Books
Cries and whispers
There’s a moment in A Boy in Winter where a young Ukrainian policeman has to escort his town’s Jewish population…
Gilded prostitution
‘An English peer of very old title is desirous of marrying at once a very wealthy lady, her age and…
Rescuing an Irish gem
This large and splendid book is more in the nature of a grand illustrated guidebook than a historical monograph. Hundreds…
The sting of betrayal
This may seem an odd thing to say about a writer who’s been officially declared a National Living Treasure in…
First signs of thaw
The Twentieth Congress of the Communist Party in February 1956 passed off entirely without incident. Speeches on the next five-year…
The bridge of size
Before Brooklyn exceeded it in cool, Manhattanites spoke dismissively of BNTs. These were the Bridge ‘n’ Tunnel folk, the out-of-towners…
A man with an agenda
What’s this? An autobiography by Stuart Hall? Wasn’t he one of the guys who put the Eng. Lit. departments out…
Days of frantic strumming
‘It was easy, it was cheap, go and do it,’ sang the Desperate Bicycles on their self-funded debut single in…
Mad matrons and horrid housemistresses
It’s not often that books make me laugh aloud. Even books I’m officially finding funny often do no more than…
Class observation
A hoicked-up small boy sits astride a yoked-up heavy horse, while three sun-stained men smile at posterity. Hairy hooves press…
Lessons and games
‘Kokkinakis banged your girlfriend. Sorry to tell you that, mate,’ the Australian tennis player Nick Kyrgios remarked to his opponent…
Every horror imaginable
The group of kidnapped women were terrified. They had been brought back to the camp as booty and were being…
Towering tree of God
In his biography of Gaudí, published in 2001, Gijs van Hensbergen opined that ‘we should never try to finish the…
Brava Bella
I like Bella Pollen for her open-mindedness, self-deprecation and verve. Given her early success as a fashion designer — top…
Too much of everything
Arundhati Roy has published only one previous novel, but that one, The God of Small Things, won the Booker Prize.…
A cursed house
Beyond the patricide and even the incest, the horror of the Oedipus myth lies in its insistence that our fates…
Pirates and puritans
In The Growing Pains of Adrian Mole, Sue Townsend’s hapless teenage diarist, reeling from the news that Argentina has just…
Immaculate conceptions
Some 30 summers ago we were staying at a famously beautiful villa outside Turin; our hostess was — indeed is…
The gull’s way
In 1978, Adam Nicolson received three Hebridean islands as a 21st birthday present from his father, Nigel. The Shiants, each…
Revolving doors
There is a curious twist in the montage on the cover of Rodney Tiffen’s Disposable Leaders; a detailed treatise on…
A gruesome retelling
‘A shudder in the loins engenders there/ The broken wall, the burning roof and tower/ And Agamemnon dead’ intoned W.B.…
Moments of absurdity
The bestselling humourist and New Yorker essayist David Sedaris is renowned for an almost hypnotic deadpan drollery and maybe especially…
Homer Simpson in a chasuble
This is one of the most remarkable, hilarious, jaw-droppingly candid and affecting memoirs I have read for some time —…
The war in the shadows
I once spent an evening, back in the mid-1980s, with William Colby, the legendary spy and director of the CIA.…
The ruin of a ruin
In the welter of Syrian bloodshed, why should we remember the death of a single man? Because he was the…
