WILL STONE fact-checks the colourful life of Ozzy Osbourne
A litmus test in France’s roiling hostilities
‘Delivered in quantity, a light marinade of pouty dialectics douses the book,’ writes FIONA O’CONNOR
RACE HOSTILITIES: Pan-European white supremacists of Generation Identitaire march in France in 2017
[Pulek1/CC] 
JAMES CROSSLEY applauds a lucid biography of the German radical preacher who reemerged as a hero in the GDR
Prizes all round: the Bard hands plaudits to the Miners Gala, OT&JC, Joe Solo, Black Sabbath’s frontman and the Lionesses
Star cartoonist JAMIE BRITTON is in awe of a graphic novel of epic proportions that explores class, religion and globalisation via the strange cultivation of Ginseng in the US Midwest
GUILLERMO THOMAS is intrigued by a history of the Middle East that demonstrates how promising post colonial beginnings were snuffed out by Western imperialist interests
MARIA DUARTE recommends the intricate study of a high-performance and highly dysfuntional German family
Annihilation
by Michel Houellebecq, translated by Shaun Whiteside
Picador, £11
FRENCH master in the art of dissing everyone, Michel Houellebecq has written his longest book and claims it will be his last.
Published in France in 2022, Annihilation has taken a while to emerge in English. It reads somewhat like a Covid project — that lockdown feel of ennui, aimless and boring for long, long passages is there.
Approaching his retirement, Shakespeare imagined every third thought being of death. For Houellebecq, now 68, every three pages or so gets animated by thoughts of sex.
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French feminists salute Gisele Pelicot as her husband and 50 other rapists are jailed
FIONA O’CONNOR relishes an artfully restrained novel whose style is perfectly in tune with the petit bourgeois existence it portrays