Books
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…
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…
