Books
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
Doctor in a toga
In the first draft of the screenplay for the film Gladiator, the character to be played by Russell Crowe (‘father…
A world without Wallis
In both his novels and non-fiction, D. J. Taylor has long been fascinated by the period between the wars. Now…
Friends before foes
Like Miranda Seymour, the author of this considerable work on Anglo-German relations, I was raised in a Germanophile home. I…
Building a Bridge
I didn’t even have to say: No need to explain, I understand. It was in his look — Look after…
Get Shorty
It is by now surely beyond doubt that those governments committed to fighting the war on drugs — and on…
The leader who followed
The historian of China Frank Dikötter has taken a sledgehammer to demolish perhaps the last remaining shibboleth of modern Chinese…
Multilingual Chinese whispers
There is a hoary Cold War joke about a newly invented translating machine. On a test run, the CIA scientists…
Not just a pretty dress
Every fashion era has its monster and in ours it’s Karl Lagerfeld, a man who has so emptied himself on…
The hero of Burma
Given the outcome of recent military campaigns in Iraq and Afghanistan, it is pertinent to look for one particular quality…
Taking the rap
Since his suicide, David Foster Wallace has made the transition from major writer to major industry. Hence this UK issue…
It’s never too late
In 1998, the Jamaican singer Bounty Killer released a single, ‘Can’t Believe Mi Eyes’, which expressed incredulity that men should…
