Letters

Frederik Seelig, Ramsay Cameron, Jane Holland, Rayane Saadeh, Francis Crimmins, Timon Screech, Benjamin Letzler

Michael Wood

At the Movies: ‘Disclosure Day’

David Runciman

Gerontocracy in America: How the Old Are Hoarding Power and Wealth, and What to Do about It by Samuel Moyn. FSG, 269 pp., £30, June, 978 0 374 60764 7

Laleh Khalili

The Sea Captain’s Wife: A True Story of Mutiny, Love and Adventure at the Bottom of the World by Tilar J. Mazzeo. St Martins, 288 pp., $30, December 2025, 978 1 250 35258 3

Archives of Intimacy: Racial Mixing and Chinese Lives in the Colonial Port City, 1905-49 by Nadine Attewell. Stanford, 330 pp., £26.99, July, 978 1 5036 4710 7

Peter Geoghegan and Lucas Amin

‘This looks absolutely rubbish’

Barbara Newman

Self-Help from the Middle Ages: A Journey into the Medieval Mind by Peter Jones. Hutchinson Heinemann, 360 pp., £20, April, 978 1 5291 5486 3

The Medieval Guide to Healthy Living by Katherine Harvey. Reaktion, 333 pp., £20, April, 978 1 83639 184 5

Jonathan Coe

Hitchcock and Herrmann: The Friendship and Film Scores that Changed Cinema by Steven C. Smith. Oxford, 295 pp., £31.99, January, 978 0 19 768128 2

Ange Mlinko

On Susan Stewart

Oliver Cussen

Jean-Paul Marat: Prophet of Terror by Keith Michael Baker. Chicago, 930 pp., £40, November 2025, 978 0 226 82092 7

Murder in the Rue Marat: A Case of Art in Revolution by Thomas Crow. Princeton, 176 pp., £25, November 2025, 978 0 691 27444 7

Iain Sinclair

Brion Gysin: Le Dernier Musée edited by Olivier Weil. Éditions Paris Musées, 120 pp., €39, April, 978 2 7596 0639 9

Michael Ledger-Lomas

Converts: From Oscar Wilde to Muriel Spark, Why So Many Became Catholic in the 20th Century by Melanie McDonagh. Yale, 384 pp., £12.99, September, 978 0 300 30619 4

Kathleen Commons

Short Cuts: England’s Birthright Citizenship

Jenny Turner

History of a Revoluter: The Life of James Leslie Mitchell/Lewis Grassic Gibbon by William K. Malcolm. Jetstone, 580 pp., £24.99, February 2025, 978 1 910858 36 3

Edmund Gordon

The End of Everything by M. John Harrison. Serpent’s Tail, 198 pp., £16.99, June, 978 1 80081 294 9

Susan Pedersen

The Modern British City 1945-2000 edited by Simon Gunn, Peter Mandler and Otto Saumarez Smith. Lund Humphries, 496 pp., £65, November 2025, 978 1 84822 729 3

Terry Eagleton

James Joyce: A Political Life by Frank Callanan. Princeton, 944 pp., £38, March, 978 0 691 22797 9

Nicola Jennings

At the National Gallery: Zurbarán in Seville

Neal Ascherson

Stay Alive: Berlin 1939-45 by Ian Buruma. Atlantic, 382 pp., £22, March, 978 1 80546 289 7

Anne Carson

Poem: ‘Smile’

Clare Jackson

A Golden World: How the Americas Transformed Renaissance England by Lauren Working. Faber, 384 pp., £22, June, 978 0 571 39383 1

Rebecca Solnit

Diary: : Before 1776