Books
Biting back
Edward St Aubyn’s new novel is a jauntily malicious satire on literary prizes in general, the Man Booker Prize in…
For God, King and Country
Flags and flowers: three bloody years worked in silk. At the needle’s eye stand easy, ghost, slip through my fingers…
Mastering a dead language…
The wisest words about learning Latin were said by that gifted prep-school boy, Nigel Molesworth: ‘Actually, it is quite easy…
… and beefing up a living one
I’ve always said that speech is my second language, so naturally I’m somewhat slang-shy; I love words all written down…
Books and arts
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Tripping through psychedelia
The Exploding Galaxy flashed brightly in the black-and-white world that was just coming to an end as I was growing…
For God, King and Country
Flags and flowers: three bloody years worked in silk. At the needle’s eye stand easy, ghost, slip through my fingers…
Tripping through psychedelia
The Exploding Galaxy flashed brightly in the black-and-white world that was just coming to an end as I was growing…
For God, King and Country
Flags and flowers: three bloody years worked in silk. At the needle’s eye stand easy, ghost, slip through my fingers…
Up close and personal
In recycling his most intimate encounters as fiction – including amazing feats of promiscuity in small-town New England – John Updike drew unashamedly on his own experiences for inspiration, says Philip Hensher
The poor man in his castle
Servicemen used paintings as dartboards. Schoolchildren dismantled banisters and paneling for firewood. Architects from the Ministry of Works acted like…
Recent crime fiction
Louise Welsh rarely repeats herself, a quality to celebrate in a crime novelist. Her latest novel, A Lovely Way to…
X marks the stop
In 1964, as part of his railway cuts, Dr Beeching ordered the closure of Duncraig, a small, little-used station in…
Prisoners of conscience
Thomas Keneally has constructed his latest novel around a framework of true events: the mass break-out of Japanese PoWs from…
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
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‘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…
