544pp. Hamish Hamilton. £25.

The practice of hunting with birds has existed in Eurasia for at least 4,000 years. Probably originating in the East, it spread westwards, reaching its apogee in western Europe during the Middle Ages.

On the urging of a cave diver she knew, Ange Mlinko read Friday (1967), the revisionist Robinson Crusoe tale by Michel Tournier. Though she admired the novel, she was horrified at the premiss of ...

The failings of Nicholas II as a ruler are widely accepted by western historians, and even by those who praise his virtues as a husband and a father. In his new history of the end of Romanov rule, ...

Giant Love is the journalist Julie Gilbert’s passion project. As the great-niece and biographer of Edna Ferber, she offers unparalleled insight into the Pulitzer winner’s life and legacy. In this work ...

In May 1944, a group of young German soldiers found themselves in the Crimea, surrounded by a rampant Red Army. Facing certain death, three of them could think of no other means of escape than to swim ...

The University of Bliss is a scathing satire of British higher education set in a dystopian near future. Bliss is a state-of-the-art institution where wellness days and creativity conferences have ...

You might imagine that the title of this volume is a typo for “Pope”. But the allusion, as the South American Pontiff, or Bishop of Rome (as he prefers to be called), reminds us, some way into the ...

“Pen pal” is a term with a delightfully retro, innocent ring, evocative of a time when all mail was snail mail and when first-hand experience of foreign cultures was far less common. Alexis Peri’s ...

Can a circle, a two-dimensional object, deepen as well as enlarge? Can the façade of a church be “toothsome”? These and similar questions may occur to readers of Adrian Duncan’s third novel, The ...

In Thrall was first published in 1982, when its author, Jane DeLynn was in her mid-thirties, but it is set in 1960s New York, the backdrop of the author’s adolescence. It is undeniably a period piece, ...