Books
The gambler’s daily grind
Lord Doyle is a shrivelled English gambler frittering away his money and destroying his liver in the casinos of Macau.…
Beauty in beastly surroundings
The vast majority of books written about British gardens and their histories are concerned with large ones, made and maintained,…
Books and arts
Got something to add? Join the discussion and comment below.
‘Qui, moi?’
In 2008, Bob Carr was on an ABC panel show, pontificating about the wisdom of decisions of the US Supreme…
Recent crime fiction
Louise Welsh rarely repeats herself, a quality to celebrate in a crime novelist. Her latest novel, A Lovely Way to…
Recent crime fiction
Louise Welsh rarely repeats herself, a quality to celebrate in a crime novelist. Her latest novel, A Lovely Way to…
Politics as Victorian melodrama
The egotistical Churchill may have viewed the second world war as pure theatre, but that was exactly what was needed at the time, says Sam Leith
‘Draw lines, young man’
Lucian Freud once said that ‘being able to draw well is the hardest thing — far harder than painting, as…
Stirrings of mutiny
Mysore, once the capital of a princely kingdom in South India, has lost its lustre. In Mahesh Rao’s darkly comic…
The stain of luxury
In Midnight in Paris, Woody Allen did a good job of showing how foolish it is to be obsessed by…
A fictional country split in two
Sudan — a country that ceased to exist in 2011 — is or was one of the last untouristed wildernesses…
More brickbats from the old buffer
After Dear Lupin and Dear Lumpy, here’s a slightly more prosaically titled collection of letters from Roger Mortimer, longtime racing…
A lovable failure
Sebastian Barry’s new novel opens with a bang, as a German torpedo hits a supply ship bound for the Gold…
Booked for murder
Like teenage children and their parents, authors and publishers have a symbiotic relationship characterised by well-justified irritation on both sides.…
Shadows on the wall
‘Take away, utterly extinct and destroy all shrines … pictures, paintings and all other monuments of feigned miracles, pilgrimages, idolatry…
A way with the stars
Many people write, or at least used to write, fan letters to their film favourites. Usually all they received in…
Books and arts
Got something to add? Join the discussion and comment below.
Letting go
We are not, by our nature, a militaristic people, and it is significant that our most well-known military venture was…
Power to the people
Alan Johnson cannot accept that the best days of the British working class are over
Scones and Bloomsberries for tea
I have to declare an interest: as a scion of the Bloomsbury Group, I was naturally brought up on their…
Jokes? Prayers? Fables?
One of these is by Lydia Davis, acclaimed American writer. One is not. They are whole pieces, by the way,…
An expert castle-squatter
When Nick Hunt first read Patrick Leigh Fermor’s account of his youthful trudge across Europe in A Time of Gifts…
A stranger in his own land
Who or what was Michael Oakeshott? How many of our fellow citizens — how many even of the readers of…
Noble cities of the dead
The first visitor to take a break on the Bay of Naples was Hercules. He had just defeated some rebellious…
A powerful inspiration
Everyone knows about the Spanish civil war, first battlefield in the struggle that broke out in 1936 and ended nine…
