordan’s novel, he mentions with satisfaction that, since this film’s release in 1996, these fictional words have been attributed to the real Collins many times.
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May 15, 2024 | 
newstatesman.com | Michael Prodger |Pippa Bailey |Barney Horner |Megan Gibson
The Light Eaters by Zoë SchlangerIn The Hidden Life of Trees (2016), Peter Wohlleben revealed the extraordinary and hitherto unexpected social networks of trees – their ability to communicate, protect and support one another. In The Light Eaters, the American science journalist Zoë Schlanger looks beyond the woods to all plants, from ferns and flowers to rice and Japanese knotweed, and finds still more communities and abilities.
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Apr 29, 2024 | 
newstatesman.com | Barney Horner
Every football club is a Ship of Theseus. If it changes players and coaches, owners and administrative staff, swaps colours, training facilities and stadiums, is it still the same club? Football teams are vessels of collective memory, points of connection with communities. They are maintained by supporters who load younger generations with their emotive history, both thrilling and desolate. Brentford, like many teams, emerged from the late-19th-century middle class’s passion for codifying pastimes.
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Apr 10, 2024 | 
newstatesman.com | Michael Prodger |Pippa Bailey |Barney Horner |George Monaghan
Interwar: British Architecture 1919-1939 by Gavin StampWhen Gavin Stamp, the architectural historian and, as “Piloti”, an acerbic columnist for Private Eye, died of cancer in 2017 he left his greatest work incomplete. Interwar, a wide-ranging and deeply informed survey of British architecture from 1919 to 1939, has now been buffed and finished by his wife, the historian Rosemary Hill.
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Apr 10, 2024 | 
newstatesman.com | Michael Prodger |Pippa Bailey |Barney Horner |George Monaghan
Interwar: British Architecture 1919-1939 by Gavin StampWhen Gavin Stamp, the architectural historian and, as “Piloti”, an acerbic columnist for Private Eye, died of cancer in 2017 he left his greatest work incomplete. Interwar, a wide-ranging and deeply informed survey of British architecture from 1919 to 1939, has now been buffed and finished by his wife, the historian Rosemary Hill.
