Books
Not Mister Jones!
My father was always arguing and falling out with people in the neighbourhood, but when he clashed with Mister Jones,…
Don’t Look Back
No, let’s not look at the old photographs any more: our hair was so full and shiny then, and anyway…
An empire within an empire
William Dalrymple is uncomfortably reminded of the astonishing savagery by which the East India Company maintained the Raj throughout the 19th century
Women take wing
Although the young women of the 1950s hovered on the cusp of change, many did not know it. Valerie Gisborn…
A lone Crusader declares holy war
In 2011, Anders Breivik murdered 69 teenagers in a socialist summer camp outside the Norwegian capital of Oslo, and eight…
Shades of the prison house
A few months ago I went to a lunch at Univ, my old college in Oxford, to celebrate the 95th…
Good old bad old days
Anthony Quinn’s fourth novel, set in London’s artistic and theatrical circles in 1936, is not the kind in which an…
A choice of first novels
I’m not sure I know what the mark of merit is in a first novel, any more than in a…
Rescuing the past from the teeth of time
John Aubrey investigated everything from the workings of the brain, the causation of winds and the origins of Stonehenge to…
Majesty of the malls
In this autobiography, Mary Portas doesn’t dip into the fabled store of her talents by giving an account of her…
Decidedly fishy
Books ought to be able to stand on their own, but perhaps it is important to know this about David…
Books and arts
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Tales to tell
The short story has long been a staple of Australian literature but has had something of a rough ride in…
Driven to abstraction
Philip Hensher on the perverse, tormented Mark Rothko, whose anger and depression — often painfully apparent in his art — only increased with his success
Songs of praise for the BBC
In a ‘Dear Bill’ letter in Private Eye, an imaginary Denis Thatcher wrote off the BBC as a nest of…
Worshipping the body beautiful
My favourite fact about gyms before reading this book was that the average British gym member covers 468 miles per…
Feather-footed through the plashy glen
Sir John Lister-Kaye has adopted a very familiar format in his new book of wildlife encounters. Essentially he charts a…
Deep in the heart of darkness
For decades, all the outside world knew was that Patrice Lumumba, the Congolese independence leader, had been done away with.…
English without tears
In a cheeringly Dickensian fashion, the names of our supposed experts on grammar imply they want to bind writers (Lynne…
A father goes over the edge
When Helen Garner, an award-winning Australian author, first saw the TV news images of the car being dragged out of…
A James Bond thriller for real
Ahead of last year’s release of The Interview, the Seth Rogen film about two journalists instructed to assassinate Kim Jong-un,…
No escaping the past
The title of A.D. Miller’s follow-up to his Man Booker shortlisted debut Snowdrops refers not to lovers but to two…
Here comes everything
You can’t accuse John Gray of dodging the big questions, or indeed the big answers. His new book The Soul…
Running around with Marx
Thomas R. Flynn has written an avowedly ‘intellectual biography’ of Jean-Paul Sartre, which might seem fitting. Sartre was nothing if…
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