A memoir chronicling the comic and broadcaster John Robins’s life in alcohol and his subsequent path to sobriety, Thirst is structured around the drinks that changed his life. There’s the bottle of Jacob’s Creek wine left out on a kitchen worktop which he helped himself to at the age of seven, secreting it into his…
Anyone with even the vaguest understanding of the profit motive can understand why Apple TV sports comedy “Ted Lasso” has returned three years after its poorly received — yet still widely watched — third season seemed to close the book on its story. A streaming service continuing to milk one of its few major hits doesn’t…
Kevin Powers’s fourth novel marks a return to the themes and subject matter of his acclaimed debut The Yellow Birds, winner of the 2012 Guardian first book award. Through the lives of its central characters, it explores the courage, folly, cruelty and absurdity involved in war, and the challenges of adjusting to civilian life afterwards….
Marxist-Leninist rule in Russia lasted 74 years, and in August 1991 it effectively collapsed in just three days: clear evidence of how hollowed out it had become. In the period that followed, Russia tried parliamentary democracy and unalloyed capitalism, then sank back into autocracy. Now it’s struggling under a wholly unnecessary war against its neighbour…
The only named wind in the British Isles, Helm is a strong northeasterly gale that blows down the slopes of Cross Fell in the Pennines and is known for its unusual cloud formations. Helm has been known to dislodge roofs, haystacks, trees and riders from their horses. Twenty years in the writing, Sarah Hall’s Helm…
Emily Wilson, the classicist behind the buzziest Odyssey translation of my generation, has finally weighed in on the film adaptation of her favorite poem. And so dark was the shade that Wilson’s withering takedown crashed its host site: the London Review of Books, not typically known for its astronomic virality. We might have predicted that…
The adjoining villages of Easington and Easington Colliery in the coalfields of east Durham make the perfect case study of the shift from England’s industrial boomtime to terminal decline. Twenty miles from a major town or city, they’ve been left to languish ever since Thatcher went to war with the industry that made them. If…
There is a growing literature of maternal flight: novels about women who leave not just their husbands but also the children they have made. In the real world, men are the more frequent deserters; the connection of the father to family life is seen as contingent, while motherhood is revered as an intrinsic state. This…
There’s such a fine line between “cheese” and “cringe”, is there not? Come, walk it with me and Tom Hiddleston in Pompeii: Out of Time With Tom Hiddleston. Let’s see how many of us survive the eruptions of embarrassment that attend our journey! This is a National Geographic documentary-drama, which means that even the factual…
When Sandra Forsyth began marching in support of the English Defence League, her daughter Nicola Wilding hoped it was a phase. The Cumbria-bred, Dover-dwelling Sandra was about to turn 60 and had been dealing with a lot of stress. Not only had her son been sentenced to two years in prison for armed robbery, but…
