Books
Lovely, enchanting language
When John Drury, himself an Anglican divine, told James Fenton (the son of a canon of Christ Church) that he…
Vichy from the inside
There can be few characters in modern fiction more unpleasant than Paul-Jean Husson, the narrator in Romain Slocombe’s Monsieur le…
Dishing the dirt
Is poetry in good enough health to be made fun of in this way? The irony is that this long,…
Cheap and cheerful
Mrs Thatcher was widely believed to have said that ‘any man over the age of 26 who finds himself on…
No use crying over spilt blood
Simon Sebag Montefiore’s One Night in Winter begins in the hours immediately following the solemn victory parade that marked the…
Giving Jonathan a drubbing
Peter Snow explains that he decided to look into this extraordinary story when he realised how few people knew about…
An elegant command
Alan Bennett once overheard an old lady say, ‘I think a knighthood was wasted on Derek Jacobi,’ and I know…
Basic instincts
What do women want? You might have thought the Wife of Bath had got this one sorted, but Daniel Bergner…
The rise of the politicians
This book expresses what is being more and more widely felt in English-speaking and other western countries: government is becoming…
Books and Arts
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Darling Flufftail … beloved Pinkpaws
The correspondence between Christopher Isherwood and Don Bachardy is good for celebrity-spotting but too cloyingly self-absorbed to be of wider interest, says D. J. Taylor
Another Old Wives’ Tale
Sathnam Sanghera, in his family memoir The Boy with the Topknot, heaped much largely affectionate contempt and ridicule on his…
Master of suspense
In the outrageous 2010 press hounding of the innocent schoolteacher Christopher Jefferies over the murder of his young female tenant…
The power of the word
The recorder of early Jewish history has two sources of evidence. One is the Bible. Its centrality was brought home…
Shady groves of academe
The scene is the common room of All Souls College, Oxford, in the first week of March 1963. It is…
The name game
In South Korea, some 20 million people share just five surnames. Every one of Denmark’s top 20 surnames ends in…
Driving me crazy
My various Oxford dictionaries define bizarre as eccentric, whimsical, odd, grotesque, fantastic, mixed in style and half-barbaric. By so many…
Pericles for king
My brother Pericles Wyatt, as my father liked to say, is by blood the rightful king of England, the nephew…
All work and no play
Stage Blood, as its title suggests, is as full of vitriol, back-stabbing and conspiracy as any Jacobean tragedy. In this…
Flower power
After the success of their animal series of monographs, Reaktion Books have had the clever idea of doing something similar…
Back to the camps
Confronted by this lavishly endorsed book — ‘compelling’ (David Lodge), ‘gripping’(John le Carré),‘thrilling’ (Jonathan Freedland) — I felt depressed. Two…
A unique capacity for personal egotism
It is peculiarly apt that the author of this autobiography should be the man who coined that now fashionable term…
Poker
To Dad You wonder if it’s worth the gamble getting up out of your armchair onto your bad leg, to…
Belgian fancy
In 1958 a vast international trade fair was held just outside Brussels. As well as being a showcase for industry,…
Donkeys led by donkeys
David Crane is taken aback by the particular contempt Max Hastings appears to reserve for the British at the outbreak of the first world war
