Books
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
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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…
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…
Talisman
She’s meant to be good with words, used to medicating others with a timely postcard — FABULOUS WOMAN YOU! Today…
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…
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…
Too little, too late
The atrocities suffered by an estimated one million Armenians in 1915 have been largely ignored by historians and officially denied by the Turks. It’s a centenary we can’t afford to neglect, says Justin Marozzi
Trailing clouds of glory
With Alpine wreckage still being sifted, this is either a very good or a very bad time to write about…
By Air
Astonishing to think That not so long ago First the Brothers Wright Then Louis Blériot Initiated flight. And strapped into…
In a niche of their own
As words commonly used to write about the visual arts become increasingly useful to advertisers, ‘to curate’ is becoming the…
