Books
Lines of beauty
David Jones (1895–1974) was a remarkable figure: artist and poet, he was a great original in both disciplines. His was…
Love, loneliness and all that jazz
Woody Allen (born Allan Stewart Konigsberg), the prolific, Oscar-winning auteur, New Orleans-style jazz clarinettist, doyen of New York delicatessen society,…
How cool is Britannia?
Is it true that, having lost an empire, we reinvented ourselves as an island of entertainers? Do we channel the…
Tree devotion
I have never written much about the one-acre shaw of native trees I planted in 1994, even though it is…
The voice of Crow
A dead parent, the interrogation of a literary inheritance, and over everything, a bird: Max Porter is apparently unafraid to…
Complicated, but unfussy
Amory Clay, photographer and photo-journalist, was born in 1908, only two years after Logan Mountstuart, writer, poseur and ‘scribivelard’. Amory…
Cry havoc
If you love dogs and or live with one — I declare an interest on both counts — there is…
Sibling rivalries
In The Past (set chiefly in the present) four middle-aged siblings spend an eventful summer holiday in the Devon country…
Pillar of the Victorian age
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
A terrible beauty
A.S. Byatt on the dark, deadly secrets lurking beneath a calm, white surface
A hero of our time
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The below is an unpublished poem, written for Moortown, the verse-diary of Ted Hughes’s experiences of farming in Devon in…
Following the fickle fish
Fish stories come in two varieties: the micro-version of a hundred riverside bars, blokeish boastings of rod-and-line tussles with individual…
Ticks and crosses
Houses, as any plumber will testify, do sometimes blow up in gas explosions, destroying their contents and inhabitants, but would…
A new track record
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 captivating prospect
What could happen in literature to a young couple — or a pair of young couples — who fall off…
The continent in crisis
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,…
A myth is as good as a mile
We live in disenchanted times. We barely do God, most of us don’t do magic and frenzied consumerism occupies our…
