Books

Belgian author Georges Simenon (1903-89) lived in four countries and travelled worldwide but details of his visit to the USSR in the early 1930s are sketchy. What’s remembered more today is that the visit gave birth to this novel, considered a singular effort among ...

Military historian Stuart Lloyd recounts how, on February 14, 1942, rampaging Japanese troops in Singapore forced an Allied retreat around — and controversially even through – the Alexandra Hospital. The Japanese bayonetted patients in their beds and an anaesthetised man on the operating table. ...

December 2022 – Soviet forces have occupied Ukraine. Tens of thousands of troops and civilians are dead. Resistance groups in the woods kill a few Soviet soldiers, blow up rail tracks and bring down power lines. In retaliation the Soviets shoot hostages and raze ...

The threads to this triangular case began in unknowing earnest on July 18, 2012 when Slovak police stumbled on an unusual finding by their easternmost border: a secretive 700-metre-long burrow that is now popularly known as the “Cigarette Tunnel”. This came with a miniature, ...

Microsoft co-founder Bill Gates, author of "How to Avoid a Climate Catastrophe” in 2021, will return to book shelves again in May this year with "How to Prevent the Next Pandemic". It will also discuss how he became the subject of conspiracy theories.

Occasionally over the years – and by now there have been many many years – I’ve come across unusual pictures of cats – psychedelic and kaleidoscopic cats, frolicking cats, knitting cats, song and dance cats, fishing cats... a whole eccentric world of felines. Not ...

A woman is free to do what she wants with her body – my body, my choice, the call goes up, usually in the context of abortion rights but also for prostitution. It’s a viable, if disputed, argument, and for the latter bear in ...

Nothing worked in Germany In the weeks of confusion that followed the end of the Second World War, not the postal service, the railways or public transport, amidst homelessness and the occasional corpse that still lay buried under the rubble. Defeat meant a “starving, ...

War is sick, war is disgusting, but who cares? The last ones were disasters but let’s have another. There’s a bit of land to fight over, or national pride, or an ideology. War is waged by lunatics, macho men, cowards and bully boys with ...

It took nearly half a century to come up with the idea, or at least to put it into motion, but some four years ago The Beatles organisation Apple Corps finally decided “The time has come to present the real story”, in other words ...