Books
Anything for a good story
When I was at boarding school in the early 1970s, the Durrells, or at least Gerald, were immensely popular. My…
Golden opportunities
Tudor merchants — shivering in furs in tiny creaking ships, sailing through the ice of unknown winter seas — knew…
A true original
Leonora Carrington was strikingly beautiful with ‘the personality of a headstrong and hypersensitive horse’ (according to her friend and patron…
Romancing the stones
If Britain’s prehistoric monuments have had a magnetic attraction for generations of artists, it is perhaps because they have long…
Neither green nor pleasant
The old coaching inn on the green. The Sunday morning toll of church bells. The ducklings paddling on the pond.…
A gaping hole in the week
This is a gem of a book for Radio 4 lovers, particularly those of us who work out which day…
Bones of contention
A few years ago, a group of Native American leaders drove 12 hours from Oklahoma to Denver Museum of Nature…
An eye for sensationalism
According to Private Eye, executives at the Daily Mail were alarmed by the impending publication of Adrian Addison’s new history…
Too young to die
In the north transept of Westminster Abbey, there is a memorial by Joseph Nollekens to three British captains killed at…
No end in sight
Are you a deathist? A deathist is someone who accepts the fact of death, who thinks the ongoing massacre of…
Conspiracy theory
The death of Princess Diana twenty years ago has been the subject of a wealth of conspiracy theories. James Murray’s…
Perilous times
Helen Dunmore’s new novel concerns lives, consequential in their day, that pass away into utter oblivion. Appropriately, the ‘solitary and…
That’s entertainment
The name Maud Russell creeps almost apologetically into a few 20th-century diaries such as those of her friend Violet Bonham…
Bird thou never wert
The most appealing phoenix in literature is surely the eponymous bird from E. Nesbit’s 1904 classic, The Phoenix and the…
Understated eloquence
It is 50 years since the publication of Very Like a Whale, Ferdinand Mount’s first novel. ‘Mr Mount’s distinguishing feature…
A unique literary phenomenon
The Argentinian writer César Aira is a prodigy: at the age of 68 he has published, according to a ‘partial…
The lost Stradivarius
Min Kym is a violinist, but if you Google her name you won’t find sound-clips or concert reviews, touring schedules…
An untouchable star
This slight book comes with heavy baggage. In 2009, Rampling handed back a hefty advance for her contribution to a…
Fragments of the future
Science fiction is not the first thing one thinks of in connection with the Polish poet Czeslaw Milosz, though the…
The pleasures of reading aloud
pkkkfffffffrrrffff-ffff! pkkkfffffffrrrffff-fff! Hobble leg, hobble leg, Hobble leg owhmmm! Into the bottle of fluff, rubbed the stuff under! pkkkfffffffrrrffff-ffff! pkkkfffffffrrrffff-fff!…
Buzzing bees and chocolate trees
It is estimated that the world’s insects perform an annual pollination service for all humankind worth $215 billion. In return,…
Two small boys in the sea
An estimated 400,000 people drown annually worldwide, 50 per cent of them children. Roughly 150 drownings occur in the UK.…
Dreaming of wide open spaces
On the website of the Australian National University in Canberra, emeritus professor of history Barry Higman lists his research interests…
The sweet life turns sour
Shawn Levy specialises in chronicling 20th-century hotspots such as London in the Sixties and Sinatra’s Vegas. Here, he turns his…
The man who’s read everything
According to Martin Amis in The Information, the last person to have read every book ever published was Coleridge. Faced…
