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This ‘nonfiction thriller’ takes us through exactly what would happen if Nigel Farage won his dreamed-of majorityFor some years now, mainstream British politics has revolved increasingly obsessively around the question of how to stop Nigel Farage. What started a decade ago with Brexit may yet end in a general election that boils down to one question: do you or don’t you want to risk putting this man in Downing Street? That said, we still know surprisingly little about what a Reform government might mean in practice.Of course, it might never happen. But if it did, what exactly would Farage do with a majority that enabled him to fulfil his wildest dreams? And how well would an unwritten British constitution, still heavily reliant on good chaps voluntarily being good chaps, cope with full-fat populism? Continue reading...

The Northern Irish writer explores music and family, memory and duty in this stunning collection of sharply observed talesThe stories in Northern Irish writer Lucy Caldwell’s fourth collection are often devoted to family life, or a professional life in the arts: or both. They’re almost always about memory and how to manage it. They offer a certain continuity with her earlier collections, Multitudes, Intimacies and Openings, though it’s subtle and organic rather than directly narrative.In All Grown Up, Luke returns to his childhood home, only to be steadily reabsorbed by it. He applies himself to clearing the house, putting it on the market; he thinks about all the possibilities he’ll have once he’s sold up. But the longer he stays the less impulse there is to leave, and the more he remembers, not just about his life here, but his life generally. Meanwhile he’s a 40-year-old divorcee with a bad back, incipient alcoholism and a child at boarding school, attempting to come to terms with divorce, the death of his mother and his sense of entrapment. A one-night stand with his ex-wife’s sister doesn’t help. As you read, that title cycles between bleak irony and an equally bleak optimism. Continue reading...

Dublin scholars find 1,200-year-old manuscript of Caedmon’s Hymn composed by Northumbrian cattle herderA lost copy of a poem composed in the seventh century by a Northumbrian cattle herder – the earliest surviving poem in the English language – has been discovered in Rome.Scholars from Trinity College Dublin (TCD) uncovered the manuscript that contains Caedmon’s Hymn at the National Central Library of Rome. Continue reading...

New HarperCollins study finds that daily reading for pleasure among five- to 17-year-olds fell from 39% in 2012 to 25% in 2025The “relentless” focus on measuring literacy progress in schools has “pushed reading for pleasure to the margins”, according to a new report.“Parents and schools both recognise that reading for pleasure matters, but their understandable focus on literacy skills is actively undermining it,” found the study, which analysed survey data on reading trends among UK children, drawing on data from HarperCollins, NielsenIQ and The Reading Agency. Continue reading...

An ex-offender searches for meaning and beauty in the second novel from the spoken-word performerKae Tempest’s new novel is dedicated to “you”, the reader. It also comes with a plea: “Be gentle though.” But to whom or what should we be gentle? The book or the writer? Having Spent Life Seeking is Tempest’s second novel, arriving a decade after his first and following a period of considerable personal change, including gender transition. Perhaps inevitably, it is a book full of struggle and soul-searching. It is also painfully earnest: an enervating read with an exhausting intensity that neither relents nor resolves.The publisher hasn’t helped here, bombastically announcing it as a “heart-breaking, soul-building new novel”. That’s a great deal to live up to, even for someone who established a reputation first as a blazingly fervent spoken-word poetry performer, winning the Ted Hughes award in 2013, and making Mercury prize-nominated albums in 2014 and 2017. But the grandeur of the publisher’s claims also suggests something of the melodramatic register of the book, which is all grand passion, big trauma and heroic self-discovery. What it lacks is any convincing sense of interiority or reflection. Continue reading...

Tactile details and a no-nonsense approach make this biography a refreshing change from more lurid fareBoth Emily Brontë and her only novel Wuthering Heights have been called “deranged”, “crazed” or (especially online, in the wake of the recent film) “unhinged”. So it’s a relief to read a biography where she comes across, instead, as more grounded, steady, sane. Deborah Lutz, whose 2015 book The Brontë Cabinet: Three Lives in Nine Objects made such an impression, anchors her narrative in solid things: the too-short bed Emily squeezed herself into; the pockets she stuffed with paper, pencils and moorland treasures; the laundry she looked after, including stockings with “AB5” sewn into them to indicate they were her sister Anne’s fifth pair. Lutz’s Emily is an eminently practical woman who wrote “while baking, in front of a peat fire perched on a little stool, or while walking” and who “used the tactile keeping of order as a prop and prompt to lose herself in the sublimity of art-making and moor-haunting”.For Lutz, Emily’s writing is also “tactile”. She counts the sampler Emily made at 10 as one of her “earliest extant writings”, and while other scholars have dismissed it as a collection of copied platitudes, Lutz notices that one line Emily stitched, from Proverbs – “Who hath gathered the wind in his fists?” – suggests that maybe she was already thinking about wuthering. She lovingly describes the little books the Brontë children made as “delightful, tiny objects to match their toys and still-small selves, texts holding secretive and insular qualities”. She calls the one-page diaries Emily made with Anne “a new writing practice, one that feels distinctly modern, even avant garde”, as they crammed in descriptions of their cooking, their chatter, their animals, their made-up heroines; stream of consciousness nearly a century before Virginia Woolf. Continue reading...

