Books
Alongside Beans
weeding alongside beans in the same rush as them 6 a.m. scrabbling at the earth beans synchronised in rows soft…
Proof that the British hardly ever had a stiff upper lip
The last time I cried was September 1989. That was my first week at public school. The reason I cried…
Allan Massie’s Bordeaux Quartet: truer to Occupied France than any history
In a recent book review, the historian Norman Stone wrote: ‘Maybe the second world war can now be left to…
Sport’s first celebrity: W.G. Grace
Should you wish to have a good copy of the 1916 edition of Wisden, cricket’s annual bible, you should be…
Retracing The Thirty-Nine Steps in Buchan’s beloved Borders
To celebrate the centenary of the publication of The Thirty-Nine Steps William Cook travelled to Tweeddale, where John Buchan spent his youthful summers
The most gripping sea-catastrophe writing I have read outside Conrad
When the novelist David Vann was 13, his father — a difficult, unhappy dreamer in his thirties, constantly in dread,…
Alongside Beans
weeding alongside beans in the same rush as them 6 a.m. scrabbling at the earth beans synchronised in rows soft…
Alongside Beans
weeding alongside beans in the same rush as them 6 a.m. scrabbling at the earth beans synchronised in rows soft…
Atheist and gay, Frederick the Great was more radical than most leaders today
Reacquaintance with Germany is long overdue for most English people. Before 1914 it was at least as familiar as France…
Superforecasting could spark a revolution in politics
Forecasts have been fundamental to mankind’s journey from a small tribe on the African savannah to a species that can…
How the world's first great republic slipped into empire and one-man rule
Marcus Tullius Cicero was the ancient master of the ‘save’ key. He composed more letters, speeches and philosophy books than…
Patrick deWitt is a literary original but he needs to BE MORE FUNNY
Patrick deWitt is a Canadian writer whose second novel, a picaresque and darkly comic western called The Sisters Brothers, was…
A portrait of a gay boxer
I don’t like boxing. If I ever get into a boxing ring, I’ll be in the corner with the governor…
Why on earth did Jeanette Winterson agree to retell Shakespeare's Winter’s Tale?
It is fair to say that Jeanette Winterson is not Shakespeare, though I cannot imagine why any authors would accept…
A book that rattles like a pressure-cooker with anger, outrage, frustration and spleen
‘You understand, Lenú, what happens to people: we have too much stuff inside and it swells us, breaks us.’ The…
Aussie royals
If the issue of Australia becoming a republic is a marathon rather than a sprint, the republicans never had a…
An unauthorised, and unconvincing, biography of Ted Hughes
Craig Raine says that Jonathan Bate’s unauthorised biography of Ted Hughes gets it wrong on every level
Friday
I have people to see is what I said. I did not say they are all in my head. I…
Shakespeare's London: where all the world really was a stage
Sam Leith on the year 1606, when plague and panic were rife — and all the world really was a stage
Alger Hiss: Tricky Dick’s scapegoat
In the more than 40 years since Richard Nixon resigned as president — disgraced as much by his inveterate lying…
David Jones: painter, poet and mystic
David Jones (1895–1974) was a remarkable figure: artist and poet, he was a great original in both disciplines. His was…
Woody Allen: a life of jazz, laughter, depression —and a few misdemeanours
Woody Allen (born Allan Stewart Konigsberg), the prolific, Oscar-winning auteur, New Orleans-style jazz clarinettist, doyen of New York delicatessen society,…
The best of British — from Agatha Christie to the YBAs
Is it true that, having lost an empire, we reinvented ourselves as an island of entertainers? Do we channel the…
There is good in every tree, says Thomas Pakenham — even the sycamore
I have never written much about the one-acre shaw of native trees I planted in 1994, even though it is…
In Crow’s dark shadow
A dead parent, the interrogation of a literary inheritance, and over everything, a bird: Max Porter is apparently unafraid to…
