Mansplainers anonymous: Men Explain Things to Me by Rebecca Solnit
By Helen Lewis.
Solnit’s lead essay became a viral sensation because many women recognised the experience of having their expertise instantly dismissed because of the lady-shaped package it came in.
The books of revelations: why are novelists turning back to religion?
By Philip Maughan.
There is a sense that, in recent years, novelists have formed part of a rearguard action in response to Richard Dawkins’s New Atheist consensus. Philip Maughan talks to Marilynne Robinson, Francis Spufford and Rowan Williams about God in literature.
How Jim fixed it: the strange, dark life of Jimmy Savile
By Rachel Cooke.
It is impossible to look back on the world of light entertainment in the Savile era and not come to the conclusion that it was strikingly weird.
“One man who made history” by another who seems just to make it up: Boris on Churchill
By Richard J Evans.
The book reads as if it was dictated, not written. All the way through we hear Boris’s voice; it’s like being cornered in the Drones Club and harangued for hours by Bertie Wooster.
David Mitchell, the master builder
By Erica Wagner.
When he was a child, the novelist David Mitchell drew maps. Now he creates worlds.
How James Joyce’s Dubliners heralded the urban era
By Eimear McBride.
It is through Joyce’s intimate rummagings through the city’s yens and wardrobes that we come closest to identifying its inhabitants.
The book that will make you quit your job
By Sophie McBain.
Paul Dolan believes all humans strive for happiness, which he defines as a combination of pleasure and a sense of purpose. The problem is that we are often very bad at maximising our own well-being.
Lena Dunham is not real
By Helen Lewis.
Lena Dunham’s Not That Kind of Girl is a confessional book where you cannot be sure if the confessions are true: it’s either a brilliantly ironic subversion of the form, or a deeply wearying put-on by someone who has no sense of who they are when no one is watching.
Too much information: how scientists and historians captured the brains of Amis and McEwan
By Leo Robson.
Novels by both authors seems to be creaking under the burden of researched fact and rehearsed message, but there was a time when their impulses flowed in the opposite direction.
Wilfred Owen: The Peter Pan of the trenches
By Rowan Williams.
The anti-heroic reading of the First World War did not begin with Blackadder – Wilfred Owen has far more to answer for than Richard Curtis, says the former Archbishop of Canterbury.
Phalluses and fallacies: the poetry of sex
By Germaine Greer.
All poetry is driven by sex, whether or not it acknowledges the impulse.
The moral universe of H P Lovecraft
By John Gray.
The weird realism that runs through Lovecraft’s writings undermines any belief system – religious or humanist – in which the human mind is the centre of the universe.
The unfinished battles of Waterloo
By Simon Heffer.
How did a hamlet in Belgium become immortalised in the names of streets, districts, parks and buildings all over Britain? These five books, published in anticipation of the bicentenary of the Battle of Waterloo, explain why.
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