Books
Money to burn
The robber barons of the gilded age, at the turn of the 20th century, were the most ruthless accumulators of…
Bachelor girl
Call me a crazy old physiognomist, but my theory is that you can always spot a lesbian by her big…
Derring-do in Salonica
It is difficult to know whether Clive Aslet intended a comparison between his debut novel, The Birdcage, set in Salonica…
Bribery and seduction
‘No, we must go our own way,’ said Lenin. The whole world knows him as Vladimir, while he was in…
Pussy’s in the well
During the second world war, when not only food, but paper and artists’ materials were scarce, Peggy Angus made a…
A choice of recent crime fiction
Philip Kerr is best known for his excellent Bernie Gunther series about a detective trying to survive with his integrity…
The green opium of the people
I was in Shanghai interviewing a Chinese film director and an actor. We were discussing government censorship. How did anyone…
A life derailed
When Haruki Murakami — Japan’s most successful novelist at home and abroad — was interviewed by the Paris Review in…
Rosa Wedding Day
More than a thousand buds have arrived in the garden. Yesterday I looked and there were none. Tangled into a…
Books and arts
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Muslim integration
Growing up is hard enough at any time; coping with additional cross-currents of race and religion is a whole new…
Rosa Wedding Day
More than a thousand buds have arrived in the garden. Yesterday I looked and there were none. Tangled into a…
Rosa Wedding Day
More than a thousand buds have arrived in the garden. Yesterday I looked and there were none. Tangled into a…
Brushes with fame
Philip Hensher on the precarious fortunes of even the most gifted 19th-century artists
Mr Nice Guy
I’m not making a picture [The Green Berets] about Vietnam, I’m making a picture about good against bad. I happen…
Stale, male and beyond the pale
This has all the appearance of a book invented by a publisher. Two years ago W. Sydney Robinson published an…
All that the British countryside has to offer
The Yale Center for British Art holds the largest collection of British art outside the UK. An impressive collection it…
Looking on the bright side
If Vincent Poklewski Koziell has really drunk as much as he claims in this book I doubt he would be…
Back in the mists of time
Most crime novels offer a curious kind of escape, to places that jag the nerves and worry the mind. Their…
Never say die
Winston Churchill once said of politics that it’s ‘almost as exciting as war and quite as dangerous. In war you…



























