Books
Philip Marlowe returns with bark but no bite
With so much Nordic noir around, it’s a relief to return to the granddaddy of them all, the hard-boiled private…
How did revolution become Istanbul's new normal?
On a recent weekend I was thinking of taking my sons to downtown Istanbul to do some bazaar browsing. ‘Bad…
Books and Arts
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April
Spring again But from where no telling Sweet as the spring That went before…
April
Spring again But from where no telling Sweet as the spring That went before…
Was Roy Jenkins the greatest prime minister we never had?
Roy Jenkins may have been snobbish and self-indulgent, but he was also a visionary and man of principle who would have made a good prime minister, says Philip Ziegler
Samuel Beckett walks into a nail bar
It isn’t very often that a writer’s work is so striking that you can remember exactly where and when you…
Witnesses in the heart of darkness
When presented with a 639-page doorstopper which includes 82 pages of closely-written sources, notes and index, most of us feel…
Civilisation’s watery superhighway
The clue is in the title: this is not about the blue-grey-green wet stuff that covers 70 per cent of…
When posters told us our place
As a sign of the way things have changed, nothing could better this. Hester Vaizey, Cambridge history don and ‘publishing…
When Mussolini came knocking on Hollywood’s door
John Ford was the first of the five famous Hollywood film directors to go to war. He went expecting to…
‘A dandy aesthete with visions of sacrificial violence’
Eschewing the biblical advertising of ‘the promised land’ or indeed ‘a land of milk and honey’, the Conservative colonial secretary…
Whistling is a bloody nuisance
Paul McCartney says he can remember the exact moment he knew the Beatles had made it. Early one morning, getting…
Books and Arts
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Hero and villain
There is a story told of Gough Whitlam as Prime Minister speaking with his Treasurer, Bill Hayden. It is late…
Management consultancy! Sculpture park! Sports stadium! The many faces of the Delphic Oracle
Sam Leith finds the most sacred site of Ancient Greece still a riddle wrapped in a mystery inside an enigma
‘A public urinal where ministers and officials queued up to leak’
Anyone brought up as I was in a Daily Express household in the 1950s — there were approaching 11 million…
Småland
Småland’s wooden cottages with sunflowers lack nothing. Brightly-painted, small in the distance like stories, they call the eye on and…
Fleet Street’s ‘wild Irish girl’
In her early days on Fleet Street, Mary Kenny, as she herself admits, was cast as ‘the wild Irish girl’,…
Recycling Sackville-West style
Here’s a book co-authored by one dead woman and one living one. Sarah Raven is the second wife of Adam…
The thrill of cutting into a human brain
In the first sentence of the first chapter of this book, Henry Marsh, a consultant brain surgeon, says, ‘I often…
Caught between a New Age rock and a theory junkie hard place
Siri Hustvedt’s new novel isn’t exactly an easy read — but the casual bookshop browser should be reassured that it’s…
Memoirs of an academic brawler
It’s a misleading title, because there is nothing unexpected about Professor Carey, in any sense. He doesn’t turn up to…
The making of a novelist
Karl Ove Knausgaard was eight months old when his family moved to the island of Tromøya; he left it aged…
The selfie from Akhenaten to Tracey Emin
If ever there was a time to write a book about self-portraits, this must be it. ‘Past interest in the…
