Books

ROB GRIFFITHS reviews John Green's book on the life of Karl Marx's closest comrade.

FROM Achebe to Soyinka, the interplay between the world of the living and the dead reappears in much African narrative as a means of lamenting the demise of an ancient way of life.

ANDREW Brown's Fishing in Utopia is a quirky, eminently personal account that, in many ways, is far too impressionistic to give any focused understanding of the changes that Swedish society has undergone over the past few decades.

SET in a Christian village outside Beirut at the time of the Israeli invasion of Lebanon in the early 1980s, A Girl Made Of Dust is a fast-moving and evocative portrayal of how conflict can tear families and communities apart.

JOHN GREEN reads Paul Ginsborg's critique of democracy today.

WORKING as volunteers in Leverhulme's beautiful terraced gardens at Rivington, one of the things that was constantly drummed into me and the other staff was what a great guy that this multimillionaire of Unilever fame had been.

I MUST admit that my experience of and enthusiasm for Edinburgh is based on many years of reviewing its summer festival for this paper and I duly take note of a salutary verse in this entertaining and informative anthology.

THIS is a fascinating account of how Newgate prison, which was situated roughly where the Old Bailey now stands and was rebuilt twice before its final demolition in 1903, inspired some of the greatest names in British literature.

IT is said that really wild places don't exist in Britain anymore. Robert Macfarlane decides to test the truth of this by visiting some of the most isolated and marginal areas of Britain.

THIS is a remarkable book, a worthy successor to the same author's paean of praise to the Routemaster bus called The Bus We Loved (Granta, 2005) and, in a way, a more appropriate evocation of an era when music was played on vinyl discs revolving at 33 1/3 revolutions per minute.