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FT Books Essay

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  • Thursday, 1 February, 2024
    Books
    Why are America’s suburbs failing?

    In ‘Disillusioned’, Benjamin Herold follows five families coping with the wreckage created by outer city development

    Houses on a street
  • Friday, 26 January, 2024
    The Oscars 2024: all you need to know
    ‘American Fiction’ and real-life publishing’s attitude to race

    We may think that the Oscar-nominated movie is knockabout comedy, but how truthful is it to the way the industry works?

    Actor Jeffrey Wright holding a pile of books in a scene from the film American Fiction
  • Tuesday, 16 January, 2024
    ReviewBooks
    What a post-war future holds for Ukraine and Russia

    Four books look at the forging of a new Ukrainian national identity in the furnace of war — and a glimmer of light in the Russian exiles who have fled their homeland

  • Wednesday, 3 January, 2024
    ReviewNon-Fiction
    Can Labour win again? History might hold the answer

    From Ramsay MacDonald to Keir Starmer, three new books offer lessons for the party as it prepares for a general election

  • Wednesday, 13 December, 2023
    ReviewHistory books
    Does the Enlightenment still matter?

    Was the great 18th-century revolution in learning the pride of European civilisation — or a tool of empire? Two books debate its consequences

    A lithograph from the late 1700s of a man in a tunic of animal furs against a dark backdrop
  • Thursday, 7 December, 2023
    ReviewGeopolitics
    What can Ukraine teach us about the future of war?

    From leadership and logistics to robots and drones, two new books assess what matters in 21st-century warfare

    A group of Ukrainian soldiers, all in combat fatigues, with one of them operating a drone control console
  • Thursday, 30 November, 2023
    ReviewNon-Fiction
    Is the American dream really dead?

    Has US economic stagnation destroyed the myth of an ever-better life for its citizens? David Leonhardt argues that it has

  • Thursday, 23 November, 2023
    ReviewBooks
    How to embrace misfires, setbacks and flops

    Two books on sensible risk-taking urge innovators to learn from ‘intelligent failures’

  • Saturday, 11 November, 2023
    Books
    Hot stuff: why readers fell in love with romance novels

    Romance is now the top-selling genre in fiction. How did we become so infatuated?

    Two young couples intertwined
  • Wednesday, 25 October, 2023
    Non-Fiction
    Are we right to fear China?

    Despite dire warnings about autocracy and human rights, expert voices urge greater understanding of this ever more powerful player

    A small figure in silhouette walks past a large portrait of Xi Jinping waving. The portrait is flanked by other photographs of the Chinese president meeting the people
  • Thursday, 12 October, 2023
    ReviewBooks
    Spy masters — the hidden lives of Ian Fleming and John le Carré

    Two works turn the tables on our assumptions about the giants of British espionage fiction

  • Thursday, 28 September, 2023
    ReviewNon-Fiction
    Return of the Caesars: the making of emperors and dictators

    Autocracy is something today’s democracies thought they had left behind, but two books — one focused on antiquity, the other on modern history — shed light on how it is enabled

    A statue of Julius Caesar in Naples looks out to sea towards a couple of container ships
  • Wednesday, 20 September, 2023
    ReviewHistory books
    Germany’s chaotic year: 1923 and the lessons for today

    Crisis bred crisis in the Weimar Republic. On the centenary of the turbulent period, two books offer a reminder of the vigilance required to sustain democracy

  • Thursday, 14 September, 2023
    ReviewNon-Fiction
    AI and the next great tech shift

    From technology containment to political power and digital regulation, three books about the artificial intelligence revolution

  • Friday, 8 September, 2023
    ReviewNon-Fiction
    Oh, Vienna: what Austria’s turmoil means for the west

    Two books look at the capital’s outsized influence on western liberalism and the nation’s loudening drumbeat of far-right politics

  • Wednesday, 30 August, 2023
    ReviewScience books
    Space odysseys — trips to discover the cosmos

    Three books explore the future of galactic travel and the sights and experiences that await

    A mass of clouds and starts in the sky
  • Wednesday, 23 August, 2023
    ReviewHistory books
    The delusions that put Putin on the path to war

    In two piercing accounts, Sergei Medvedev and Jade McGlynn expose the manipulation of history used to justify Russia’s invasion of Ukraine

    Vladimir Putin appears on a big screen, flanked by veterans in military uniform, to address a parade of soldiers on Moscow’s Red Square in 2021
  • Wednesday, 16 August, 2023
    ReviewBooks
    A mind-infecting virus: the dark dreams of QAnon

    Three books look at how outlandish conspiracy theories have laid the groundwork for authoritarianism in America

  • Friday, 11 August, 2023
    ReviewNon-Fiction
    Shadows at Noon — Joya Chatterji exposes the beating heart of south Asia

    A fast-paced history blends the writer’s own experiences with an examination of the region’s political and cultural contradictions and commonalities

  • Wednesday, 2 August, 2023
    ReviewBiography and memoir
    Two sides of George Orwell

    Contrasting perspectives on the author — and the invisible life of his first wife

  • Thursday, 27 July, 2023
    ReviewHistory books
    What makes empires rise and fall?

    From Ancient Rome to China’s Huawei, two new titles look to history as a guide for the geopolitical shape of things to come

    Three columns of an ancient Roman temple stand against a sunny blue sky
  • Thursday, 20 July, 2023
    ReviewNon-Fiction
    Are we forgetting how to read?

    From stone tablet to Kindle, two surveys of the history of the book probe what comes next, in the era of e-readers and text-guzzling AI

    In a painting dating from the 1830s, a bearded man in purple sits in a dark room arranging blocks of print in the light from a window
  • Wednesday, 12 July, 2023
    ReviewNon-Fiction
    The search for a new language about race

    From white supremacism to census ethnicity questions, a clutch of new books enters the debate over racial identity

    A black-and-white photograph dated 1954 of a black Jamaican man in a smart white suit being checked by white customs officials in England. Behind him stands a woman in a smart suit
  • Wednesday, 5 July, 2023
    ReviewBooks
    Consider every drop — manifestos for saving rivers, lakes and oceans

    Three new books help recalibrate our relationship to the water that sustains us

  • Friday, 30 June, 2023
    ReviewNon-Fiction
    What is the life expectancy of the NHS?

    As Britain’s National Health Service marks its 75th birthday — amid doctors’ strikes and record waiting lists — two books trace its foundation, survival and future prognosis

    Nurses wheel a patient into the hospital
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