The Visionaries review – seers who were shaped by the shadow of war
The Visionaries by Wolfram Eilenberger review – four women who changed the world
December 2022
Top 10s
Top 10 books about freedom
Authors as radically different as Julia Donaldson, John Rawls and Ayn Rand can make us appreciate the value of freedom, and the terrible jeopardy of losing it
March 2022
The books of my life
Madeline Miller: ‘Reading Ayn Rand was like being dipped in slime’
The author of The Song of Achilles on discovering TS Eliot, her childhood love of James Herriot and the subversive genius of Chinua Achebe
February 2022
Top 10s
Top 10 buildings in fiction
It may only rarely get built, but imaginary architecture is a crucial support for many stories, from Jane Austen’s Pemberley to Kafka’s Castle and Ballard’s High-Rise
October 2021
Pass notes
The 20-page rule: how much time should you give a devastatingly boring book?
Novelist Mark Billingham advises readers to angrily launch a book across the room after 20 non-gripping pages – but almost 40% of people will keep going right to the end
July 2019
The Nico Project; The Fountainhead – review
The Fountainhead review – Ivo van Hove hypnotises with Ayn Rand's nonsense
February 2018
From Watchmen to Catch-22: can TV tackle 'unfilmable' books?
Film history is littered with adaptations that didn’t do their literary source material justice. But the small screen’s longer format could be the ideal place for unwieldy texts
April 2017
Ayn Rand’s selfish gene is out of date
Letters: We humans switch our genes on and off and tweak their effects by means of language. We can change our minds. We have free will
Ayn Rand’s neoliberal legacy is seen today
Letters: Ayn Rand’s “Objectivism” seems to me no more than a reversion to animal behaviour.
The new age of Ayn Rand: how she won over Trump and Silicon Valley
Her novel The Fountainhead is one of the few works of fiction that Donald Trump likes and she has long been the darling of the US right. But only now do her devotees hold sway around the world
February 2016
War and Peace … and then what?
Andrew Davies’s triumphant TV series has caused sales of Tolstoy’s epic to soar. Here are five more big reads to fill the gap – from Finnegans Wake to Gravity’s Rainbow. And every one is ripe for the small screen
January 2016
Finally, the Tories get the state’s vital role
Letters: The ideological difference is not the intervention, which is functionally indispensable, but the underlying values
November 2015
Top 10s
Top 10 books about bankers
A self-confessed ‘complete outsider in the City’, Joris Luyendijk reveals the best guides he’s found to this complex, sometimes terrifying world
June 2015
Let’s have a reality check. The Tories aren’t all wicked and wrong
Martin Kettle
This government will be judged on three issues: Europe, the union of the UK and public spending. The trick is not to bring your preconceptions with you
December 2014
Ayn Rand’s ‘never-before-seen’ novel Ideal due out in 2015
Atlas Shrugged author’s work, which she abandoned and adapted for the stage, will be released next year
July 2014
The Fountainhead review – Ivo van Hove's smouldering take on Ayn Rand
This mammoth production of the neocon classic shifts the focus to its enthralling and predatory femme fatale, writes Andrew Todd
May 2014
Books blog
Self-publishing is not revolutionary - it's reactionary
Alan Skinner: Trumpeted as a democratic broadening of the publishing field, 'authorpreneurialism' actually narrows the world of reading and writing
December 2013
If Nelson Mandela really had won, he wouldn't be seen as a universal hero
Slavoj Žižek
Slavoj Žižek: Mandela must have died a bitter man. To honour his legacy we should focus on the unfulfilled promises his leadership gave rise to
