Live music venues, clubs and bars feed creativity and drive social change. But they’re increasingly in dangerA few weeks ago, I decided to walk from London Bridge, up through Soho, to Marylebone, to catch a train home to the West Midlands. It was late-ish on a Friday afternoon, early spring was in the air, and I had time to kill. I was expecting the...

The creator of the highly successful crime series, set in Tudor England, was a private person who ‘preferred to be known through his novels’CJ Sansom, the bestselling author of Dissolution, Winter in Madrid and Dominion has died aged 71, having been diagnosed with multiple myeloma, a rare cancer that affects bone marrow, in 2012.His publisher confirmed...

A weary supermarket queue at the height of the pandemic is wryly observed by a speaker who is just as driven by scrappy appetitesIn the SpringtimeThe queue outside the Aldi spreads all round the car park, out onto the street and round Continue reading...

This provocative and engrossing history of marine life identifies its role in shaping us – and the future crisis we faceThe science fiction writer Arthur C Clarke once argued that our planet should not be called Earth. “Clearly it is Ocean,” he observed. And certainly it is hard to deny its aquatic nature when we see that distinguishing sea-blue globe...

The Essex Serpent author’s fourth novel, about a newspaper columnist who lives a double life, mixes themes of faith and physics to powerful effectSarah Perry’s third book, Melmoth, remains, to my mind, one of the most complex and brilliant novels of the past few decades: a serious and haunting attempt to wrestle with the darkest elements of the 20th...

While a cast of literary heavyweights grace Laing’s account of her garden restoration, the real joys lie in her detailed description of the pruning and the planting and the soothing effect on her state of mindOlivia Laing’s new book, The Garden Against Time, is as fragrantly replete as a long border at its peak. The word that comes to mind is spumy:...