Books
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…
Hart-felt praise
‘I don’t profess this tome to be one of deep reflection or profound, serious thinking,’ writes Miranda Hart, which may…
Our most exotic bird
The Black Grouse (Merlin Unwin, £20) is Patrick Lurie’s first book and the first ever on the the subject. Lurie…
A guide to the media circus
Caitlin Moran’s bestselling How to be a Woman careered with reckless frivolity from the personal (eldest of eight, home-schooled in…
Hell hath no fury…
We all know Edwina Currie as a shrill, tasteless, attention-seeking Thatcherite nuisance from Liverpool. But the private Edwina — as…
Games over
It seems like only hours since they ended, but people have already written and published books about the Olympics, and…
Our national obsession
If Britain is serious about this Olympic legacy thing, we should get ‘talking about the weather’ added to the list…
Bookends: The Saint Zita Society, by Ruth Rendell
Sometimes it seems as if Ruth Rendell’s heart just isn’t in all that killing any more. Certainly, her latest book,…
Bookends: Umpty, umpty, umpty…
According to Ogden Nash, the reason the British aristocracy wrote so much is because they could never understand what they…
Bookends: Heading for the rough
Middle age lays many hazards and traps for us, not the least of which is golf. Breaking 80 (Yellow Jersey…
Bookends: Deftly orchestrated chaos
The headings set the scene: ‘Last Tango in Balham, in which I meet Marlon Brando on the dance floor of…
Bookends: Cycle of pain
Reg Harris by Robert Dineen (Ebury Press, £16.99) is about a man who was once Britain’s number one athlete: a…
From our own correspondent
‘Interviewing Afghan warlords is always something of a delicate dance,’ writes roving BBC reporter Nick Bryant in Confessions from Correspondentland…
Bookends: Arkansas tales
Stranger men have become stars than Billy Bob Thornton, but not many. His obsessive-compulsive disorder encompasses a bizarre list of…
