More from Books
The boys who never grow up: Sad Little Men, by Richard Beard, reviewed
I can’t recall reading an angrier book than this. Richard Beard has written what I hope for his sake is…
Darkness, desolation and disarray in Germany
In Geoffrey Household’s adrenalin-quickening 1939 thriller Rogue Male, a lone English adventurer takes a potshot at Hitler and then runs…
No stone left unturned: The World of Bob Dylan reviewed
In May 2019, the first World of Bob Dylan conference was held in Tulsa, Oklahoma. Why Tulsa? Because Dylan’s archives…
The watery life of the capital
To write about London and its rivers is to enter a crowded literary field. Many aspects of watery life in…
A very British coup: SBS – Silent Warriors reviewed
The vast majority of the British public, and even military historians, have never heard of them. COPPists — a combination…
To the brownstone born: WASPS, by Michael Knox Beran, reviewed
It was only in 1948 that the term WASP was coined — by a Florida folklorist, Stetson Kennedy. Yet White…
Was Josiah Wedgwood really a radical?
No wonder Josiah Wedgwood, the 18th-century master potter, was a darling of the Victorians. From W.E. Gladstone to Samuel Smiles…
A narrow escape in Britain’s most treacherous mountain range
Twenty-five years ago, my cousin Jock, a Scottish priest, rang in shock. Two priest friends, David and Norman, had been…
Like burst balloons after a party: the last paintings of John Hoyland
When the internationally acclaimed abstract painter John Hoyland died in 2011 at the age of 76, a large chunk of…
A glimpse of lost London – before the yuppie invasion
In a 1923 book called Echo de Paris, the writer Laurence Houseman attempted to conjure up in a very slim,…
War between Heaven and Hell: The Absolute Book, by Elizabeth Knox, reviewed
Ursula Le Guin once described speculative fiction as ‘a great heavy sack of stuff, a carrier bag full of wimps…
First love: The Inseparables, by Simone de Beauvoir, reviewed
‘Newly discovered novel’ can be a discouraging phrase. Sure, some writers leave works of extraordinary calibre lurking among their effects…
The men of blood get their comeuppance in Revolutionary France
Colin Jones’s hour-by-hour reconstruction of the fall of Maximilien Robespierre, the French revolutionary most associated with the Terror, is inspired…
The cosmopolitan spirit of the Middle East vanished with the Ottomans
One of the most depressing vignettes in Michael Vatikiotis’s agreeably meandering account of his cosmopolitan family’s experiences in the Near…
The great disrupter: how William of Occam overturned medieval thought
Astonishing where an idea can lead you. You start with something that 800 years hence will sound like it’s being…
Interpreting for a dictator: Intimacies, by Katie Kitamura, reviewed
If this is a cautious and circumspect novel, it’s because it involves a cautious and circumspect job: that of interpreter.…
Should the Duke of Windsor have been tried for treason?
In Traitor King, Andrew Lownie shows how the Duke of Windsor — the former Edward VIII, who abdicated in 1936…
Bad sports, from the ancient Greeks to the present
Sports history, writes Wray Vamplew, is sometimes ‘sentimental, reactionary and built on the implicit assumption that the sporting past was…
Why did the Allies dismiss the idea of a German resistance movement?
In 1928, a modest young lecturer from Wilwaukee, Mildred Harnack, née Fish, arrived in Berlin to begin her PhD in…
Fascist, anti-Semite and dupe: the dark side of G.K. Chesterton
The Sins of G.K. Chesterton demands our attention because, as Richard Ingrams notes in his introduction, the literature on this…
Are the English exceptionally gullible?
The word ‘hoax’ did not catch on till the early 19th century. Before that one spoke of a hum, a…
The history of transplants had many false starts
On watching transplant surgery, I can give prosaic but essential advice: have a good breakfast. Each operation can last 12…
Margaret Thatcher vs everyone else: the making of the 1985 Anglo-Irish Agreement
Diplomatic negotiations are rarely fully described by their participants in books, for two reasons. They are usually secret until much…
Glasgow gangsters: 1979, by Val McDermid, reviewed
Like a basking shark, Val McDermid once remarked, a crime series needs to keep moving or die. The same could…
The poet with many lives
This is an ingenious and infuriating book about an ingenious and infuriating writer. I first encountered Fernando Pessoa in the…
