Books
What does it really mean to have a tyrannical father?
What was it like, asks Jay Nordlinger, to have Mao as your father, or Pol Pot, or Papa Doc? The…
Would even Blair have put Felix Dennis in the Lords?
This is not only an authorised but a commissioned biography. Felix Dennis, the tiny, depraved, manipulative media mogul, was hardly…
John Lennon’s desert island luxury
Beatlebone is an account of a journey, a psychedelic odyssey, its protagonist — at times its narrator — John Lennon,…
From Spike Milligan — and Marge Simpson — with love, light, peace and great respect
This book is a serious bit of kit. Its hard covers measure 28.9 by 21 centimetres, and it weighs 1.62…
When English Catholics were considered as dangerous as jihadis
Martyrdom, these days, does not get a good press. Fifty years ago English Catholics could take a ghoulish pride in…
Behind the scenes at the Brighton bombing
Sadly, I can’t see it catching on, but one of the notable things about Jonathan Lee’s new novel is that…
Green is the colour of happiness
According to this wonderfully thought-provoking book, human attachment to plants was much more evident in the 19th century than it…
Beyond the call of duty: the kindness of strangers is a pleasing mystery
When I applied to medical school, an experienced doctor offered me some advice: ‘Don’t give them reason to think you’re…
Margaret Thatcher’s most surprising virtue: imagination
Margaret Thatcher’s second administration saw bitter divisions at home, but abroad the breakthrough in Anglo-Soviet relations really did change history, says Philip Hensher
The best thing about Harry G. Frankfurt’s On Inequality is the paper it’s printed on
Ten years ago, a philosophy professor at Princeton wrote a book with a provocative, slightly indecent title. It was a…
Curtain call for Ruth Rendell
Ruth Rendell’s final novel, Dark Corners, is about how psychological necessity can drive perfectly ordinary people either to terrible deeds…
The greatest surprise about Nigeria on its centenary is that it exists at all
A giant was born in 1914, an African giant. The same year European powers set about each other in the…
The polyphonous Babel of global music
‘Following custom, when the Siamese conquered the Khmer they carried off much of the population, including most of their musicians,…
Mary Beard minds her S, P, Q and R
Having rattled and routed Mark Antony and his bewitching Egyptian at the battle of Actium in 31 BC, Octavian was…
Books and arts opener
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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,…
