Kathryn Hughes

Matthew Sweet’s biography presents Barbara Cartland as more than the flamboyant purveyor of formulaic romance novels. Drawing on extensive archives, it traces her childhood losses, early career as a society journalist, strategic marriages, political engagement and evolution into a hugely successful author and self-promoter. Cartland’s opposition to Nazi antisemitism and her internationalist Toryism complicate her later public image, while her connection to Diana Spencer’s family helped fuel her celebrity. The review concludes that Sweet convincingly situates Cartland within the economic, political and cultural changes of the 20th century and reveals her as an extraordinary, entirely self-made woman.

Philip Hensher’s 600-page history of British fiction is praised as an unusually cohesive and pleasurable account of the novel’s development from Daniel Defoe in 1719 to Zadie Smith in 2000. Its strength lies in connecting authors and movements rather than presenting isolated academic chapters, while Hensher’s experience as a novelist informs detailed discussions of narrative technique and publishing economics. The review highlights his rehabilitation of neglected writers including Hannah More, Tobias Smollett and Arnold Bennett, alongside sharp criticism of authors such as Ann Radcliffe, D. M. Thomas and David Lodge. Hensher deliberately stops at 2000, arguing that meaningful critical judgment requires historical distance.

Ed Douglas’s Upland is praised as a vivid history of Britain’s mountainous regions, tracing their geological origins, ecological richness and influence on politics, culture and national development. The review highlights the uplands’ role in supplying water and raw materials, while examining exploitation and displacement through lead mining, the Elan Valley reservoir and the Highland clearances. It also emphasizes traditions of resistance, including the Jacobite rebellions, and profiles figures such as Hannah Mitchell and Queen Victoria, concluding that Douglas has woven familiar sources into an engaging and colorful survey.

James Lasdun’s book examines Alex Murdaugh, a South Carolina lawyer from a powerful prosecutorial family who was convicted of murdering his wife Maggie and son Paul while concealing extensive financial crimes. The review praises Lasdun’s polished, restrained prose and refusal to reach an absolute conclusion, but criticizes his meticulous retelling of a case already extensively covered by podcasts and documentaries. The book’s uncertainty became newly relevant when the South Carolina Supreme Court overturned Murdaugh’s conviction in May 2026, finding that court clerk Becky Hill had improperly influenced jurors; a retrial is expected.

Hester Grant’s group biography examines the summer of 1726 when Jonathan Swift, Alexander Pope and John Gay spent time together at Pope’s Twickenham home. The book argues that their collaboration and conversation marked a pivotal moment in English literary history, amid plans surrounding Gulliver’s Travels and the development of later satirical works. The review praises Grant’s vivid writing and her account of the discomforts of 18th-century travel and daily life, but finds her central claim overstated: Swift had already written Gulliver’s Travels, Pope was still working on his Homer translation, and Gay would not begin The Beggar’s Opera until the following year. The gathering is therefore seen as an interesting creative encounter rather than the decisive literary turning point Grant proposes.

Jane Rogoyska’s Hotel Exile traces the Hôtel Lutetia’s transformation from a bohemian Parisian hotel and refuge for intellectuals fleeing Hitler into the headquarters of the Nazi Abwehr during the occupation, and finally into a repatriation centre for concentration-camp survivors after liberation. The review follows figures including Heinrich Mann, Walter Benjamin, Irène Némirovsky and Gisèle Freund, highlighting the dangers faced by émigrés, Jews and other persecuted people. Its final section emphasizes that the Lutetia offered medical care, clothing and food to returning survivors, but could not provide the happy reunions many families hoped for.

Thomas Laqueur’s book examines the symbolic role of dogs in Western art, arguing that their position between nature and culture makes them compelling intermediaries for viewers. The review highlights dogs’ gazes in works by Velázquez, Picasso and Veronese, showing how they provide an accessible alter ego, interpret scenes and introduce comic or worldly perspectives into both secular and sacred imagery.

Caroline Bicks’s book draws on a year spent studying Stephen King’s archive, including drafts, marginalia and editorial exchanges from five major novels. The review highlights how small word choices in Pet Sematary create fear, as well as King’s frugality, early financial hardship and eventual success. Bicks’s comparison of early and revised drafts of Carrie shows King transforming a lurid monster story into a more psychologically focused novel centered on Carrie’s consciousness. The book is praised for combining close literary analysis with biography and for offering an original account of King’s writing methods.

Alan Bennett’s diaries covering 2016 to 2024 revisit familiar material, including his pandemic years and memories of national service, but gain new meaning through changing context. The diaries combine nostalgia, shame, gossip and sharp self-awareness, while documenting Bennett’s physical decline and continuing creative vitality. His work Allelujah! and The Choral are presented as major late-career successes, with Nicholas Hytner and Rupert Thomas identified as especially important figures in his life. Despite its recurring subjects and occasional sentimentality risks, the collection remains engaging because of Bennett’s layered, witty and unsparing prose.

Kathleen Stock's Do Not Go Gentle argues against state-sanctioned assisted dying, warning that eligibility rules tend to expand from terminal illness to broader physical and psychological conditions, and in some cases to children. The review presents her central concern as the risk of coercion and institutional pressure on vulnerable people, including disabled people lacking adequate support and elderly people whose families may be influenced by care costs or inheritances. It also highlights Britain's uneven, expensive palliative-care provision and questions whether assisted dying could become a substitute for properly funded hospice and social care. Stock's position is portrayed as a measured but deliberately unpopular challenge to widespread public support for assisted dying.

Ian Buruma’s Stay Alive: Berlin 1939-45 examines how Berliners survived and sometimes resisted Nazi rule during the Second World War. Drawing on his father Leo’s wartime letters and the recollections of witnesses including Ursula von Kardorff and Ruth Andreas-Friedrich, Buruma focuses less on organized underground resistance than on everyday acts of decency, such as greeting Jews in public, maintaining forbidden relationships and helping persecuted neighbors. The book depicts a city shaped by its liberal and rebellious Weimar legacy but increasingly constrained by military defeat, bombing, scarcity, deportations and Nazi repression. Its central insight is that survival often required a morally compromised middle ground between heroism and cowardice.