A sprawling delight of a novel. I was due to visit Florence for the first time in the summer and was recommended this book as a warm-up: what a wonderful idea.
I’m basically a softie with a thin veneer of sophisticated cynicism, so I am always going to be a sucker for a book like this – that starts with tragedy and grimness and then slowly morphs into joy. But the characters are sufficiently compelling that they become friends in your mind, and some of the set pieces and images are unshakeably vivid.
Admittedly, the people all seem more alive, more completely human, than most real humans you could meet – but that’s not a bad thing in a novel, is it?
A captivating, bighearted, richly tapestried story of people brought together by love, war, art, flood, and the ghost of E. M. Forster, by the celebrated author of Tin Man.
Tuscany, 1944: As Allied troops advance and bombs fall around deserted villages, a young English soldier, Ulysses Temper, finds himself in the wine cellar of a deserted villa. There, he has a chance encounter with Evelyn Skinner, a middle-aged art historian who has come to Italy to salvage paintings from the ruins and recall long-forgotten memories of her…
This twenty-year-old little book has maybe the best title ever conceived, and it does a pretty good job of living up to it – and in fact, in our age of AI, it seems startlingly prescient.
Fernandez-Armesto has recognised that the category ‘human’ is right at the centre of our way of understanding the world, and that fundamentally it makes no sense: we don’t really know what it means, what constitutes it, or how to delineate it. On our journey, we occasionally trigger one of his actual opinions like a hidden land-mine, which keeps you on your toes; but mostly he leads us through a learned and (yes) humane history of how these questions have been understood by different people at different times.
A book to read to learn what a strange animal you are, and to do so in hugely affable, sharp-tongued company.
You think you're human. But what does that mean? How can humanity be defined? Felipe Fernandez-Armesto takes us on an enlightening journey through the history of humankind to reveal the challenges to our most fundamental belief - that we are, and have always been, human. Chimps and humans are objectively so alike that an anthropologist from Mars might classify them together; advances in artificial intelligence mean that humans no longer have exclusive access to reason, consciousness and imagination; developments in genetics threaten humanity with an uncertain future. The harder we cling to the concept of humanity, the more slippery it…
Lea Ypi is a political philosopher and she has, in effect, written a sly and subtle piece of political philosophy, but you only realise that when you close the book at the end.
It’s a memoir of her early life in Albania: under the ersatz Stalinism of Enver Hoxha’s regime as a small child; the sudden realisations when the regime fell that she had been surrounded by lies, not least the lies of her dissident family who could not take the risk of their child learning the truth about them; and the sickening stories of how ‘free’ Albania in the 1990s was overtaken by crooks and dangerous idealists.
She is unsparing on the evils of both the communist and post-communist worlds, without succumbing to any kind of cheap moral equivalence between them. But the story itself is also hugely compelling: you will remember her father in particular. The kind of book about politics that always knows politics means people.
'The best book I read last year by a mile. . . so beautifully written that anyone would be hooked' Laura Hackett, Sunday Times, Best Summer Books
'Wonderfully funny and poignant. . . a tale of family secrets and political awakening amid a crumbling regime' Luke Harding, Observer
'We never lose our inner freedom; the freedom to do what is right'
Lea Ypi grew up in one of the most isolated countries on earth, a place where communist ideals had officially replaced religion. Albania, the last Stalinist outpost in Europe, was…
The history of atheism and unbelief isn't a history of rational ideas winning an argument - not because atheism isn't rational, but because human beings don't work that way. We embrace belief, or abandon it, with our whole selves: intuitively, emotionally. This book gives a new history of unbelief, explaining not its intellectual triumph but its emotional power, and how anger and anxiety generated doubt in (formerly) Christian Europe from the Middle Ages to the present.
