Books
Notes from a big country
The esteemed literary critic, serial academic and one-time Marxist firebrand Terry Eagleton is, at 70, still producing books at an…
Notes from a big country
The esteemed literary critic, serial academic and one-time Marxist firebrand Terry Eagleton is, at 70, still producing books at an…
Hunting for bogeymen
Here is how you make a conspiracy theory: take a couple of facts, stir in a few assumptions, then add…
The useful Colonel Houses
Franklin Delano Roosevelt was determined to get the measure of Britain’s wartime prime minister Winston Churchill, and of Britain’s chances…
Disraeli, by Douglas Hurd; The Great Rivalry, by Dick Leonard - review
Sam Leith finds shades of Jeffrey Archer and Boris Johnson in the 19th-century prime minister
The Charleston Bulletin Supplements, by Virginia Woolf and Quentin Bell
The Charleston Bulletin was a family newspaper produced between 1923 and 1927 by the teenaged Quentin Bell and his elder…
Building: Letters, 1960–1975, by Isaiah Berlin
This is the third volume of Isaiah Berlin letters; one more to go. Discerning critics have showered the first two…
Rousseau and the Tiger
This is the Tiger and this is Rousseau. This is the picture I painted to show That this is the…
Seaweeds, by Ole G. Mouritsen - review
On 14 April each year, nori fishermen gather on a hillside overlooking Ariake Bay on Kyushu in southern Japan to…
The history girl
Ronald Knox, found awake aged four by a nanny, was asked what he was thinking about, and he replied ‘the…
She Landed by Moonlight, by Carole Seymour-Jones - review
The subtitle of Carole Seymour-Jones’s quietly moving biography of the brilliant SOE agent Pearl Witherington is ‘the real Charlotte Gray’.…
how to get a life
just to tell you there is nothing better almost nothing better than getting into bed in the middle of the…
The Unwinding, by George Packer - review
The Unwinding is a rather classy addition to the thriving genre of American apocalypse porn. The basic thesis can be…
The Authors XI, by The Authors Cricket Club - review
We were never going to get ‘come to the party’ or ‘a hundred and ten per cent’ from The Authors…
Books and Arts
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A wicket way with words
We were never going to get ‘come to the party’ or ‘a hundred and ten per cent’ from The Authors…
A wicket way with words
We were never going to get ‘come to the party’ or ‘a hundred and ten per cent’ from The Authors…
Music & Monarchy, by David Starkey - review
Music has always been integral to the image and power of monarchy. Our present Royal family should take note, says Jonathan Keate
Horace and Me, by Harry Eyres - review
After Zorba the Greek, here comes Horace the Roman. The peasant Zorba, you’ll remember from the film, releases uptight, genteel…
Laidlaw by William McIlvanney - review
Laidlaw was first published in 1977, 36 years back from now, 38 on from The Big Sleep. Like Chandler’s classic…
Adhocism, by Charles Jencks - review
Here, for time travellers, is the whack-job spirit of ’68 in distillate form, paperbound and reissued in facsimile (with some…
Foreign Policy Begins at Home, by Richard N. Haass - review
A year or so after the ‘liberation’ of Iraq, an unnamed senior Bush administration official (later revealed to be Karl…
Against Their Will, by Allen M. Hornblum - review
After the Morecambe Bay Hospital scandal a new era opens of compassion, -whistle-blowing, naming names and possible prosecutions. But what…
Dark Actors, by Robert Lewis - review
No book about Dr David Kelly could start anywhere other than at the end. Kelly is found, dead, in a…
Jane Gardam on Barbara Comyns - essay
The Vet’s Daughter is Barbara Comyns’s fourth and most startling novel. Written in 1959 when she was 50 it is…
