Books
Northern, posh and Brummie are the only accents we recognise
Jacob Rees-Mogg and Rab C. Nesbitt excepted, it has become quite difficult to infer much from people’s appearance. In these…
Fifty-one hours in Dr Johnson’s rumbustious company
When a man is tired of Samuel Johnson, he’s tired of life. James Boswell intended his biography of Dr Johnson,…
Enduring life under Chairman Mao
Rao Pingru is 94, and a born storyteller. His gripping graphic narrative weaves in and out of the violent, disruptive…
The songs my father’s mistress taught me ignited my love of France
When John Julius Norwich was a boy, his father was British ambassador in Paris.School holidays were spent in the exceptionally…
The best single-volume history of the Great War yet written
The historiography of the Great War is stupendous, the effects of the conflict being so far-reaching that even today historians…
The splendour and squalor surrounding the Sun King
The château at Versailles remained the grandest palace in the whole of Europe from the moment that Louis XIV established…
Zen tales and flights of fancy: Patient X reviewed
The target audience for David Peace’s new novel appears almost defiantly niche. Certainly, any readers in the embarrassing position of…
Root and branch: Richard Powers is determined to save the world’s trees
This is a novel about trees, written in the shape of a tree (eight introductory background chapters, called ‘Roots’; a…
Knickerbocker glories: feminism, fashion and the bicycle
One September day the 16-year-old Tessie Reynolds got on her bike. In a homemade suit, she pedalled from London to…
The ordeal of being married (twice) to John Bellany
Misery memoirs are in vogue. There is much misery in this harrowing account of married life with John Bellany (1942–2013)…
The futile gang wars of New York
I’ve interviewed a lot of rappers over the years and always feel a little grimy when I find myself nudging…
The long arm of the Russian super mafia
Mark Galeotti’s study of Russian organised crime, the product of three decades of academic research and consultancy work, is more…
Couldn’t Diana Evans’s fretful couples just shut up and deal with it?
My husband started reading Diana Evans’s third novel, Ordinary People, the day after I’d finished it. Three days later, I…
The misery of policing the US–Mexico border
Francisco Cantú’s mother is surprised when he announces he’s joining the Border Patrol and going to work in the Arizona…
Who needs Jordan Petersen when we have Ferdinand Mount?
You will by now doubtless be familiar with the University of Toronto academic Jordan Peterson. He’s the unlikely YouTube star…
The London painters that conquered the world
This is an important, authoritative work of art criticism that recognises schools of painters, yet displays the superior distinctions of…
The young Descartes: I fought, therefore I thought
Descartes is most generally known these days for being the guy who was sure he existed because he was thinking.…
Leaving Mangoland
When Donald Trump was elected President in 2016, irascible US comedian Lewis Black declared angrily that, thanks to that event,…
The most bizarre museum heist ever
They don’t look like a natural pair. First there’s the author, Kirk Wallace Johnson, a hero of America’s war in…
Kitty Marion: too radical even for the suffragettes
The suffragettes are largely remembered not as firestarters and bombers but as pale martyrs to patriarchy. The hunger artists refusing…
A disturbing psychological experiment involving secrecy, small boys and sharp knives
Gina Perry is the eminent psychologist who blew apart Stanley Milgram’s shocking revelations from his 1961 research. Milgram had caused…
Britain was utterly wretched in 1975. No wonder Europe seemed a better bet
‘I voted to stay in a common market. No one ever mentioned a political union.’ It is the complaint of…
The tragedy of Syria: how protest spiralled into savagery
The fateful day five years ago began like any other for the family. A pot of black tea with cardamon…
Will ‘I’m a Tudorbethan, Get Me Out of Here’ be hitting our screens soon?
Are books becoming an adjunct to TV? Both of these are good reads, but both feel influenced by — and…
Arlott and Swanton — the Disraeli and Gladstone of cricket?
Francis Wheen 5 May 2018 9:00 am
E.W. Swanton’s first published article appeared in All Sports Weekly in July 1926, soon after his 19th birthday. Thence, swiftly,…