Books
Angel of mercy or angel of death?
On 28 August 2005 — Sheri Fink’s Day One — Hurricane Katrina reached New Orleans. The National Weather Service warned…
The great pamphlet war
What is the origin of left and right in politics? The traditional answer is that these ideas derive from the…
A place of rough justice
There are writers whose prose style is so fluid, so easy, the reader feels as though he has been taken…
Plumes over the prairies
When John Buchan was appointed Governor General of Canada in 1935, the country was deep in depression, the western provinces…
Loss, grief and guilt
About 30 pages in and unable to find my bearings, I flipped to the end of this novel — well,…
Corpses and clichés
Isabel Allende is not an author one usually associates with the thrillers about serial killers. Ripper, however, lives up to…
A&E
If this waiting is hellish, then the sick are limbo dancing; only those who are bent double, or on the…
Books and Arts
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A&E
If this waiting is hellish, then the sick are limbo dancing; only those who are bent double, or on the…
A&E
If this waiting is hellish, then the sick are limbo dancing; only those who are bent double, or on the…
The great land grab
The highly profitable — and intrinsically selfish — system of land ownership that replaced medieval feudal tenure had profound moral consequences that continue to this day, says John Adamson
A tireless networker
We critics seldom write our memoirs, perhaps because we skulk away our lives in dark corners, avoiding the public gaze,…
Back to her native roots
Like an old woman in a fairy story, Germaine Greer, now in her late seventies, has taken to lurking in…
Cats in feathers
Owls have more associations for us than perhaps any other family of birds, suggested Jeremy Mynott in Birdscapes, so it…
An elephant in our midst
On 15 September 1885, the world’s most famous elephant, Jumbo, was killed by a train. Jumbo, the star attraction at…
Guns and neuroses
William S. Burroughs lived his life in the grand transgressive tradition of Lord Byron and Oscar Wilde and, like all…
The halo slips further
Tom Bower’s first biography of Sir Richard Branson, in 2000, was memorable for its hilarious account of the Virgin tycoon’s…
Unmade in Chelsea
Once below a time (to quote the man himself) the bloated poet Dylan Thomas slouched back to New York’s Chelsea…
Books and Arts
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The new Garnaut Report
Yes, economics really is a dismal science, if this book is to be believed. Even when things are going right,…
The lure of Europe
A tour of the Continent was a prerequisite for young Jacobean noblemen training for statesmanship — provided they resisted its corrupting influence, says Blair Worden
The game of consequences
No one alive now has any adult experience of the first world war, but still it shows no sign of…
Portrait of a marriage
In Never Mind Miss Fox, Olivia Glazebrook’s second novel, the revelation of a long buried secret releases a Pandora’s Box…
Love in a Cold War climate
Sex, spies, aristocrats and atom bombs — the Profumo affair is in the news again, thanks to the recent Andrew…
Ornithology
‘The Wood Thrush can sing a duet by itself, using Two separate voices,’ as opposed To the whip-bird, one cry,…
