Books

More from Books

The enduring mystery of Goethe’s Faust

A.N. Wilson has never been afraid of big subjects. His previous books have tackled the Victorians, Charles Dickens, Dante, Jesus and Hitler, to name just a few. So it’s hardly a surprise that he’s now decided to have a crack at Goethe’s Faust. How do all the intellectual fireworks fit together? What, in short, does

Doctor in trouble: Time of the Child, by Niall Williams, reviewed

In the early 1960s, glimmers of change start to appear in the Irish ‘backwater’ parish of Faha. A smuggled copy of Edna O’Brien’s banned The Country Girls is read surreptitiously by the doctor’s daughter, Ronnie Troy; a photograph of John F. Kennedy, the first Catholic president of the USA, hangs proudly on the postmistress’s wall.

Why must medieval mysticism be treated as a malady?

Medieval women – they were ‘just like us’. Except that they weren’t. Poet, Mystic, Widow, Wife is the first popular book by the academic and New Generation thinker Hetta Howes. It is a history of medieval women in relation to four celebrated figures – Marie de France (poet), Julian of Norwich (mystic), Christine de Pizan

Conspiracy theories are as old as witch hunts 

To millions of people across America, Hillary Clinton sits atop a global network of satanic child-traffickers and is battling an underground resistance led by Donald Trump to maintain her malign influence. That is the core tenet of the QAnon movement, a conspiracy theory that originated in obscure corners of the internet before being seized upon