Books
The decisive moment
The short story likes to play the underdog. Famously unfavoured by publishers, it has none of the commercial clout of…
For the sake of argument
Madison Flight is a divorce lawyer, nicknamed ‘the Chair-Scraper’ for the number of times she leaps to her feet arguing…
The lonely sea and the sky
In the manner of Richard Holmes’s Footsteps, Julia Blackburn’s story of John Craske is as much autobiography as biography, as…
Villains of the gospels
Peter Stanford is a writer on religious and ethical matters. He was for four years editor of the Catholic Herald.…
The ass saw the angel
I suppose all children’s authors write the stories they would have liked to read as children. But in the case of…
Ghost Hands
Sant’Apollinaire Nuovo, Ravenna Your hands brush marble, feel impelled To touch where crisp cold tesserae Compose a fine array Of…
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Ghost Hands
Sant’Apollinaire Nuovo, Ravenna Your hands brush marble, feel impelled To touch where crisp cold tesserae Compose a fine array Of…
Ghost Hands
Sant’Apollinaire Nuovo, Ravenna Your hands brush marble, feel impelled To touch where crisp cold tesserae Compose a fine array Of…
Fifty shades of grey wolf
Locate. Stalk. Encounter. Rush. Chase. The pace of Sarah Hall’s fifth novel follows the five stages of a wolf hunt…
Thank heaven for little girls
A.S. Byatt explores the dark alternatives to innocence in Lewis Carroll’s deeply disturbing looking-glass world
Swing, swing together
The public schools ought to have gone out of business long ago. The Education Act of 1944, which promised ‘state-aided…
Into the valley of death
It’s rare that granitic and iron-jawed prose is also enveloping and warm, but that’s just one of the many enticing…
A master of miniatures
On YouTube there’s a brief dance video of a Viennese waltz so enchanting that not even Fred and Ginger in…
For the Time Being
Time slips away while we conjecture how to make best use of it. Waking late, the hours already sliding by,…
Back-stabbing the old warrior
Coalitions, as David Cameron has discovered, are tricky things to manage. How much more difficult, then, was it for Winston…
Big Cheese in MI6
Second world war deception operations are now widely known, particularly those which misled the Germans into thinking that the D-Day…
The true flower of dawn
Leonora Carrington is one of those jack-in-the-boxes who languish forgotten in the cultural toy cupboard and then pop up every…
The abundant charms of a playful cupid
Lesley Blanch (1904–2007) will be remembered chiefly for her gloriously extravagant The Wilder Shores of Love, the story of four…
Dark humour for the dark continent
‘I’ve come back because I love the mess. Anarchy. Madness. Things falling apart.’ The lines belong to Roland Nair, one…
Studio Portrait
My uncle in his uniform, dog-collared, briar clutched at an angle, brilliantined hair with a central parting, très debonaire. This…
Arch absurdity
Miranda July is a funny and brilliant film director, performance artist, sculptor and smartphone app designer. In 2005, she won…
Promising more than he delivers
In 2001, Tony Blair took Sir Michael Barber from his perch as special adviser in the Department for Education and…
Public man, lover, connoisseur
To the 21st-century right, especially in the United States, John Maynard Keynes has become a much-hated figure whose name is…
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