Books
The Durable Postie
(For Karl) He doesn’t even bother to change out of his uniform, just goes straight to the pub after…
Guardians of an ideal
The French have always favoured grand, elegant abstractions about the human condition, says Ruth Scurr. It’s part of their national identity
Broken dreams
As Masha Gessen herself admits — and as friends and journalist colleagues repeatedly told her — it was a strange…
Parmenion
Athens The air-raid siren howls Over the quiet, the un-rioting city. It’s just a drill. But the unearthly vowels Ululate…
Swords of honour
Earlier this century I was a guest at a fine dinner, held in a citadel of aristocratic Catholicism, for youngish…
Style over substance
We begin in Paris with an introduction to five insignificant friends. One (Ramon) is walking past the new Chagall exhibition,…
The new rules of dating
An American stand-up comedian Aziz Ansari, who usually performs in Los Angeles and New York, has found time to conduct…
Salvation through music
Ours is the era of everybody’s autobiography. Bookshops groan with misery-lit memoirs — Never Let Me Go, Dysfunction Without Tears…
Awfully arrayed
John Keegan, perhaps the greatest British military historian of recent years, felt that the most important book (because of its…
One vast, blaring cultural circus
In the late 1980s Peter Ackroyd invited me to meet Iain Sinclair, whose first novel, White Chappell, Scarlet Tracings, I…
Curious shades of Browne
On the evening of 10 March 1804, Samuel Taylor Coleridge settled at a desk in an effort to articulate what…
The first Clive Palmer
When former Liberal Prime Minister, John Howard, was finishing off his autobiography Lazarus Rising in 2010 I asked him whether…
Parmenion
Athens The air-raid siren howls Over the quiet, the un-rioting city. It’s just a drill. But the unearthly vowels Ululate…
Parmenion
Athens The air-raid siren howls Over the quiet, the un-rioting city. It’s just a drill. But the unearthly vowels Ululate…
From ambrosia to zabaglione
This Oxford Companion ranges from the sweet to the decidedly salty, while being the most politically correct reference book you will ever consult, says Paul Levy
Robin Hood v. the toffs
The publicity blurb about the two unpleasant criminals whom this dismal book romanticises says that they are ‘continuing their ancestors’…
Sub-Aga saga
Lovely, gentle Isabel, just 40, makes masks. Her husband Dan, erstwhile ‘student of the Classics’ and playwright manqué, is ‘bored…
Some animals are more equal than others
Here are two parallel books, both by Americans, both 260 pages (excluding indexes) long, both using ‘likely’ as an adverb.…
The forgotten faithful
It is often said that cricket was ‘a game invented by the English and played by Indians’, and every so…
Only the lonely
This book starts with a Chinese boy so privileged and pampered that, at 21, he can’t open his own suitcase,…
Confessions of a Fedhead
Good writing about sport is rare — and good writing about tennis is that much rarer — so it’s conspicuous…
A watershed moment in music history
In 1994 I was working in marketing at London Records, a frothy pop label part-owned by the Polygram Group —…
The traffic in human misery
When Sara discovers that her husband died in India, rather than being killed in Afghanistan as she was told, she…
Bogs and fogs
In his poem ‘Eden Rock’, Charles Causley conjures up a dreamy memory of a childhood picnic ‘somewhere beyond Eden Rock’.…
Message
A tiny fly is moving over the page of my dull book this sultry evening, and it is my conceit…
