Books
The Snow Queen crawls at snail’s pace – and you wouldn’t want it any other way
For all would-be novelists whose stumbling block is that they can’t resist describing every single sensation in depth — the…
Ettore Sottsass, Jnr: more than just a funny name
Personally, I have always been sensitive about a credibility gap, a difference in prestige, between literary and visual cultures. More…
A lost treasure of Japanese fiction – pocket-sized but world class
Think haiku, netsuke, moss gardens… Small is beautiful. Japanese art, a scholar of the culture once commented, is great in…
The Foreign Office's long war on women
I faltered during the preface to this account of the rise of the female (British) diplomat. Helen McCarthy, a historian…
From Bletchley Park to Take Your Pick – this baroness’s memoir is a blast
Jean Trumpington’s memoir, published as she closes in on her 92nd birthday, is an absolute blast from the opening page.…
Books and arts
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With enemies like these…
Rupert Murdoch’s last five years have been the worst of his career, but a new biography by Sydney University’s Rodney Tiffen is so unfair that even Peter Oborne, one of the newspaper magnate’s severest critics, found himself warming to him
Bold history
This is a bold attempt to write the history of Australia in 1,200 pages of narrative. A huge team of…
Radical nationalist
Many of Australia’s former prime ministers have been content to spend their political afterlife stoking the embers of their own…
Books and arts
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Look again – the first world war poets weren't pacifists
The patriotism of the Great War’s finest poets was neither narrow nor triumphalist but reflected an intense devotion to an endangered country and to a way of life worth dying for, says David Crane
Judge a critic by the quality of his mistakes
What the title promises is not found inside. It is a tease. John Sutherland says he has ‘been paid one…
Mid-life crisis, 13th-century style
The word delicate is seldom a compliment. I once threw a saucepan of hot soup out of a fifth storey…
The Italians who won the war – against us
Italy entered the second world war in circumstances very similar to those in which it signed up for the first.…
Wealth is no guarantee of happiness. Look at the Sackville-Wests
When Robert Sackville-West was writing Inheritance (2010), his history of Knole and the Sackvilles, he was ‘struck’, as he recalls…
Exclamation marks, no; aertex shirts, yes!
Jonathan Meades, the architectural, food and cultural commentator, appears on television in a pair of retro shades and a trademark…
Dylan Thomas: boozer, womaniser, sponger, charlatan — or master craftsman?
In Dylan Thomas’s centenary year, Hilly Janes recalls her father’s friendship with the poet and his visits to the Boat House at Laugharne
A noble cause
I supported Australia’s Vietnam commitment in the decade between 1965 (when the Menzies Coalition government deployed combat forces to South…
Portrait of the artist
Who the hell was Dylan Thomas? Boozer, womaniser, sponger, charlatan — or master craftsman, besotted husband, generosity personified and one…
Portrait of the artist
Who the hell was Dylan Thomas? Boozer, womaniser, sponger, charlatan — or master craftsman, besotted husband, generosity personified and one…
Jorge Luis Borges and his ‘bitch’
Ian Thomson on a miserable mismatch that became the talk of Buenos Aires in the Sixties
The fruitcake island of Sicily and its legion of literary visitors
At the opposite end of the Continent to ourselves, Sicily has always been an attraction for the English who, from…
How seriously should we take Ruskin as an artist?
This stout and well-designed volume nicely complements Tim Hilton’s classic biography of John Ruskin. It is the catalogue for the…
Who’s raiding the fridge?
There is a problem with describing what happens in Nagasaki: impossible to reveal much of the plot without flagging up…
John Crace digested – twice
Fiction ‘So how come we’re in the same book?’ Paul from The Stranger’s Child asked Florence from On Chesil Beach.…
