Books
His dark materials
In this giant, prodigiously sourced and insightful biography, John A. Farrell shows how Richard Milhous Nixon was the nightmare of…
Highly charged territory
I first heard of this tragicomic spy romp around Israel and Palestine when Julian Barnes sang its praises in the…
Putting the boot into Italy
A young woman, naked and covered in blood, totters numbly down a night road. A driver spots her in his…
The great betrayal
They were at sea for more than two months in desperately cramped conditions. The battered ship, barely seaworthy, pitched violently…
Navigating a new world
In the 1890s, when British-owned ships carried 70 per cent of all seaborne trade, legislators worried about the proportion of…
Recent crime fiction
Gabriel Tallent’s My Absolute Darling (4th Estate, £12.99) has the word masterpiece emblazoned on the cover, alongside quotes from several…
Re-discovering Cook
Despite an unpleasant resurgence of anti-British, anti-European political correctness, Captain James Cook (1728-1779) remains one of the world’s greatest explorers.…
Lost in the metropolis
Richard Rogers is to architecture what Jamie Oliver is to cookery. It is not enough for either of them just…
Octopus beaks and snake soup
Driving across Japan’s Shikuko island, the food and travel writer Michael Booth pulls into a filling station to find, alongside…
That’s no lady
Did I enjoy this novel? Yes! Nevertheless, it dismayed me. How could John Banville, whom I’ve admired so much ever…
Band of bickering brothers
There aren’t many downsides to being a film critic, but one of them is being asked to name your favourite…
The keys to Chinese
The history of industry is the story of the reduction of complexity to easily manageable, replicable components or actions. But…
The worst things happen at sea
This horrifying and engrossing book could scarcely be improved upon. In this age of HRHs Harry, William and Kate-led openness…
August Auguste
In 1959 the formidable interviewer John Freeman took the Face to Face crew to the 81-year-old Augustus John’s studio. The…
A poet in prose
Literary reputation can be a fickle old business. Those garlanded during their lifetimes are often quickly forgotten once dead. Yet…
Who is Sylvia – what is she?
In May 1956, three months after meeting Ted Hughes, one before they will marry, Sylvia Plath writes to her mother…
Our islands’ story
Britain has 6,000 islands. Not as many as Sweden’s 30,000 but quite enough to be going on with. Only 132…
Tales out of school
In 1952, the five-year-old Michael Rosen and his brother were taken on holiday along the Thames by their communist parents.…
Wandering Jews
Simon Schama is an international treasure. Whether on screen or in print, he is all energy, enthusiasm, dramatic gestures, emotional…
Having your cake
For those in the know, Jimmy Webb is one of the great pop songwriters of the 1960s and 70s, up…
Trials and Trinitarians
John Calvin believed that human nature was a ‘permanent factory of idols’; the mind conceived them, and the hand gave…
Apostle of gloom
Few people turn to Henning Mankell’s work in search of a good laugh. He’s best known as the author of…
Ratings war
Planning for the ‘war of the future’ is something generals and politicians have been doing for the past 150 years.…
Going places
Stations, according to Simon Jenkins, are the forgotten part of the railway experience. People love the trains, the journey, the…
Portraits of Pakistan
By his own admission, Isambard Wilkinson’s memoir of his experiences in Pakistan a decade ago as a foreign correspondent has…
