Books
The road to bestsellerdom
Christopher Maclehose recalls his dealings with the author of the Flashman novels, George Macdonald Fraser
The road to bestsellerdom
I met George Macdonald Fraser when he was the features editor of the Glasgow Herald. He was a very good…
The road to bestsellerdom
I met George Macdonald Fraser when he was the features editor of the Glasgow Herald. He was a very good…
A guide to life
Adam Nicolson plunges into Homer’s epic poetry and finds it inexhaustible. Sam Leith feels a touch of envy
A world without colour
Rachel Kelly, a respected former journalist on the Times, might seem the most blessed of women: five children, marriage to…
Seeeing the light
For all would-be novelists whose stumbling block is that they can’t resist describing every single sensation in depth — the…
Italy’s first computer wizard
Personally, I have always been sensitive about a credibility gap, a difference in prestige, between literary and visual cultures. More…
A modern Japanese master
Think haiku, netsuke, moss gardens… Small is beautiful. Japanese art, a scholar of the culture once commented, is great in…
Ruling the waves…
I faltered during the preface to this account of the rise of the female (British) diplomat. Helen McCarthy, a historian…
… and waiving the rules
Jean Trumpington’s memoir, published as she closes in on her 92nd birthday, is an absolute blast from the opening page.…
Books and arts
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With enemies like these…
Rupert Murdoch’s last five years have been the worst of his career, but a new biography by Sydney University’s Rodney Tiffen is so unfair that even Peter Oborne, one of the newspaper magnate’s severest critics, found himself warming to him
Bold history
This is a bold attempt to write the history of Australia in 1,200 pages of narrative. A huge team of…
Radical nationalist
Many of Australia’s former prime ministers have been content to spend their political afterlife stoking the embers of their own…
Books and arts
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God save England
The patriotism of the Great War’s finest poets was neither narrow nor triumphalist but reflected an intense devotion to an endangered country and to a way of life worth dying for, says David Crane
How to read well
What the title promises is not found inside. It is a tease. John Sutherland says he has ‘been paid one…
Gently does it
The word delicate is seldom a compliment. I once threw a saucepan of hot soup out of a fifth storey…
Botched Italian job
Italy entered the second world war in circumstances very similar to those in which it signed up for the first.…
Led a merry dance
When Robert Sackville-West was writing Inheritance (2010), his history of Knole and the Sackvilles, he was ‘struck’, as he recalls…
Not for the squeamish
Jonathan Meades, the architectural, food and cultural commentator, appears on television in a pair of retro shades and a trademark…
Portrait of the artist
In Dylan Thomas’s centenary year, Hilly Janes recalls her father’s friendship with the poet and his visits to the Boat House at Laugharne
A noble cause
I supported Australia’s Vietnam commitment in the decade between 1965 (when the Menzies Coalition government deployed combat forces to South…
Portrait of the artist
Who the hell was Dylan Thomas? Boozer, womaniser, sponger, charlatan — or master craftsman, besotted husband, generosity personified and one…
Portrait of the artist
Who the hell was Dylan Thomas? Boozer, womaniser, sponger, charlatan — or master craftsman, besotted husband, generosity personified and one…
