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French fury
Sylvie Bermann was the French ambassador in London between 2014 and 2017. Her stint here was a notable success. She…
The real rogue traders
When we think of those lurching moments last spring when it became clear that much of the world, not just…
Bright and beautiful
Edward St Aubyn’s ‘Patrick Melrose’ novels were loosely autobiographical renderings of the author’s harrowing, rarefied, drug-sozzled existence. Despite their subject…
Truckload of trouble
A father and his estranged 20-year-old daughter set off across France, sharing the driver’s cabin of a long-haul truck. This…
Dinners through the dynasties
A truth that ought to be universally acknowledged is that Chinese food, while much loved, is underappreciated. China certainly has…
Wind, sea and sky
Bird migration was once one of those unassailable mysteries that had baffled humankind since Aristotle. A strange hypothesis, genuinely advanced…
An oddly matched pair
On a shard of paper, some time in the bleak mid-1930s, F. Scott Fitzgerald incorporated a favourite line from one…
On the game
For a novel set partly in a Soho brothel, Hot Stew is an oddly bloodless affair. Tawdry characters drift in…
Deepest, darkest Peru
As the planet gets more and more ravaged, the mind can begin to glaze over at the cumulative general statistics…
Walls of fear
In her 2017 travelogue Border: A Journey to the Edge of Europe, the writer and poet Kapka Kassabova meets Emel,…
A robot with feelings
The world of Kazuo Ishiguro’s new novel — let’s call it Ishville — is instantly recognisable. Our narrator, Klara, is…
The Russian conundrum
Churchill was wrong: Russia is neither a riddle nor an enigma. Russians themselves concoct endless stories to glorify their country’s…
A study in parental tyranny
In a career stretching back to the mid-1980s, Robert Edric has so far managed a grand total of 28 novels,…
The last of old England
Thomas Hennell is one of that generation of painters born in 1903 whose collective achievements are such an adornment of…
A three-pipe problem
It has been described as Britain’s Dreyfus Affair — the wrongful imprisonment in 1903 of a half-Indian solicitor George Edalji…
On the defensive
Lauren Oyler is viral and vicious. A critic with a reputation for pulling no punches, she is known for delivering…
Weeping wounds
In France, even the car horns yelled about Algeria. A five-beat klaxon blast — three short, two long — signalled…
Jolly good company
In the spring of 1945 three men pooled their resources in order to buy Long Crichel House, a former rectory…
The struggle to put bread on the table
Wheat flour, and the bread made from it, has been a recurring cause of concern for the British for centuries,…
The sister from hell
A while ago, Samantha Markle declared that her forthcoming book would be about ‘the beautiful nuances of our lives’. Was…
More magical thinking
Most collections of journalism are bad. There are two reasons for this: one is that they are usually incoherent and…
Dying of shame
In the early hours of 28 May 2014 the bodies of two young girls were found hanging from the branches…
Moi… Lolita
Until this book was published, Gabriel Matzneff was a respectable man. The French author may have written about his affairs…
Tact and tactics
The 17th-century diplomat Sir Henry Wotton said that an ambassador was ‘an honest man sent to lie abroad for his…
An excess of black bile
Caspar Henderson 6 March 2021 9:00 am
Footling around on the internet recently, I stumbled on a clip of a young woman singing Leonard Cohen’s ‘Hallelujah’ to…