At a talk on her latest essay collection, Dead and Alive, Smith said she ‘sometimes’ reads male novelists, but more often seeks the wisdom of older female writers like Helen Garner“I don’t know when I read men any more”, the writer Zadie Smith told a literary festival audience on Sunday.“It does happen sometimes, but it’s completely flipped compared to the reading I did when I was young,” she continued. Continue reading...

The Girls creator has endured brickbats and breakdowns – but she doesn’t always make it easy to feel sorry for herAt the end of last year, Netflix released Too Much – a sickly, indie-sleaze romcom about an American transplant who falls for a troubled British muso. It was created by Lena Dunham and her musician husband Luis Felber, and apparently loosely based on the couple’s backstory. It felt, to many critics, like second-screen fare, decidedly Lena Dunham-lite. Was this really the same person who had given us the spiky, self-absorbed world of Girls, the millennial Sex and the City complete with brutal situationships, toxic besties and, er, one of the main characters accidentally smoking crack?Famesick sheds almost all the Richard Curtis-isms to find that old, controversy-courting Dunham alive and – if not exactly well – then learning to cope with it. Her second memoir (Not That Kind of Girl was published in 2014) charts the chronic illness and seemingly unending stress that came to define her 20s and 30s after she had snagged her own HBO series aged just 24. The afflictions described across its 400 pages include – though are not limited to – OCD, colitis, the connective tissue disorder Ehlers-Danlos syndrome, endometriosis, early menopause, PTSD and addiction to both opioids and benzodiazepines. At one point, Dunham accidentally sets herself on fire; at another, she panics about how Vogue will cover up the impetigo on her face, “a waterfall of golden blisters, turning a sickly green as they dried”. The book is scattergun and sometimes lacking in self awareness (who cares that Dunham had to give her designer booties up, like contraband, when she entered rehab?). It’s also undeniably frank and exhaustive: a lifetime of therapy condensed into something you could conceivably rip through in a weekend. Continue reading...

The Olive Kitteridge and Lucy Barton author branches out with the tale of a Massachusetts teacher haunted by traumaThe American author Elizabeth Strout famously persisted throughout years of rejection to publish her first novel when she was in her 40s, and the hard work has certainly paid off. She won a Pulitzer prize in 2009, and has been nominated multiple times for the Booker and Women’s prizes. The Things We Never Say is her 11th book.Strout, who grew up in Maine and New Hampshire, writes mainly about small-town America and the mostly white, working-class people who inhabit it. She’s interested in the small details of ordinary lives: people’s joys and disappointments, marriages and infidelities, and the lasting effects of trauma. The fictional world of a Strout novel often extends into subsequent companion works: Olive Kitteridge, published in 2008, was followed by Olive, Again in 2019; the characters first seen in her 2016 novel My Name Is Lucy Barton reappeared in Oh William! in 2021 and Lucy by the Sea in 2022. In 2024, Strout took this world‑building to another level when Lucy, Olive and other recurring characters were brought together in Tell Me Everything. She has charted her fictional worlds so extensively across interlinked novels and stories that readers often think of her characters as their personal friends. Continue reading...

The reaction among officials in Germany to his bestselling novel has been hostile. As Mayfly Season is published in the UK, its author explains whyA few weeks after the German publication of his debut novel in 2024, author Matthias Jügler received a call from an employee at the German government agency tasked with investigating the human rights abuses of the socialist east.The call wasn’t overtly threatening; Jügler was asked to explain what historical source material he had consulted for Mayfly Season and which period he was planning to tackle in his next book. But it came after another government official had accused him of traumatising some of his readership, and after the organiser of a reading had asked him to bring along documents proving the plausibility of his book’s plot. Continue reading...

Leaders have thrown up walls and barriers throughout history – but their effects are unpredictableFour millennia ago, a Sumerian king, his frontier beset by nomadic tribes fleeing prolonged drought in their own lands, ordered the construction of the world’s first border wall: a 177km-long boundary laid in stone between the Tigris and Euphrates rivers.Since humanity’s earliest city-states and kingdoms arose in ancient Mesopotamia, walls, ditches and fences have defended territory, marked the edges of empires and projected political power across the void. But the world’s first border wall failed. It now lies buried beneath Iraq’s desert sands. Rome’s legions abandoned Hadrian’s Wall long ago, and the iron curtain’s razor-wire fences fell with the eastern bloc’s collapse in the late 1980s. Continue reading...

She coined the term ‘intersectionality’ and helped to develop critical race theory, now her life’s work is under attack by Washington’s war on ‘woke’. As her memoir is published, the legal scholar explains why she’ll never stop speaking truth to powerWhen Donald Trump returned to office in January last year, one of his first acts was to sign an executive order intended to cut federal funding for any school teaching what the administration defined as “critical race theory”. A raft of other orders mandated the termination of DEI (diversity, equity and inclusion) personnel, offices and training across the federal government. Federal agencies began flagging hundreds of words to avoid or eliminate, including “intersectional” and “intersectionality”. All of which has amounted to 40 years of Kimberlé Crenshaw’s work being literally and deliberately erased.For decades, the 66-year-old legal scholar has been naming things that powerful people would prefer remain unnamed. In 1989, she coined the term intersectionality to describe the way race and gender overlap to shape lived experience, often in ways the law fails to recognise. Around the same time, she was one of a group of African American scholars who created the framework that came to be known as “critical race theory”, which sought to examine how racism is embedded in legal systems rather than simply enacted through individual prejudice. Now, Crenshaw’s ideas are being contested like never before. Continue reading...