Books

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 ...

There is a small library of books on Norway’s Edvard Munch, including several by the art historian, critic, curator and expert on the artist, Øystein Ustvedt. His latest, “Edvard Munch: An Inner Life”, is intended to offer a wide-reaching, all-encompassing introduction for the lay ...

Will Sergeant failed his 11-plus school exam in Liverpool, UK, and was dumped with the other thickies at a secondary modern school, where the careers master wanted him to train to be a welder. No one, including Sergeant himself, suspected that instead of being ...

There is not one but two mysteries for we amateur sleuths to ponder here: first, Simenon’s actual plot, involving the obligatory killing and the natural question of whodunnit, and second, how this brand-new translation differs so much from Penguin’s earlier one (in a positive ...