Books
Bookends: Shady people in the sun
Carla McKay’s The Folly of French Kissing (Gibson Square, £7.99) is a very funny, cynical tale about British expatriates in…
Bookends: Prep-school passions
In his introductory eulogy, Peter Parker calls In the Making: The Story of a Childhood (Penguin, £8.99) G. F. Green’s…
Bookends: Pure gold
Even nowadays, a 50-year career in pop music is a rare and wondrous thing, and for a woman triply so.…
Bookends: … and the inner tube
In the early 1990s, when Boris Johnson was making his name as the Daily Telegraph’s Brussels correspondent, Sonia Purnell was…
Bookends: Tilling tales
Several years ago, I listed as my literary heroes Herbert Pocket in Great Expectations and E. F. Benson’s Lucia. The…
Bookends: Disarming but disingenuous
At first glance, Be the Worst You Can Be (Booth-Clibborn Editions, £9.99) by Charles Saatchi (pictured above with his wife,…
Bookends: Terribly Tudor
History publishers like a gimmick, so I assumed Suzannah Lipscomb’s A Visitor’s Companion to Tudor England (Ebury, £12.99) must be…
Bookends: A matter of opinion
In an age when the merely mildly curious believe they can get all they really need to know from Wikipedia…
Bookends: A life of gay abandon
Sometimes, only the purest smut will do. Scotty Bowers’s memoir, Full Service: My Adventures in Hollywood and the Secret Sex…
Bookends: Down on the farm
Can we please have an inquiry into why already talented people are allowed to go off and be brilliant at…
Bookends: Wasp without a sting
‘It may be hard to accept that a chaste teenage girl can end up in bed with the President of…
Bookends: Dickensian byways
Is there room for yet another book on Dickens? Probably not, but we’ll have it anyway. The Dickens Dictionary (Icon,…
Bookends: A network of kidney-nappers
Raylan Givens, an ace detective in the Raymond Chandler mould, has encountered just about every shakedown artist and palooka in…
Bookends: Short and sweet
Before texts and Twitter there were postcards. Less hi-tech, but they kept people in touch. Angela Carter (pictured above) and…
Bookends: Trouble and strife
It isn’t true that Joanna Trollope (pictured above) only produces novels about the kind of people who have an Aga…
Bookends: Doors of perception
Unlike most of the old rockers he writes about, the esteemed US critic Greil Marcus is becoming more prolific as…
Bookends: The year of living dangerously
Most people who recall 1976 do so for its appallingly hot summer, when parks turned brown and roads melted. Some…
Bookends: A shaggy beast of a book
Autobiography is a tricky genre to get right, which may be why so many well-known people keep having another go…
Bookends: An unreal world
Even by Hollywood standards, Carrie Fisher is pretty crazy. She was born a Hollywood princess, and remembers her parents —…
Bookends: A metropolitan menagerie
London has always loved its animals. James I kept elephants in St James’s Park (allowed a gallon of wine per…
Bookends: Saving JFK
Stephen King’s latest novel is a time-travel fantasy about the assassination of John F. Kennedy. At almost 750 pages, 11.22.63…
Bookends: No joke being a comedian
Failure is the very stuff of comedy, but not of showbiz memoirs, so Small Man in a Book (Michael Joseph,…
Bookends: Not filthy enough
The Pursued (Penguin, £12.99) is a lost crime thriller by C. S. Forester, the author of the Hornblower novels. It…
Bookends: About a boy
The Go-Between was L.P. Hartley’s best novel, Joseph Losey’s best film, and probably Harold Pinter’s best screenplay. In the novel,…
Bookends: Spirit of place
A new book by Ronald Blythe is something of an event. In recent years the bard of Akenfield has mostly…
