Books
Books of the year – part two
Richard Ingrams A book that gave me great enjoyment (for all the wrong reasons) was Harvest Bells: New and Uncollected…
Yalta was a carve-up — and the Poles are understandably still bitter about it
‘The strong do what they can. The weak suffer what they must.’ Thucydides’ principle expresses an uncomfortable truth. The eight-day…
Eleanor of Aquitaine is still as elusive as quicksilver
Eleanor of Aquitaine is the most famous woman of the Middle Ages: queen of France and England, crusader, mother of…
Ben Lerner’s much hyped latest novel reads like an audit of contemporary grievances
Things keep recurring in the novels of Ben Lerner — snatches of conversation, lines of poetry, Lerner himself. But in…
Children’s questions about death are consistently good fun
What strikes me most about the Christmas gift-book industry — for industry it surely is, as I can confirm, having…
Friends forever: the inside story of the American sitcom classic
Here is a test to tell you whether you will like this book or not: when I write ‘So, no…
Tips for Christmas tipples
It’s telling that perhaps the best wine book of last year, Amber Revolution by Simon Woolf, was self-published, though you’d…
Less radical, less rich: Elizabeth Strout’s Olive, Again is a disappointment
Elizabeth Strout’s Pulitzer-prize winning Olive Kitteridge (2008) is the novel I recommend to friends who don’t read much. Talk about…
Free of Lucian Freud — Celia Paul’s road to fulfilment
I was looking the other day at a video of the artist Celia Paul in conversation with the curator of…
The surrealism of war against Isis
The campaign against Isis was pretty big news for most of 2016. But by the time the final showdown got…
Letters: How to squash a Speaker
No special protection Sir: Rod Liddle’s joke that the election might be held on a date when Muslims cannot vote,…
Books of the year – part one
Philip Hensher The best novels of the year were Colson Whitehead’s The Nickel Boys (Fleet, £16.99) and James Meek’s To…
Vladimir Nabokov confesses to butterflies in the stomach
Not every novelist has opinions. Some of the greatest have a touch of the idiot savant, such as Adalbert Stifter,…
It’s a dull world in which children don’t challenge their parents
On the Shoulders of Giants consists of 12 essays that the late Umberto Eco gave as lectures at the annual…
Picturing paradise: the healing power of art
Some 35 years ago I visited the National Gallery of Sicily in Palermo on the hunt for the ‘Virgin Annunciate’…
Rescuing the great British Cheddar
Gastronomy is one of the deepest forms of culture. If you’ve grown up in France you know this, to the…
How to message a Martian
Apparently the first audio message broadcast into space with the ostensible purpose of communicating with aliens was the sound of…
A tribute to the grandes dames of gardening — Beth Chatto and Penelope Hobhouse
There is no longer much point buying strictly practical gardening books, such as were a staple of the publishing industry…
There’s no end to the wonders of the human body, says Bill Bryson
Bill Bryson has come a long way from being the funniest, most irreverent travel writer around. He’s still as amiable,…
Dieting to death: a black comedy of boarding school life
It sounds in bad taste, but Scarlett Thomas has written a riotously enjoyable novel about a boarding school full of…
When atheists stole the moral high ground
In 1585, Jacques du Perron presented to the court of the French king Henry III, as a kind of after-dinner…
Liberty depends on a delicate balance between state and society
Liberty is a fragile thing. For thousands of years, civilisations have risen, flourished and fallen, and most of them have…
Three dashing Frenchmen captivate Victorian London
Do not google Samuel Jean Pozzi. If you want to enjoy Julian Barnes’s The Man in the Red Coat —…
Crime fiction: a sole survivor is haunted by a family tragedy on a remote Scottish island
James Sallis has a modus operandi: never to waste a word. Sarah Jane (No Exit Press, £8.99) follows this stricture…
As well as being a mythic tale, Moby-Dick is a superb a guide to oceanography
Anyone who has read Moby-Dick will recognise the moment, 32 chapters in, when their line of attention, hitherto slackly paying…
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