Books
Evil under the sun
The plot of The Quickening (Arrow/ Hammer, £9.99) by Julie Myerson (pictured) revolves around pregnant, newlywed Rachel and her sinister…
Evil under the sun
The plot of The Quickening (Arrow/ Hammer, £9.99) by Julie Myerson (pictured) revolves around pregnant, newlywed Rachel and her sinister…
Blue-sky dreaming
We don’t have an extreme climate, says Richard Mabey in Turned Out Nice Again (Profile, £8.99). We don’t have tsunamis,…
Blue-sky dreaming
We don’t have an extreme climate, says Richard Mabey in Turned Out Nice Again (Profile, £8.99). We don’t have tsunamis,…
Fight to the death
Not Dead Yet: Labor’s Post-Left Future By Mark Latham Black Inc Books, $19.95, pp 99 ISBN 9781863955973 This book, by…
All is not lost
Phyllida Law has a delightfully natural style, a gift for anecdote and the knack of seeing the funny side of…
All is not lost
Phyllida Law has a delightfully natural style, a gift for anecdote and the knack of seeing the funny side of…
A hero of folk
‘This Machine Kills Fascists’ was the ambitious slogan that Woody Guthrie (1912-1967) painted on his guitars. By fascists he meant…
A hero of folk
‘This Machine Kills Fascists’ was the ambitious slogan that Woody Guthrie (1912-1967) painted on his guitars. By fascists he meant…
Down to a T
There are normally three problems with reviews of books which, like This is the Way by Gavin Corbett (Fourth Estate,…
Down to a T
There are normally three problems with reviews of books which, like This is the Way by Gavin Corbett (Fourth Estate,…
Growing old disgracefully
Virginia Ironside’s novel, No! I Don’t Need Reading Glasses (Quercus £14.99) about a 65-year-old granny who belongs to a local…
Growing old disgracefully
Virginia Ironside’s novel, No! I Don’t Need Reading Glasses (Quercus £14.99) about a 65-year-old granny who belongs to a local…
Knowing your onions
Having fried your leeks in butter, form them into a poultice and apply it to your backside. No, not Heston…
Knowing your onions
Having fried your leeks in butter, form them into a poultice and apply it to your backside. No, not Heston…
Novel ways of writing
If you consider ‘gripping metafiction’ a self-contradictory phrase (surely metafiction disables tension through its wink-at-the-audience style?), Nicholas Royle’s First Novel…
The Diana effect
My favourite joke of all time concerns Diana Dors, whose real name was Diana Fluck. She was invited back to…
The Wiggins streak
As the first British winner of the Tour de France and a gold medalist at London 2012, Bradley Wiggins is…
Rock solid
Rod Stewart once tried to convince his mother that he had made a lot of money, and wanted to buy…
A narrow escape
C.J. Sansom is deservedly famous for his Shardlake crime novels, featuring a 16th-century lawyer on the fringes of the court.…
Classic Coe
You sense that writing Seb Coe: The Autobiography (Hodder, £20) must have been a pleasurable task for the Lord of…
The one who got away with it
The first track on Neil Young’s latest album lasts nearly 28 minutes, for while he usually has no problem starting,…
Narrative drive
Michael Holroyd describes this tiny, charmingly pointless publication (On Wheels, Chatto, £9.99) not as a book but as an example…
Too much time in the library
Donna Leon’s The Jewels of Paradise (Heinemann, £17.99)has a promising premise. A young musicologist, Caterina Pelligroni, returns to Venice to…
The darker side of Dawn
I like Dawn French when she is playing a sinister nurse much more than when she’s a jolly vicar. As…
