Books
No love lost
Strolling through Whitehall Palace in the early years of the Restoration, Samuel Pepys was thrilled to spy a washing line…
Slaves and skulduggery
If I had a slave owner in my family background I’d probably keep quiet about it. Richard Atkinson, in his…
Taking French leave
With more than a dozen acclaimed novels to her name, not to mention short stories, poetry, a memoir and a…
Generous to a fault
Watching Heston Blumenthal arrange the infernal horror that is a lamprey’s head on a plate is one thing; seeing an…
Flights of fancy
Fieldwork can move the most rigorous scientist to lyricism, as Mark Cocker discovers
A radical mismatch
Question: which American president and first lady would you care to imagine having intercourse? If that provokes a shudder, be…
Beating the cheats
On 6 May 2010 the eurozone crisis was tearing through the continent. Greece was bankrupt, and it looked as though…
The long and the short and the tall
The French have a love-hate relationship with heroes. For the great 19th-century historian Jules Michelet, the French Revolution was supposed…
All Renaissance men now
With unlimited information just a click away, everyone can pass as a polymath today, says Philip Hensher
Tricks and treats
Give thanks to the person who invented Venetian blinds, they say, or it would be curtains for us all. Curtains…
Delusions of destiny
One of the great mysteries of European history is how for the best part of 700 years a family who…
Slow-burning masterpieces
It’s the perfect opportunity to crack open those classics of 19th-century fiction you’ve always been meaning to read, and I…
Giving insects a bad name
Heteropoda davidbowie is a species of huntsman spider. Though rare, it has been found in parts of Malaysia, Singapore, Indonesia…
Longing to be wanton
Once in a while, just at the right moment, a truly gorgeous real-life love story appears out of the blue,…
Farce and frolics
Cinema history is a strange thing. A couple of months ago the Guardian began a series in which film critics…
Who pays tribute to whom?
At a well-reported political meeting at London’s Queen’s Hall during the first world war the preacher and suffragette Maude Royden…
Wrestling with ideas
One of the delights of going to stay with my grandparents in the 1970s was that my grandmother was a…
The good die young
In the two generations since Watergate, the image of the journalist has gone from that of plucky truth-seeker to sensationalist…
Opposites attract
On the way back from my daily dawn march in the park, I often pass my neighbour, a distinguished gentleman…
The magic realist
It was not until I went to Harvard in 1988 to take a year out from the Foreign Office that…
The great and the not so good
Here are ten political biographies, with a leavening of the classics, for those with time to kill in the present…
Drawing a blank
It needs authorial guts to write a novel in which details are shrouded, meaning is concealed and little is certain.…
Life on a plate
In the concluding chapter of this book the Daily Telegraph’s restaurant critic and recovering vegan-baiter William Sitwell muses on the…
The great juggling act
The phrase ‘working mother’ ought to be as redundant sounding as ‘working father’ would be if anyone ever said that:…
Least said, soonest mended
Early on in Tim Finch’s hypnotic novel Peace Talks, the narrator — the diplomat Edvard Behrends, who facilitates international peace…
