Books
December
The ferns around the badgers’ sett are dying down, and fine webs fret the brambles. By late afternoon the moon…
Answers to ‘Spot the Line of Poetry’
1. Ill-met by moonlight (Shakespeare’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream) 2. Hope springs eternal in the human breast (Pope’s ‘An Essay…
Spot the line of poetry
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All Change
Based on a handwritten notebook of recipes from Dorothy Eliza Barnes, my grandmother, a shepherd’s wife, who had worked as…
December
The ferns around the badgers’ sett are dying down, and fine webs fret the brambles. By late afternoon the moon…
George and Martha Washington were an odd first First Couple
Frances Wilson on America’s likeable, if unlikely, first First Couple
Hubris made the 20th century the bloodiest in history
Sir Alistair Horne, like that other great knight of military history, Sir Michael Howard, served in the Coldstream Guards during…
General Anders to the rescue
Until Poland joined the EU in the 1990s, the biggest single influx of Poles into this country was in the…
Richard III: a bad man — and even worse king
When archaeologists unearthed the battered mortal remains of King Richard III beneath a council car park in Leicester in 2012,…
Shakespeare with or without the waffle
30-Second Shakespeare: 50 key aspects of his works, life and legacy, each explained in half a minute sounds trivial, but…
James Klugmann and Guy Burgess: the wasted lives of spies
Geoff Andrews’s ‘Shadow Man’, James Klugmann, was the talent-spotter, recruiter and mentor of the Cambridge spy ring. From 1962, aged…
The real gardeners’ questions answered
Why is it that gardening in the public prints is so often treated as a fluffy subject for fluffy people?…
A companion for life
There can be no good reason why Graham Johnson’s marvellous three-volume encyclopaedia of Schubert’s songs has been so neglected by…
Bad news from paradise
Suddenly, the Maldivians are in the news. Earlier this year, they locked up their first democratically elected president, and just…
O this white powder!
Beware hedonists bearing white powder. This, in part, was the message pressed in a short book about the excesses of…
A lonely ice maiden
‘Mystery comes through clarity’, is how Rupert Thomson recently described the effect he was trying to achieve in writing. It’s…
Cultivating the fourth estate
Lord Palmerston is remembered today not for his foreign policy nor for his octogenarian philandering, but for his management of…
A lofty, lusty Laureate
These Collected Poems, published halfway through Carol Ann Duffy’s time as poet laureate, make clear that she is a true…
Multi-fanged
Nowadays a vampire is usually a Transylvanian in need of an orthodontist. But, as Nick Rennison demonstrates in this entertaining…
Bequest
Knowing he was ill he offered a free choice of the books on his shelves, but for every one wanted…
Heron
Walking to the bus stop after a hospital visit, in an unfamiliar, dusty suburb, I pass a small park on…
Bequest
Knowing he was ill he offered a free choice of the books on his shelves, but for every one wanted…
Heron
Walking to the bus stop after a hospital visit, in an unfamiliar, dusty suburb, I pass a small park on…
Bequest
Knowing he was ill he offered a free choice of the books on his shelves, but for every one wanted…
Heron
Walking to the bus stop after a hospital visit, in an unfamiliar, dusty suburb, I pass a small park on…
