Books

Alexei Navalny was not a man in a million, he was a man in 145 million. His nemesis is also a man in 145 million. The difference between the two is that Navalny is seen as a man of such immense courage he gave ...

With some 16 war books to his credit, historian James Holland remains on full firepower in “Cassino ’44”. This follows on from his “Sicily ’43, The First Assault on Fortress Europe”, published in November 2020, and “The Savage Storm, The Brutal Battle for Italy ...

Penguin Random House is following the 30 archival releases in its “Crime and Espionage” series (Simenon, le Carré, Deighton, Tey, Rampo, Macdonald, Ambler, Woolrich, Hines, Forester, et al) with a new series called “Weird Fiction”, which the publisher describes as a category all its ...

Don’t most people have a yearning to know how clever, or stupid, they are? Well, perhaps they do if they are astute enough, aware enough, to wonder about it in the first place. Here are dozens of riddles and trick questions to wrap your ...

The English language is a constant delight, and we made two exciting lexical discoveries only recently. First, “spats”, a footwear word we have long known, was found to be short for the much odder “spatterdashers”. Second, we had to look up “sesquipedalianism” to find ...

At the same moment as we are reading this rivetting but depressing account of how money men – the “suits” – have fattened themselves on Manchester United, overworked elite players are battling in the UEFA Nations League. But wasn’t it a mere two months ...

It is the 80th anniversary of the masterful “Double Indemnity”, released in July 1944, and to mark the occasion here is an in-depth book exploring multiple aspects of what is considered the quintessential film noir. We’ve watched the movie two or three times and ...

These potted biographies open with the mostly familiar stories of Adolf Hitler and his immediate henchmen, and then come the lesser known human instruments of the trumpeted Thousand-Year Third Reich that actually lasted for twelve, from 1933 to 1945. All in all, here are ...

World War Two rages on, 80 years after the fact – death and derring-do, resistance versus occupation, sabotage and torture. Horror. Historians continue to unearth fresh stories, and here is the tale of the 'Wooden Wonder”, the aircraft Britain’s Royal Air Force didn't want ...

Of the 30 vintage “crime and espionage” novels reissued by Penguin in the past year – and we’ve now read the whole bunch – a definite feeling has arisen that we prefer a good slaying or heist to the clandestine capers of snoops. And ...