Books
In Winwick Churchyard
The gravestones are laughing. They tilt at each other’s shoulders, droll tears of lichen blotching their honourable faces. Seated in…
War is good for us
The argument that mankind’s innate violence can only be contained by force of arms may make for a neat paradox, but it fails to convince David Crane
Sex and squalor in San Francisco
Frog Music begins with a crime against a young mother, committed in a tiny space. Unlike Emma Donoghue’s bestselling novel…
Mortar fire, weddings, camels, the French revolution: all kind of things get in the way of cricket
It isn’t just the elk, either. Also bringing proceedings to a halt in this wonderful anthology are camels (Bahrain), cows…
Oriel: the college that shaped the spiritual heart of 19th century Britain
Oriel was only the fifth college to be founded in Oxford, in 1326. Although it has gone through periods of…
The Thucydides of court gossip? Steady on...
Sir Brian Unwin leads off with some decidedly questionable assertions. He wonders why the first of his two subjects, the…
Brains with green fingers
‘Life is bristling with thorns,’ Voltaire observed in 1769, ‘and I know no other remedy than to cultivate one’s garden.’…
The one-man spy factory who changed history
With two new biographies of Kim Philby out, an espionage drama by Sir David Hare on BBC2, and the recent…
April
Spring again But from where no telling Sweet as the spring That went before…
White, blue-collar, grey-haired rebels
In the 2010 general election, Ukip gained nearly a million votes — over 3 per cent — three times as…
Philip Marlowe returns with bark but no bite
With so much Nordic noir around, it’s a relief to return to the granddaddy of them all, the hard-boiled private…
How did revolution become Istanbul's new normal?
On a recent weekend I was thinking of taking my sons to downtown Istanbul to do some bazaar browsing. ‘Bad…
Books and Arts
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April
Spring again But from where no telling Sweet as the spring That went before…
April
Spring again But from where no telling Sweet as the spring That went before…
Was Roy Jenkins the greatest prime minister we never had?
Roy Jenkins may have been snobbish and self-indulgent, but he was also a visionary and man of principle who would have made a good prime minister, says Philip Ziegler
Samuel Beckett walks into a nail bar
It isn’t very often that a writer’s work is so striking that you can remember exactly where and when you…
Witnesses in the heart of darkness
When presented with a 639-page doorstopper which includes 82 pages of closely-written sources, notes and index, most of us feel…
Civilisation’s watery superhighway
The clue is in the title: this is not about the blue-grey-green wet stuff that covers 70 per cent of…
When posters told us our place
As a sign of the way things have changed, nothing could better this. Hester Vaizey, Cambridge history don and ‘publishing…
When Mussolini came knocking on Hollywood’s door
John Ford was the first of the five famous Hollywood film directors to go to war. He went expecting to…
‘A dandy aesthete with visions of sacrificial violence’
Eschewing the biblical advertising of ‘the promised land’ or indeed ‘a land of milk and honey’, the Conservative colonial secretary…
Whistling is a bloody nuisance
Paul McCartney says he can remember the exact moment he knew the Beatles had made it. Early one morning, getting…
Books and Arts
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Hero and villain
There is a story told of Gough Whitlam as Prime Minister speaking with his Treasurer, Bill Hayden. It is late…
