Bookends

Bookends: The Saint Zita Society, by Ruth Rendell

18 August 2012 4:00 pm

Sometimes it seems as if Ruth Rendell’s heart just isn’t in all that killing any more. Certainly, her latest book,…

Bookends: Umpty, umpty, umpty…

11 August 2012 4:00 pm

According to Ogden Nash, the reason the British aristocracy wrote so much is because they could never understand what they…

Bookends: Heading for the rough

4 August 2012 4:00 pm

Middle age lays many hazards and traps for us, not the least of which is golf. Breaking 80 (Yellow Jersey…

Bookends: Deftly orchestrated chaos

21 July 2012 4:00 pm

The headings set the scene: ‘Last Tango in Balham, in which I meet Marlon Brando on the dance floor of…

Bookends: Cycle of pain

14 July 2012 4:00 pm

Reg Harris by Robert Dineen (Ebury Press, £16.99) is about a man who was once Britain’s number one athlete: a…

From our own correspondent

7 July 2012 4:00 pm

‘Interviewing Afghan warlords is always something of a delicate dance,’ writes roving BBC reporter Nick Bryant in Confessions from Correspondentland…

Bookends: Arkansas tales

30 June 2012 4:00 pm

Stranger men have become stars than Billy Bob Thornton, but not many. His obsessive-compulsive disorder encompasses a bizarre list of…

Bookends: One for the road

23 June 2012 4:00 pm

Jay McInerney is best known for his first novel, Bright Lights, Big City (1984), which winningly combined sophistication and naivety.…

Bookends: Un poco goes a lang Weg

16 June 2012 4:00 pm

Here esse un curiosité, and kein mistake. Diego Marani (above) esse eine Italianse writer and EU officialisto livingante in Brussels,…

Bookends: The Queen’s message

2 June 2012 10:00 am

It is a sad fact that most ‘self-help’ books end up helping no one, other than the people who wrote…

Bookends: Shady people in the sun

26 May 2012 10:00 am

Carla McKay’s The Folly of French Kissing (Gibson Square, £7.99) is a very funny, cynical tale about British expatriates in…

Bookends: Prep-school passions

19 May 2012 10:00 am

In his introductory eulogy, Peter Parker calls In the Making: The Story of a Childhood  (Penguin, £8.99) G. F. Green’s…

Bookends: Pure gold

5 May 2012 10:00 am

Even nowadays, a 50-year career in pop music is a rare and wondrous thing, and for a woman triply so.…

Bookends: … and the inner tube

28 April 2012 10:00 am

In the early 1990s, when Boris Johnson was making his name as the Daily Telegraph’s Brussels correspondent, Sonia Purnell was…

Bookends: Tilling tales

21 April 2012 10:00 am

Several years ago, I listed as my literary heroes Herbert Pocket in Great Expectations and E. F. Benson’s Lucia. The…

Bookends: Disarming but disingenuous

14 April 2012 10:00 am

At first glance, Be the Worst You Can Be (Booth-Clibborn Editions, £9.99) by Charles Saatchi (pictured above with his wife,…

Bookends: Terribly Tudor

31 March 2012 11:00 am

History publishers like a gimmick, so I assumed Suzannah Lipscomb’s A Visitor’s Companion to Tudor England (Ebury, £12.99) must be…

Bookends: A matter of opinion

24 March 2012 11:00 am

In an age when the merely mildly curious believe they can get all they really need to know from Wikipedia…

Bookends: A life of gay abandon

17 March 2012 11:00 am

Sometimes, only the purest smut will do. Scotty Bowers’s memoir, Full Service: My Adventures in Hollywood and the Secret Sex…

Bookends: Down on the farm

10 March 2012 11:00 am

Can we please have an inquiry into why already talented people are allowed to go off and be brilliant at…

Bookends: Wasp without a sting

3 March 2012 11:00 am

‘It may be hard to accept that a chaste teenage girl can end up in bed with the President of…

Bookends: Dickensian byways

25 February 2012 11:00 am

Is there room for yet another book on Dickens? Probably not, but we’ll have it anyway. The Dickens Dictionary (Icon,…

Bookends: A network of kidney-nappers

18 February 2012 11:00 am

Raylan Givens, an ace detective in the Raymond Chandler mould, has encountered just about every shakedown artist and palooka in…

Bookends: Short and sweet

11 February 2012 11:00 am

Before texts and Twitter there were postcards. Less hi-tech, but they kept people in touch. Angela Carter (pictured above) and…

Bookends: Trouble and strife

4 February 2012 11:00 am

It isn’t true that Joanna Trollope (pictured above) only produces novels about the kind of people who have an Aga…