Books
A fine bromance
This book has appeared with no fuss or fanfare and yet by any account it is something of a scoop.…
Restless spirit
Sybille Bedford died in 2006, just short of 95. She left four novels, a travel book, two volumes of legal…
Return of the Christmas Elves
We have a fine crop of Christmas gift books this year, so good that some of them actually qualify as…
The land that time forgot
The region of Dolpo in Nepal forms part of a border zone between that country and China in the central…
Comfort in dark times
Nigella Lawson is many things to many people: the perfect hostess, the TV star, the thinking man’s crumpet. To me…
Beggaring belief
Eight centuries ago in Turkey, at a gathering of intellectuals, a Muslim sultan insisted that one of his courtiers write…
From St Petersburg to St Andrews
Aneliya, the Russian narrator of David Keenan’s enjoyably weird new novel, is worried about her dad. Tomasz’s modest music career…
Books of the year I
Reviewers choose the books they have most enjoyed in 2020 – and a few that have disappointed them
Haunted by the past
Mr Wilder & Me is not in any way a state- of-the-nation novel — and thank goodness. Brilliant as Jonathan…
Secret understanding
John le Carré once wrote sadly that he felt ‘shifty’ about his contribution to the glamorisation of the spying business.…
Origins of the termini
I began this book waiting for a diesel train to Derby, under the windy, boxy, flat-roofed bit which one of…
Style over substance
In 2006 the director Christopher Nolan filmed an adaptation of one of my novels, written a decade and a half…
A fiasco from the start
In carefree days which now seem so distant we used occasionally to take the Newhaven-Dieppe ferry. Docking after a long…
Cut out and keep
William Burroughs was introduced to a British readership in November 1963, and the welcome he received was ‘UGH…’ The headline…
From hard tack to trifle
Prue Leith traces the biscuit’s surprisingly colourful history
A tissue of lies
Kiss Myself Goodbye. It sounds a bit like a William Boyd novel. It looks likea William Boyd novel, too: the…
Battered old bear
The Prime Minister may have lost his bounce –but perhaps that’s no bad thing, says Lynn Barber
The gospel of separation
In late April 1962 Los Angeles police shot and killed an unarmed black man, Ronald X Stokes, during a disturbance…
Born in the saddle
The appeal of a book called Horse Crazy risks being limited to those who are. Yet many moments in Sarah…
A race against time
In 1835 the first two Egyptian antiquities were registered in the British Museum: a pair of red granite lions from…
Tabula rasa
Elaborated over a writing career that spans half a century — a career crowned with every honour save the Nobel…
A winning team
Eighty years ago this summer Britain was facing its greatest moment of peril as Göring’s Luftwaffe attacked airfields, cities and…
A masterpiece of modern manners
Of all the successful modern female writers documenting their search for love, none has been as endearing as Dolly Alderton.…
The staff of life
In the seventh and final chapter of this small but lingeringly powerful book, the author reveals his motivation for writing…
Slavic adoration
If you want to see the very best of Gauguin and Matisse, go east. That was the case in 1914…
