Books
A pioneer at heart
Richard Davenport-Hines on the tomboy from Red Cloud whose evocation of the vast, unforgiving landscape of the prairies is unrivalled
Redemption with laughs
Harry Christmas, the central character of this bitterly funny debut novel, is a middle- aged, overweight alcoholic, with no friends…
Swan song from Yerevan
Vasily Grossman, a Ukranian-born Jew, was a war correspondent for the Soviet army newspaper Red Star. His dispatches from the…
Epic journeys
Consider for a moment the plight of the willow warbler. Russian birds of this species fly between eastern Siberia and…
Life in the Augean stables
What, really, is a literary education for? What’s the point of it? How, precisely, does it help when you’re another…
Decorous Confessions
Unexpectedly, he made a sober success with his self-published book of decorous confessions. It eschewed turmoil in the bedchamber and…
Escape through the locks
The title, the subtitle, the author’s plain name, even the jacket’s photograph of a laughing old lady in sunglasses: none…
Je ne regrette rien
Verdi’s La Traviata is the story of a courtesan who is redeemed when she gives up the man she loves…
Pomp and severance
The Coronation Chair currently stands all spruced up, following last year’s conservation, under a crimson canopy, by the west entrance…
Where are our garlic-breathing Gallic bretheren?
Oh the French! Where would the Anglo publishing industry be without them? Ever since Peter Mayle first made goo-goo eyes…
Books and Arts
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Born to rule
Depending on how you look at it, the Chinese Communist Party is either the last non-ridiculous bastion of Marxism, an…
Born to rule
Depending on how you look at it, the Chinese Communist Party is either the last non-ridiculous bastion of Marxism, an…
History’s great success story
The Tudors, England’s most glamorous ruling dynasty, were self-invented parvenus, with ‘vile and barbarous’ origins, Anne Somerset reminds us
My companion for life
There are books we read for pleasure and there are books we are paid to review. However enjoyable the books…
Loved and lost
Author has late-blossoming romance with authoress, both divorcees, and they live together in a cramped house in Harrogate full of…
The urban peasant diet
You know that something’s afoot when Lakeland says so. Lakeland is the kitchenware company which has more of a finger…
Set in a silver sea
‘Tom Island’ — that was the name I was given once by a girl I met on an island in…
No shrinking Violet
Evelyn Waugh once recalled the anguish with which he greeted Edith Sitwell’s announcement that ‘Mr Waugh, you may call me…
A monumental testimony
With Spain’s economic crisis in the forefront of global news, it would be fascinating to see what a reporter of…
The muse in the bottle
The boozer’s life is one of low self-esteem and squalid self-denial. It was memorably evoked by Charles Jackson in his…
A fascist’s fireside chat
This book may sound like it’s going to be about high fashion, but it’s actually about Nazism, satanism, incest and…
Dublin’s dark heart
It’s always a little disconcerting for the rest of us when literary novelists turn to crime. Have they become different…
When the picturesque turns ugly
Under his real name, Charles James Stranks, the author of this little masterpiece wrote on a number of ecclesiastical subjects:…
Books and Arts
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