Books
All the pomp of family life
The Green Road is a novel in two parts about leaving and returning home. A big house called Ardeevin, walking…
Two wheels good
Bicycles — in Britain, anyway — are the Marmite means of transport. I am among the bicycle-lovers, almost religious and…
Turing’s long shadow
As a young student, the atheist Alan Turing — disorientated with grief over the death of his first love Christopher…
A passion for men and intrigue
Moura Budberg (1892–1974) had an extraordinary life. She was born in the Poltava region of Ukraine, and as a young…
Wilde about the boy
The prodigious brilliance, blaring public ruin, dismal martyrdom and posthumous glory of Oscar Wilde’s reputation are almost too familiar. The…
What a Day
The blue sky is Sunni. The white clouds are Shia. The sun is happy. The shops are crowded. The planet…
What a Day
The blue sky is Sunni. The white clouds are Shia. The sun is happy. The shops are crowded. The planet…
The raw material of fiction
Saul Bellow’s lurid personal life — especially the triangular relationship with his wife and her lover — was the basis for his best work, says Craig Raine
The sick man of Europe finally succumbs
In a possibly apocryphal story, Henry Kissinger, while visiting Beijing in 1972 as Nixon’s national security adviser, asked Zhou Enlai,…
Snow White or black beauty?
God Help the Child, Toni Morrison’s 11th novel, hearkens back to two of her earliest. Like The Bluest Eye, it…
Sum total
Midnight to dawn adding one more to the serial tally, love and irritation carried over, borrowed and paid back, all…
Songs of innocence and experience
We live in an age of generational turmoil. Baby-boom parents are accused of clinging on to jobs and houses which…
Blitzed on Benzedrine
Lore has it that those viewing naughty books in the British Museum could once do so only with the Archbishop…
Full of sound and fury
John Knox, Cranmer complained, was ‘one of those unquiet spirits, which can like nothing but that is after their own…
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
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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…
