Books
A break from sabre-thrusting
Allan Mallinson’s historical series concerning Matthew Hervey, the well-bred, thoughtful soldier, details a world where men are practical and not…
Sher force of character
Understandably given its bulk, Antony Sher’s Falstaff in the Royal Shakespeare Company’s recent production of Shakespeare’s two Henry IV plays…
A graceful writer and a graceful man
Tom Stoppard recalls bedsit days in Sixties London with his laconic friend Derek Marlowe, as they both embarked on a life of writing
Books & arts
Got something to add? Join the discussion and comment below.
Local hero
Some of us habitually quote Orwell’s correct comparison of producing first-person prose to ‘dosing yourself with some … very deleterious…
Sum total
Midnight to dawn adding one more to the serial tally, love and irritation carried over, borrowed and paid back, all…
Sum total
Midnight to dawn adding one more to the serial tally, love and irritation carried over, borrowed and paid back, all…
The blood-dimmed tide is loosed
The centenary of the Easter Rising is already being commemorated. Ahead of the flood of books that will follow, Roy Foster chooses two impressive, if sombre ones to be going on with
All things to all men
What did St George do? Killed a dragon, as everyone knows. And yet, as Samantha Riches points out, no mention…
A safe pair of hands
Among the more intriguing insights into an election that seems to be taking longer than a Cliff Thorburn 50 break…
Gunning for freedom
Like the documentary journalist Iain Overton, author of this book, I was taught to shoot and maintain a gun as…
Dirty dealing across the board
I knew there had to be a point to Monopoly. The game itself is tedium made cardboard, the strongest known…
Bitten by the bug
‘Good night, sleep tight, don’t let the bedbugs bite,’ my mother used to say when she tucked me in at…
A peephole into Peru
Mario Vargas Llosa likes to counterpoint his darker novels with rosier themes: after the savagery of The Green House came…
Gore blimey
Gore Vidal has form as a crime writer. In the early 1950s, when his sympathetic literary treatment of homosexuality had…
Heigh-ho, heigh-ho…
Work is a funny old thing — a four-letter word to some, the meaning of life to others. There have…
Passionate pioneers
If Mary Wollstonecraft, as she once declared, ‘was not born to tred in the beaten track’, the same with even…
Toujours la politesse
Robert Cumming’s opening sentence is: ‘Kenneth Clark and Bernard Berenson first met in the summer of 1925.’ One is then…
Indulge your inner reptile
What do you get if you cross renegade psychoanalyst Carl Jung with lizard-men conspiracist David Icke? It is a question…
i.m. AMSTRAD
Dear Lord Sugar, it’s been a sad week. A kind of bereavement, really. Today, a council employee in a yellow…
Spring
The sparrows banter in the bushes that crowd the walls of the World’s End alleyway as I walk to the…
Talisman
She’s meant to be good with words, used to medicating others with a timely postcard — FABULOUS WOMAN YOU! Today…
Books and arts
Got something to add? Join the discussion and comment below.
War and jealousy
Le Hamel was the site of an extraordinary triumph of allied arms early on the morning of July 4, 1918.…
In the bunker
Wars make myths; probably no-one understood that better than Charles Bean, Australia’s first true war writer and a person who…
