Books

This Christmas, hordes of tourists and the English themselves would have again enjoyed the towering Norway spruce in Trafalgar Square. Some but not all would have known that a tree is donated each year by the city of Oslo “to the people of London ...

A book analysing Hungarian politics by Shea Bradley-Farrell, the head of the Counterpoint Institute, was presented in New York on Thursday.

This 1939 book is sometimes rated as the best of Eric Ambler’s novels, which can be taken either as a big plus considering that he wrote 18, or as a very subjective judgement for the exact same reason. Overall, Ambler forged a considerable reputation, ...

The 20 paperback books republished this year by Penguin Random House in their Crime and Espionage series were written from 1928 to 1978 by 15 authors from the United Kingdom, United States, Belgium and Japan, all dead now except one, some that we recognised, ...

That’s a fairly terrible title for a book –“Brat Farrar” – but, as someone somewhere once said, you can’t judge a book by its cover, and no doubt this applies equally to titles too. Still, this one came out in 1949, and it’s a ...

A senior partner in a firm of London solicitors at Lincoln's Inn, Michael Gilbert made good use of the 50-minute commute by train from his home in Kent to write some 500 words each day. This was an art he had learnt in World ...

Seemingly a fairly straightforward crime book, this one is actually deeper on a couple of levels, including that it is based on a true case in 1753 and it slips in some social commentary on media responsibility and accountability, and the way communities take ...

Considerations arise when reading a 1928 Japanese crime novel. On the plus side, we stand to learn something of a unique culture in pre-global village days. But we are in the hands of a translator – will any of the author’s style be lost? ...

SS is an abbreviation of Schutzstaffel (Protection Squadron), the black-uniformed elite corps that was one of the most feared organisations in Nazi Germany. GB is short for Great Britain. ”SS-GB” is Len Deighton’s 1978 novel imagining what might have happened if Germany had fought ...

People who have enough spare time to enjoy themselves ranking an author’s books – and you’d need to have read all 26 of John Le Carré’s to do so – don’t often include this one among the very best. But it still fares well ...