Books
Not Mister Jones!
My father was always arguing and falling out with people in the neighbourhood, but when he clashed with Mister Jones,…
An Indian family epic
Early in the second section of Aatish Taseer’s The Way Things Were we are presented with a striking description of…
Waterloo sunset years
As Johnny Rogan notes in this new biography of Ray Davies and the Kinks, it is almost 50 years since…
A Stoic among sadists
They lived in barrels, they camped on top of columns, or in caves: the lives of the sages are often…
Paradise lost
Julian is clever, handsome and spoiled, a gilded youth who has all the girls wanting to mother him, and a…
Cold comfort farm in Canada
Patrick Gale’s first historical novel is inspired by a non-story, a gap in his own family record. His great-grandfather Harry…
The stuff that binds us
Before I read this book about vitamins, I thought I knew what it would be like. It would be vaguely…
Three men in the Basin
John Hemming is our greatest living scholar-explorer. He is best known for his extraordinary first book The Conquest of the…
Protestants preferred
The most successful newspapers have a distinct personality of their own with which their readers connect. In Britain, the Daily…
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…
Books & Arts opener
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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…
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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