Books
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…
Home from the hill
As well as being a leading architectural historian Mary Miers is an editor at Country Life. For her latest book…
Cold comfort
All animals, Scott Carney tells us, seek comfort. But human beings are a bit different. We don’t need to spend…
Perfect, gentle Knight
I once asked Baroness Manningham-Buller, the former head of MI5, what she did to relax. Nailing me to the wall…
Forty years of comfort-eating
In 2015 a pair of linen drawers belonging to Queen Victoria sold at auction for over £12,000. In old age…
The last great pandemic
The symptoms of the Spanish flu could be ghastly. Perhaps Laura Spinney should have chosen her title with more care…
The fount of all knowledge
Somewhere around the middle of the 17th century our modern concept of the museum began to take shape. Until then…
