An Eye for the Ladies
Stendhal loved Lawrence, Thackeray thought his work tawdry. An NPG exhibition gives us a chance to decide
Politics, Ideas and the Arts
The German Question
The German Genius: Europe's Third Renaissance, the Second Scientific Revolution and the Twentieth Century by Peter Watson; Fame by Daniel Kehlmann; The Box by Günter Grass; and Portrait of the Mother as
All About Himself
La Carte et le Territoire by Michel Houellebecq
Mentioned in Dispatches
Letters from London and Europe by Giuseppe Tomasi di Lampedusa, tranlated by J. G. Nichols
Smoke on the Water
A World on Fire: An Epic History of Two Nations Divided by Amanda Foreman
Flouting (Not Flaunting) the Rules of English
The teaching of grammar should be at the heart of the school syllabus. Without it we are killing intellectual curiosity
Eastern Questions
Crimea: The Last Crusade by Orlando Figes
The State of the State
The Servile Mind: How Democracy Erodes the Moral Life by Kenneth Minogue
Writers of the World, Unite
Politics and the Novel During the Cold War by David Caute
Mao’s Little Helpers
The Wind from the East: French Intellectuals, the Cultural Revolution, and the Legacy of the 1960s by Richard Wolin
Perplexed of St. John’s Wood
The Finkler Question by Howard Jacobson
The Serpent in His Own Eden
Paul Gauguin forged the myth of himself as a South Seas primitive — but his painting was not just a pose