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Is City on Fire just a box set masquerading as a novel?
Ninety pages into the juggernaut that is City on Fire, I begin to think that this is really a box…
Big is beautiful: A crushing case for brutalism — with the people left out
Elain Harwood’s flawed but impressive study of modernist architecture manages perfectly to reflect its subject, says David Kynaston
The many lives of John Buchan
Ursula Buchan casts further light on her grandfather’s famous novel
Hermitage director Mikhail Piotrovsky knows all the secrets of his museum, and he’s keeping them
The front cover of this book describes the Hermitage as ‘the Greatest Museum in the World’. That sobriquet must go…
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 is 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
A Mile Down: David Vann’s memoir of a disastrous career at sea
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…
Sodom in Potsdam
Reacquaintance with Germany is long overdue for most English people. Before 1914 it was at least as familiar as France…
The politics of prediction
Forecasts have been fundamental to mankind’s journey from a small tribe on the African savannah to a species that can…
What is written down
Marcus Tullius Cicero was the ancient master of the ‘save’ key. He composed more letters, speeches and philosophy books than…
To wit, deWitt
Patrick deWitt is a Canadian writer whose second novel, a picaresque and darkly comic western called The Sisters Brothers, was…
Lover and fighter
I don’t like boxing. If I ever get into a boxing ring, I’ll be in the corner with the governor…
Bard times
It is fair to say that Jeanette Winterson is not Shakespeare, though I cannot imagine why any authors would accept…
Two serious ladies
‘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…
Poet as predator
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…
Theatre of politics
Sam Leith on the year 1606, when plague and panic were rife — and all the world really was a stage
Dick at his trickiest
In the more than 40 years since Richard Nixon resigned as president — disgraced as much by his inveterate lying…
