Books
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…
The very odd couple
Ian Thomson on a miserable mismatch that became the talk of Buenos Aires in the Sixties
From pillar to crag
At the opposite end of the Continent to ourselves, Sicily has always been an attraction for the English who, from…
Hints of beauty
This stout and well-designed volume nicely complements Tim Hilton’s classic biography of John Ruskin. It is the catalogue for the…
Who’s raiding the fridge?
There is a problem with describing what happens in Nagasaki: impossible to reveal much of the plot without flagging up…
Mildly indigestible
Fiction ‘So how come we’re in the same book?’ Paul from The Stranger’s Child asked Florence from On Chesil Beach.…
A shot in the dark
Amid the vast tonnage of recent books about the first world war this must be the most unusual — and…
Anthem for lost youth
Patrick McGuinness’s prose trembles on the edge of poetry, occasionally indeed tipping gently over into it. This is thoroughly characteristic…
Hamlet without the prince
In the summer of 1955 a group of finals students trooped into a classroom at the Royal Academy of Dramatic…
Models for Marlowe
If the inclusion of the erstwhile master of the genre, Raymond Chandler, as a fictonalised character in a pastiche 1930s…
The rubble of the past
The term ‘psychological thriller’ is an elastic one these days, tagged liberally on to any story of suspense that explores…
Tripping through psychedelia
Hugo Williams describes his early association with The Exploding Galaxy — a group of innovative artists, musicians, poets and dancers that burst on the London scene in the late 1960s
