Books
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
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…
