Books
Between the broad and the high
Oriel was only the fifth college to be founded in Oxford, in 1326. Although it has gone through periods of…
All the gossip from London and Paris
Sir Brian Unwin leads off with some decidedly questionable assertions. He wonders why the first of his two subjects, the…
Blue-sky thinking
‘Life is bristling with thorns,’ Voltaire observed in 1769, ‘and I know no other remedy than to cultivate one’s garden.’…
Garbo’s mystique
With two new biographies of Kim Philby out, an espionage drama by Sir David Hare on BBC2, and the recent…
April
Spring again But from where no telling Sweet as the spring That went before…
The class that got left behind
In the 2010 general election, Ukip gained nearly a million votes — over 3 per cent — three times as…
Bark and no bite
With so much Nordic noir around, it’s a relief to return to the granddaddy of them all, the hard-boiled private…
Forever on the march
On a recent weekend I was thinking of taking my sons to downtown Istanbul to do some bazaar browsing. ‘Bad…
Books and Arts
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April
Spring again But from where no telling Sweet as the spring That went before…
April
Spring again But from where no telling Sweet as the spring That went before…
A champion of liberal reform
Roy Jenkins may have been snobbish and self-indulgent, but he was also a visionary and man of principle who would have made a good prime minister, says Philip Ziegler
The sound of nervous laughter
It isn’t very often that a writer’s work is so striking that you can remember exactly where and when you…
Paving the road to hell
When presented with a 639-page doorstopper which includes 82 pages of closely-written sources, notes and index, most of us feel…
Main currents of history
The clue is in the title: this is not about the blue-grey-green wet stuff that covers 70 per cent of…
How many times have I told you?
As a sign of the way things have changed, nothing could better this. Hester Vaizey, Cambridge history don and ‘publishing…
Directing the war effort
John Ford was the first of the five famous Hollywood film directors to go to war. He went expecting to…
With death came glory
Eschewing the biblical advertising of ‘the promised land’ or indeed ‘a land of milk and honey’, the Conservative colonial secretary…
Put your lips together and blow
Paul McCartney says he can remember the exact moment he knew the Beatles had made it. Early one morning, getting…
Books and Arts
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Hero and villain
There is a story told of Gough Whitlam as Prime Minister speaking with his Treasurer, Bill Hayden. It is late…
‘Tell it not in the future’
Sam Leith finds the most sacred site of Ancient Greece still a riddle wrapped in a mystery inside an enigma
Who knows wins
Anyone brought up as I was in a Daily Express household in the 1950s — there were approaching 11 million…
Småland
Småland’s wooden cottages with sunflowers lack nothing. Brightly-painted, small in the distance like stories, they call the eye on and…
In Fleet Street’s fast lane
In her early days on Fleet Street, Mary Kenny, as she herself admits, was cast as ‘the wild Irish girl’,…
