Books
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…
The Italian job
During the civil war, the Puritan iconoclast William Dowsing recorded with satisfaction his destructive visit in 1644 to the parish…
In dialogue with the novel
This year marks the fourth Granta ‘Best of Young British novelists’, begun in 1983, but it is the first time…
Wax now works
Ruby Wax, who is best known as a comedian, dedicates this book ‘to my mind, which at one point left…
Siempre
After Neruda Facing you I am not jealous. If you arrived with a man on your back, or a hundred…
Notes from a big country
The esteemed literary critic, serial academic and one-time Marxist firebrand Terry Eagleton is, at 70, still producing books at an…
The useful Colonel Houses
Franklin Delano Roosevelt was determined to get the measure of Britain’s wartime prime minister Winston Churchill, and of Britain’s chances…
Hunting for bogeymen
Here is how you make a conspiracy theory: take a couple of facts, stir in a few assumptions, then add…
A multitude of voices
‘Consider, too, the world’s fisheries.’ This line more or less sums up the tone of Destroying the Joint: Why Women…
Notes from a big country
The esteemed literary critic, serial academic and one-time Marxist firebrand Terry Eagleton is, at 70, still producing books at an…
Notes from a big country
The esteemed literary critic, serial academic and one-time Marxist firebrand Terry Eagleton is, at 70, still producing books at an…
Hunting for bogeymen
Here is how you make a conspiracy theory: take a couple of facts, stir in a few assumptions, then add…
The useful Colonel Houses
Franklin Delano Roosevelt was determined to get the measure of Britain’s wartime prime minister Winston Churchill, and of Britain’s chances…
For the greater glory of Benjamin Disraeli
Sam Leith finds shades of Jeffrey Archer and Boris Johnson in the 19th-century prime minister
Playing Woolf
The Charleston Bulletin was a family newspaper produced between 1923 and 1927 by the teenaged Quentin Bell and his elder…
We were dazzled
This is the third volume of Isaiah Berlin letters; one more to go. Discerning critics have showered the first two…
Rousseau and the Tiger
This is the Tiger and this is Rousseau. This is the picture I painted to show That this is the…
Bring on the winged kelp
On 14 April each year, nori fishermen gather on a hillside overlooking Ariake Bay on Kyushu in southern Japan to…
The history girl
Ronald Knox, found awake aged four by a nanny, was asked what he was thinking about, and he replied ‘the…
Pearl beyond price
The subtitle of Carole Seymour-Jones’s quietly moving biography of the brilliant SOE agent Pearl Witherington is ‘the real Charlotte Gray’.…
