Books
Tales of the Wild East
The brutality and folly of Russia’s bid to conquer America has the makings of grand tragicomedy says Sam Leith
When every captain was a Nelson
‘I never before came across a man whom I could fancy being a Napoleon or a Nelson…His ascendancy over everybody…
The great American nightmare
Colonel Eli McCullough, formerly known as Tiehteti, is a living legend. The first male child born in the Republic of…
They weren’t all shooting up or shooting each other
Rift Valley, Kenya The other day when I told the headmaster of a top British public school that I came…
The stoic approach
A friend of mine who works for the NHS has been told recently by a superior that his ‘attention to…
Men of mystery
People, they say, want different things from a book over the summer than they do the rest of the year.…
Inspiration from the past
Pastoral elegy is not what you expect to find in a collection of short stories, but then Ali Smith is…
On a wing and a prayer
‘A world without birds would lay waste the human heart,’ writes Mark Cocker. Following his Birds Britannica and prize-winning Crow…
Books and Arts
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In the bunker
The rusted-on supporters of the ALP must wonder how it came to this. Six years ago, the ALP was on…
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Conspicuous consumption
Margaret MacMillan says that the ostentation of the Edwardian Age focuses the mind painfully on the horror that was so quickly to follow
Blindness and madness
An abandoned lunatic asylum, a nasty pornographer in a wheelchair, a bizarre glass-ceilinged viewing dome beneath a scummy lake, a…
Saints and sinners
There is always meat in Michael Arditti’s novels. He is a writer who presents moral problems via fiction but is…
Looking at books
The sexy thing this summer, as the TV ads tell us, is the e-book. Forget those old 1,000-page blockbusters, two…
Was Machiavelli a Machiavellian?
One more anniversary, one more cache of commemorative books. This time we are celebrating the half-millennium since Niccolò Machiavelli produced…
Crime and no punishment
Edward Jay Epstein is an American investigative journalist, now in his late seventies, who has spent at least half a…
Riding for Rwanda
This is a book about Rwanda. It’s a book about cycling. But it’s not, in the end, a book about…
Waiting for the Train
Early spring cherry blossom by the tracks — so prim and so dirty, all at once. The bees must be…
Waving, not drowning
Conductors love telling stories, especially stories about other conductors, and every chapter of this otherwise determinedly pragmatic book begins with…
Books and Arts
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Victorian values
Philip Hensher says that Churchill’s engagement with the empire does not reveal him at his finest hour
Land of hope and envy
Mark Mills is known for his historical and literary crime novels, including The Savage Garden, The Information Officer and House…
No satisfaction
For Stuart Maconie fans, this book might sound as if it’ll be his masterpiece. In his earlier memoirs and travelogues,…
Good timing
‘Value and worth in any of the arts has always been about timing,’ writes British director Nicolas Roeg at the…
