In no particular order and without any ado, here are my favourite reads of 2025. Glorious Exploits - Ferdia Lennon It’s a novel set during the Pelopponesian war about two bored Syracusan potters bribing a dying cohort of Athenian prisoners of war into staging a Euripides play in a quarry. It’s witty, morbid, and despite the absurd sounding premise, so compellingly human in how its characters are moved and changed by art, friendship and respect for their enemies. Written in co

This was the winning fiction entry in the Stanley Ratteray Memorial Prize for festive short stories, 2025. Bermuda, Christmas Eve 1930 It burned, the drink, but it wasn’t a bad sort of burn. Not the kind you got from being too eager to grab a chicken leg from the grill or even if you sat too long in the sun after church in August. Eldon fought to turn his splutter into a defiant smile. His father laughed and clapped him on the back, raising his own cup, and the other Shepherd

We’re going to need a smaller urn. There was time when England's bold new approach to Test cricket seemed charmed. Paradigms shifted on a bash of Jonny Bairstow's bat, on a tap of Brendan McCullum and Ben Stokes' temples. There were the fourth innings chases in 2022, the assault on Pakistan, the strike rates borrowed from shorter formats, the belief that positivity unlocked everything. But, somewhere along the way it faded. Hubristic declarations, slogging earlier in an inni

It was never going to be easy. But not even the most masochistic of Rory McIlroy’s fans can have expected it to be quite this hard.

To quote Paul Bettany playing Geoffrey Chaucer, without further gilding the lily, and with no more ado, in no particular order, here are...

The great naturalist, Charles Darwin, gave his name to two very different honours. The Darwin Medal is a prestigious prize awarded for...

This darkly comic fable earned Noviolet Bulawayo a place on the Booker Prize Shortlist, but what it offers in blunt force, it lacks in...

Sometimes, the madness of sport can only be encapsulated in the most simple of sentences Football, bloody hell! Or, as Thanasi Kokkinakis...

From books set in uncertain futures to lyrical historical fantasies, books that batter down the traditional borders of crime fiction and...

In the FIFA World Cup Quarter Finals Morocco will be trying to complete its 2022 Iberian conquest, having seen off Spain in the last...

Growing old is full of ironies. For Cristiano Ronaldo, a single one now dominates. A man who has spent his sporting life determined to be...

Sometimes historical novels dig up events so clearly dramatic and well preserved, it is as if the writer were an archaeologist...

Generally at the Winter Olympics, athletes are preoccupied with speed or style. Beat the field down (or for those of a cross-country...

A great circle is the largest circle that can be drawn on any given sphere. It exists, in other words, at the extremes, far from the...

Anyone who reads knows that books are so much more than piles of paper bound together. And even once they are read, and back on the shelf...

This review contains light spoilers for The Lincoln Highway and A Gentleman in Moscow. 3,389 miles of open road. That was the promise of...

No matter how many times I read about the Wars of the Roses – and perhaps embarrassingly given how much time I spent there during my...

How ironic titles can be. A commissioner who doesn’t understand what he is commissioned to do. A wife who knows no love from her husband....

When Natalie Haynes first ventured into the ancient world in 2017, with the Children of Jocasta, she was part of the avant garde of those...

To pass on a patronymic is to name a child after a father. Ask someone today about this system and they are perhaps most likely to think...