Books
For William Boyd's war-photographer heroine, life is a series of accidents
Amory Clay, photographer and photo-journalist, was born in 1908, only two years after Logan Mountstuart, writer, poseur and ‘scribivelard’. Amory…
The beloved, mistreated and traumatised dogs of war
If you love dogs and or live with one — I declare an interest on both counts — there is…
Tessa Hadley's masterful new novel of missed opportunities
In The Past (set chiefly in the present) four middle-aged siblings spend an eventful summer holiday in the Devon country…
Mighty monuments — or neo-Gothic horrors?
Briefing his illustrator for the jacket of A Handful of Dust (1934), Evelyn Waugh asked for a country house in…
Books and arts opener
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Friday
I have people to see is what I said. I did not say they are all in my head. I…
Friday
I have people to see is what I said. I did not say they are all in my head. I…
The house that Alfred built
This is a book about boundaries — and relationships. At its heart is the eponymous house by the lake, which…
Remembering P.J. Kavanagh
OBITUARY
The perils of porcelain – and the pleasures of Edmund de Waal
A.S. Byatt on the dark, deadly secrets lurking beneath a calm, white surface
Niall Ferguson's biography of Henry Kissinger is a masterpiece
I have met Dr Kissinger, properly, only three times. First, in Cairo, in 1980, when, as a junior diplomat escorting…
Hoof-trimming
The below is an unpublished poem, written for Moortown, the verse-diary of Ted Hughes’s experiences of farming in Devon in…
The current scarcity of herring may itself be a red herring
Fish stories come in two varieties: the micro-version of a hundred riverside bars, blokeish boastings of rod-and-line tussles with individual…
The perfect big bang that opens this book was too good to be true
Houses, as any plumber will testify, do sometimes blow up in gas explosions, destroying their contents and inhabitants, but would…
Sexual assault, chamber-pot etiquette, and other problems of early rail travel
Simon Bradley dates the demise of the on-board meal service to 1962, when Pullman services no longer offered croutons with…
On the way to Plumpton
We pull up at Wivelsfield, under a blue sky, and glance out at the one figure on the platform: a…
A gleeful vision of the future from Margaret Atwood
What could happen in literature to a young couple — or a pair of young couples — who fall off…
What drove Europe into two world wars?
Sir Ian Kershaw won his knight’s spurs as a historian with his much acclaimed two-volume biography of Hitler, Hubris and…
Review
(reading Daphne Rooke) Thank you for the book. It reminded me in the way she writes, dry as the Karoo,…
Spirit of place: the landscape of myth and magic
We live in disenchanted times. We barely do God, most of us don’t do magic and frenzied consumerism occupies our…
Life in Rio’s most infamous favela — where you have to pay the cops to arrest criminals
When Stefan Zweig first arrived in Rio de Janeiro in 1936, he was overwhelmed not only by the city’s magnificent…
The way we treat our heroes is a disgrace
Matthew Green, former Financial Times and Reuters correspondent, remains unimpressed by officialdom’s response to casualties who aren’t actually bleeding: Ever…
Matt Ridley manages to Pangloss over the nastier aspects of evolution
Before I read this book, I wasn’t aware that I was a creationist. But Matt Ridley tells me I am,…
Books and Arts opener
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Remembering P.J. Kavanagh
‘Elms at the end of twilight are very interesting,’ wrote Gerard Manley Hopkins in his journal: ‘Against the sky they…
