Books
Losing a Crown in the National Portrait Gallery
The cafe was full of connoisseurs of the scones. As he bit into his flapjack a sinister uncoupling took place…
Easy Street
Roller skating down the main road in the cycle lane, her easy, smooth and flowing scissor stride on booted castors,…
Autocracy tempered by strangulation
It’s hard to tell at times who came off worst in Romanov Russia — the tsar or his subjects, says Adam Zamoyski
Not so happy valley
Simon Barnes opens with a presumably true idea, that we are all in search of our own versions of paradise…
Poverty + anarchy + drug dollars = Mexico
You may not have heard of the Maras. Or Barrio 18. Or the Jalisco New Generation Cartel, or the Zatas,…
Sharing the Dog
The Dog share didn’t work out well in the end. For a start, Dog — no mean manipulator — cadged…
A country in crisis
Jack Shenker is a throwback to an older, more romantic age when foreign correspondents were angry, partisan and half-crazed with…
Rewriting the merchant’s tale
Howard Jacobson’s novelistic riff on The Merchant of Venice for the Hogarth Shakespeare project turns, unsurprisingly, on what makes some…
Alive and kicking
Four years after his death, it is still faintly surprising to recall that Christopher Hitchens is no longer resident on…
Tricks of the trade
This book, the blurb warns us, was written by ‘an established voice in popular psychology, with a regular column on…
Siftings
And we awake like children to tiny snow sprinkled on shed and car roofs, thinking, Will it last, will it…
Very much like a whale
In principle, freediving is simple and perilous: divers take one breath, then dive as deep as they can, with no…
A legend in her own time
I usually dread the final 15 minutes of a celebrity interview: the awkward section during which the writer must steer…
Recent crime fiction
We fully expect con artists to be caught in a sting themselves, but even with that thought constantly in mind…
Kerr’s curse
Here it is, yet another book on the Dismissal. The fall of Gough Whitlam in 1975 has created quite a…
Sharing the Dog
The Dog share didn’t work out well in the end. For a start, Dog — no mean manipulator — cadged…
Siftings
And we awake like children to tiny snow sprinkled on shed and car roofs, thinking, Will it last, will it…
Sharing the Dog
The Dog share didn’t work out well in the end. For a start, Dog — no mean manipulator — cadged…
Siftings
And we awake like children to tiny snow sprinkled on shed and car roofs, thinking, Will it last, will it…
Charlemagne’s legacy
The Holy Roman Empire has been much maligned over the centuries. In fact it worked remarkably well, says Jonathan Steinberg
A pitiful wreck
When I look at the black-and-white photograph of Julian Barnes on the flap of his latest book, the voice of…
Tracking the super cats
Of all charismatic animals, tigers are surely the most filmed, televised, documented, noisily cherished and, paradoxically, the most persecuted on…
Age cannot wither her
There’s something reassuring about 98-year-old Diana Athill. She’s stately and well-ordered, like the gardens at Ditchingham Hall in Norfolk, her…
Drying out in the Orkneys
‘If I were to go mad,’ Amy Liptrot writes in her memoir of alcoholism and the Orkneys, ‘It would come…
The medium is the message
Molly Crabapple is an American artist and Drawing Blood is the story of her life. That life has only been…
