Books
The deeper secrets of Britain’s submarines
The Silent Deep is a compelling and fascinating exposé of a service that for too long has had to remain…
Samuel Palmer: from long-haired mystic to High Church Tory
In his youth, Samuel Palmer (1805–1881) painted like a Romantic poet. The moonlit field of ‘The Harvest Moon’ (1831–32) glows…
Shock and awe in Coventry, 14 November 1940
On 14 November 1940, at seven in the evening, the Luftwaffe began to bomb Coventry. The skyline turned red like…
Bravery
I am not ready for the temple but neither am I ready for the market. Leave me, I pray, a…
Top tips for gardeners — from stroking seedlings to stacking logs
I spent the summer of 1976 working as a trainee gardener at the Arboretum Kalmthout in Belgium. My employer was…
Rab Butler was too indecisive (and badly dressed) to be Prime Minister
‘The best prime minister we never had’ is not an epithet exclusive to Rab Butler. Widely applied to the late…
August in Arizona
Helen Simpson is not a prolific writer; six slim collections of short stories in 25 years, each timed quinquennially with…
A stunning blend of simplicity and complexity
Reading Tintin when I was a child, in Britain in the 1970s, I always assumed Georges Remi’s creation was just…
Curiosities for Christmas
There is not, sadly, a dedicated Trivia Books section in your local Waterstones, although at this time of year there…
The atheist delusion
Dan Rhodes apparently had trouble finding a publisher for this short novel, and it’s possible to envisage a certain amount…
In the grip of yellow fever
In late Victorian south London a ‘lower-middle-class’ boy, Arthur Ward, is lingering over his copy of The Arabian Nights. The…
Bravery
I am not ready for the temple but neither am I ready for the market. Leave me, I pray, a…
Bravery
I am not ready for the temple but neither am I ready for the market. Leave me, I pray, a…
Books of the Year: the best and most overrated of 2015
Our regular reviewers choose the best and most overrated books of 2015
There’s nothing wrong with plugging a friend’s book
The advantage of reviewing books by a friend is that you can invite him out for a walk across the…
Charles Williams: sadist or Rosicrucian saint?
Charles Williams was a bad writer, but a very interesting one. Most famous bad writers have to settle, like Sidney…
Patti Smith grows old too gracefully
‘Jesus died for somebody’s sins/ but not mine’: the opening lines of Patti Smith’s 1975 debut album, Horses, find a…
John Paul Stapp: the fastest man on earth, who saved millions
There’s a moment in Craig Ryan’s spectacular biography of John Paul Stapp — the maverick American Air Force doctor who,…
A soothing Negroni for la dolce vita
The first draft of the famous story was called ‘A Martini as Big as the Ritz’. That’s not true, but…
Jonathan Coe’s raucous social satire smoulders with anger behind the fun
When Rachel, one of the unreliable narrators of Number 11, wants to ‘go back to the very beginning’, she starts…
An elegy for Concorde, the most beautiful airliner of all time, that died aged 27
The Concorde experience, a fleeting indulgence in luxurious grandiosity, began each day with circumvention of the hugger-mugger of the hoi…
Sic transit: the buildings we treasure most are often the ones we’ve never seen
Here are two books which have almost nothing in common: form, function, source material, methodology, all utterly different. The surprise…
The best new cook books include recipes for Toad-in-the-hole, braised Pilot Whale and seal soup
Timing is everything, and few cookbooks come at an apter moment than Mamushka (Mitchell Beazley, £25) by the excellently named…
He knew he was right
A highlight of this year’s Dublin Theatre Festival was the Rough Magic Theatre Company’s production of The Train, a musical…
Loneliness and the love of friends
When Hugh and Mirabel Cecil’s book In Search of Rex Whistler was published in 2012, the late Brian Sewell reviewed…
