Books
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…
A grand tour of the globe
When the wealthy young Joseph Banks announced that he intended joining Captain Cook’s expedition to Tahiti to observe the Transit…
Making a killing
What happened in the rites of Eleusis is a mystery. So are all the unwritten parts of human history. Our…
Cricket’s Faustian pact
Imagine an archetypal English scene and it’s likely you’re picturing somewhere rural. Despite losing fields and fields each year to…
How far should we go?
Modern advances in communication technology, computer power and medical science can sometimes be so startling as to seem almost like…
The poet of self-discovery
To describe a new book as ‘eagerly awaited’ is almost unpardonable. Yet Mark Doty’s What is the Grass: Walt Whitman…
Swan song
This is Roger Scruton’s final book. Parsifal was Wagner’s final opera. Both works are intended to be taken as Last…
Nature fights back
Adrian Woolfson explains the essence of pandemics – and how we can expect many more of them
Killing for a cup of coffee
In the winter of 1939, at the San Francisco Golden Gate trade fair, an advertorial film called Behind the Cup…
A tinpot Caesar
Mussolini dreamed of a new Roman empire and dominion over the Mediterranean. Two decades later he was hanging by his feet in a public square, as Ian Thomson relates
Sadness and scandal
In 1886 the British mathematician and schoolmaster Charles Howard Hinton presented himself to the police at Bow Street, London to…
Flower power
Critics have argued over the meaning of the great golden flower head to which Van Dyck points in his ‘Self-Portrait…
