Books
Old hippies never die
We all know that if you can remember the Sixties you weren’t really there. But Graham Nash, of the Hollies,…
The missing word game
Mark Twain had a notoriously thorny relationship with German, a language he gamely tried to conquer. His main beef was…
Let them eat glue
Skip this book if you dislike dogs, or even if you are indifferent to them, or echo an acquaintance of…
Openly taking sides
This is a curious book. Its title and the name of its publisher suggest that it is going to be…
Grace under pressure
Ask any England cricket fan in his fifties to name his favourite batsman and chances are he will say David…
Books and Arts
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The world according to Bob
Apparently, Ellis believes that the year 2011 was as important as 1848. He never explains why, exactly. He seems to…
Grace under pressure
Ask any England cricket fan in his fifties to name his favourite batsman and chances are he will say David…
Grace under pressure
Ask any England cricket fan in his fifties to name his favourite batsman and chances are he will say David…
Diplomatic meltdown
In pre-1914 cosmopolitan society, everyone seemed to be related — ambassadors as well as monarchs. But increased militarisation was fast obliterating old family ties, says Jane Ridley
Breaking omertà
According to the medical historian Professor Sonu Shamdasani, Sigmund Freud was not the best, nor actually the most interesting, psychoanalyst…
From underdog to top dog
When we think of David and Goliath, we think of a young man, not very big, who has a fight…
Salad days
The early 1990s in Russia were hungry years. At the time, I was a student, too idle to barter and…
Dutch comfort
Donna Tartt is an expert practitioner of what David Hare has called ‘the higher hokum’. She publishes a long novel…
Black and beyond
When Prince Albert died in 1861, aged 42, Queen Victoria, after briefly losing the use of her legs, ordered that…
Once upon a time there were…
If you are going to read a novel that plays with literary conventions you want it written with aplomb. In…
China’s iron lady
For susceptible Englishmen of a certain inclination — like Sir Edmund Backhouse or George Macdonald Fraser — the Empress Dowager…
Grand old master of modernism
How minor is minor? ‘Rings a bell’ was more or less the response of two English literature graduates, now successful…
Funny, warm and eccentric
It must have been awful for Diana and Duff Cooper to be separated from their only child during the war,…
Books and Arts
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Sour mixture
This book purports to be the story of the 2013 election. It is not clear why it makes that claim,…
This other Eden
Sam Leith is transported by the finest scenery in England
Bloom and bust
‘How could a man who has loved light and flowers so much and has rendered them so well, how could…
An Affair to remember
The Dreyfus Affair, the furore caused by a miscarriage of justice in France in 1894, is a source of perennial…
Best of enemies
The Great War was an obscene and futile conflict laying waste a generation and toppling emperors. Yet here are two…
