Books
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…
