Books
Where did the Right and the Left come from?
What is the origin of left and right in politics? The traditional answer is that these ideas derive from the…
How to get around South Africa's many boundaries
There are writers whose prose style is so fluid, so easy, the reader feels as though he has been taken…
The Scot who became more Canadian than the Canadians
When John Buchan was appointed Governor General of Canada in 1935, the country was deep in depression, the western provinces…
The Shock of the Fall is a worthy Costa Book of the Year
About 30 pages in and unable to find my bearings, I flipped to the end of this novel — well,…
Isabel Allende's Ripper doesn't grab you by the throat
Isabel Allende is not an author one usually associates with the thrillers about serial killers. Ripper, however, lives up to…
A&E
If this waiting is hellish, then the sick are limbo dancing; only those who are bent double, or on the…
Books and Arts
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A&E
If this waiting is hellish, then the sick are limbo dancing; only those who are bent double, or on the…
A&E
If this waiting is hellish, then the sick are limbo dancing; only those who are bent double, or on the…
Has land ownership changed our lives for better or for worse?
The highly profitable — and intrinsically selfish — system of land ownership that replaced medieval feudal tenure had profound moral consequences that continue to this day, says John Adamson
Portrait of a Guardian music critic
We critics seldom write our memoirs, perhaps because we skulk away our lives in dark corners, avoiding the public gaze,…
Germaine Greer's mad, passionate quest to heal Australia
Like an old woman in a fairy story, Germaine Greer, now in her late seventies, has taken to lurking in…
Toowit-towoo! At long last, a Collins book on owls
Owls have more associations for us than perhaps any other family of birds, suggested Jeremy Mynott in Birdscapes, so it…
Why you shouldn't keep elephants
On 15 September 1885, the world’s most famous elephant, Jumbo, was killed by a train. Jumbo, the star attraction at…
William S. Burroughs was a writer – not a painter, prophet, philosopher
William S. Burroughs lived his life in the grand transgressive tradition of Lord Byron and Oscar Wilde and, like all…
Richard Branson deserves (some) respect
Tom Bower’s first biography of Sir Richard Branson, in 2000, was memorable for its hilarious account of the Virgin tycoon’s…
Where artists went to drink and die
Once below a time (to quote the man himself) the bloated poet Dylan Thomas slouched back to New York’s Chelsea…
Books and Arts
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The new Garnaut Report
Yes, economics really is a dismal science, if this book is to be believed. Even when things are going right,…
What Englishmen learnt from Europe
A tour of the Continent was a prerequisite for young Jacobean noblemen training for statesmanship — provided they resisted its corrupting influence, says Blair Worden
When intellectuals are clueless about the first world war
No one alive now has any adult experience of the first world war, but still it shows no sign of…
How miserable a marriage can be
In Never Mind Miss Fox, Olivia Glazebrook’s second novel, the revelation of a long buried secret releases a Pandora’s Box…
Fiction embroiled in the Profumo affair
Sex, spies, aristocrats and atom bombs — the Profumo affair is in the news again, thanks to the recent Andrew…
Ornithology
‘The Wood Thrush can sing a duet by itself, using Two separate voices,’ as opposed To the whip-bird, one cry,…
Australia's entrancing Sheila
The ‘dollar princesses’, those American heiresses who crossed the Atlantic in search of a titled husband, are familiar figures from…
