Books
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…
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…
