Books
Sum total
Midnight to dawn adding one more to the serial tally, love and irritation carried over, borrowed and paid back, all…
Sum total
Midnight to dawn adding one more to the serial tally, love and irritation carried over, borrowed and paid back, all…
Pitfalls on the road to the Rising
The centenary of the Easter Rising is already being commemorated. Ahead of the flood of books that will follow, Roy Foster chooses two impressive, if sombre ones to be going on with
St George: patron saint of England, patronised by all
What did St George do? Killed a dragon, as everyone knows. And yet, as Samantha Riches points out, no mention…
What did Steve Davis do to succeed at snooker? Everything his dad told him
Among the more intriguing insights into an election that seems to be taking longer than a Cliff Thorburn 50 break…
Americans and their gun culture: attached at the hip
Like the documentary journalist Iain Overton, author of this book, I was taught to shoot and maintain a gun as…
Monopoly is fascinating – as long as you don’t try to play it
I knew there had to be a point to Monopoly. The game itself is tedium made cardboard, the strongest known…
Bigger, better bedbugs bite back with a vengeance
‘Good night, sleep tight, don’t let the bedbugs bite,’ my mother used to say when she tucked me in at…
Social comedy Peruvian-style
Mario Vargas Llosa likes to counterpoint his darker novels with rosier themes: after the savagery of The Green House came…
Brothels, hashish, a poisonous scorpion, a cursed necklace: all excuses for macho antics in the Valley of the Kings
Gore Vidal has form as a crime writer. In the early 1950s, when his sympathetic literary treatment of homosexuality had…
Working is good for you — even if it’s unpaid, in a charity shop — or writing book reviews for The Spectator
Work is a funny old thing — a four-letter word to some, the meaning of life to others. There have…
There’s something about Mary (Wollstonecraft and Shelley)
If Mary Wollstonecraft, as she once declared, ‘was not born to tred in the beaten track’, the same with even…
Bernard Berenson and Kenneth Clark: pen friends, not true friends
Robert Cumming’s opening sentence is: ‘Kenneth Clark and Bernard Berenson first met in the summer of 1925.’ One is then…
Carl Jung meets David Icke (and writes a book of bonkers business-speak)
What do you get if you cross renegade psychoanalyst Carl Jung with lizard-men conspiracist David Icke? It is a question…
i.m. AMSTRAD
Dear Lord Sugar, it’s been a sad week. A kind of bereavement, really. Today, a council employee in a yellow…
Spring
The sparrows banter in the bushes that crowd the walls of the World’s End alleyway as I walk to the…
Talisman
She’s meant to be good with words, used to medicating others with a timely postcard — FABULOUS WOMAN YOU! Today…
Books and arts
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War and jealousy
Le Hamel was the site of an extraordinary triumph of allied arms early on the morning of July 4, 1918.…
In the bunker
Wars make myths; probably no-one understood that better than Charles Bean, Australia’s first true war writer and a person who…
In the bunker
Wars make myths; probably no-one understood that better than Charles Bean, Australia’s first true war writer and a person who…
Talisman
She’s meant to be good with words, used to medicating others with a timely postcard — FABULOUS WOMAN YOU! Today…
i.m. AMSTRAD
Dear Lord Sugar, it’s been a sad week. A kind of bereavement, really. Today, a council employee in a yellow…
Spring
The sparrows banter in the bushes that crowd the walls of the World’s End alleyway as I walk to the…
Talisman
She’s meant to be good with words, used to medicating others with a timely postcard — FABULOUS WOMAN YOU! Today…
