Book of the week: Black Gold by Jeremy Paxman

Paxman’s history of coal is told with ‘characteristic panache’

Miners pictured after their last shift at Kellingley Colliery, the UK's last deep coal mine, on 18 December 2015 in Knottingley, England
Miners pictured after their last shift at Kellingley Colliery, the UK's last deep coal mine
(Image credit: Oli Scarff/WPA Pool/Getty Images)

The German novelist Thomas Mann (1875-1955) led an overwhelmingly “sedentary existence”, said Lucy Hughes-Hallett in The Guardian: most of his adult life was either spent “behind a desk”, creating the works that brought him wealth and fame (such as Buddenbrooks and Death in Venice), or “going for sedate little postprandial walks with his wife”.

Yet from such unpromising material, Colm Tóibín has fashioned a “compelling fictionalised biography” – which exquisitely balances the “intimate and the momentous”.

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