Books
Bookends: The showbiz Boris Johnson
Amiability can take you a long way in British public life. James Corden is no fool: he co-wrote and co-starred…
Bookends: Circling the Square Mile
You want the two-word review of this new book about the City? ‘London porn.’ For those of you with more…
Bookends: Squelch of the bladder-wrack
What’s not to like about Candida Lycett Green’s Seaside Resorts (Oldie Publications, £14.99)? Lovely colour photographs of over 100 of…
Bookends: Getting it perfect
There is an old joke which says that if you are lost in the desert, start making a salad dressing…
Bookends
Political sketchwriting, like most humorous writing, is one of those things that looks easy, especially to people who would never…
Bookends
Joan Collins first came to public notice in the 1950s, as a Rank starlet and sex kitten. In the 1970s…
Bookends
One day in the late 17th century, goes the legend, a French monk named Pierre called out to his colleagues:…
Bookends
Harry Enfield has said that ‘comedy without Galton and Simpson would be like literature without Dickens,’ and he may be…
Bookends
Dr Temperance Brenner, like her creator, Kathy Reichs, is a forensic anthropologist. She works in North Carolina, specialising in ‘decomps…
Bookends
‘Owl?’ said Pooh. ‘What’s a biography?’ ‘A biography,’ replied Owl, ‘is an Important Book. Such as an Interested Person might…
Bookends: The Jazz Baroness
She was born Kathleen Annie Pannonica Rothschild. Her father, Nathaniel Charles Rothschild, an ardent lepidopterist, named her Pannonica, Nica for…
Bookends: Laughing by the book
Comedy is a serious business. The number of young people who seek to make a living making other people laugh…
Bookends
Of all the great cultural shifts of recent years, the rise to respectability of American comics may be the strangest.…
Bookends: Corpses in the coal hole
Ruth Rendell has probably pulled more surprises on her readers than any other crime writer. But the one she produces…
Bookends: A friend of mine
A friend of mine was throttled by Pete Postlethwaite once. It was outside a TV studio, people were smoking and…
Bookends
I like books with weather and there’s plenty in this one, all bad, which is even better. Set in London…
Bookends: Scourge of New Labour
Like all politicians, Bob Marshall-Andrews is fond of quoting himself, and Off Message (Profile Books, £16.99) includes a generous selection…
Bookends: Not just for Christmas
Sticky at Christmas, packed in serried rows around a plastic twig in an oval-ended paper-wrapped box with a picture of…
Bookends: Venice improper
Books about Venice are almost as numerous as gondolas on the Grand Canal, but Robin Saikia is the first to…
Bookends: When will there be good news?
I am in love with Jackson Brodie. Does this mean that, in a literary homoerotic twist, I am actually in…
Bookends: Lowe and behold
It is 1979. You are a 15-year-old boy starring in a hit US television show. You’ve seen the crowds of…
Bookends: Bloodbath
It may have been first published in 1973, but reading it again in Persephone Books’ elegant re-print, Adam Fergusson’s The…
Bookends
In the summer of 2003, in a bar in Malta, George Best was approached by a man holding a paper…
Bookends: The voice of the lobster
In existence for over 250 millions years, lobsters come in two distinct varieties, ‘clawed and clawless’. Human predators tend to…
Bookends: Unbalanced chorus
Imagine a 77-year-old woman hanging around, say, Leicester bus station, telling people about her life. She confides her belief that…
