Books
He never looked back again
In that dark world the air pulsed with the melancholy clangour of bells. If, as legend has it, the chimes…
Firmly in the picture
At first glance, Clara Peeters’s ‘Still Life with a Vase of Flowers, Goblets and Shells’ (1612) appears to be just…
Bittersweet memories
This is a deceptively slim novel. Its 96 pages contain multitudes: two lives, past and present, seamlessly interwoven. The narrator,…
Second chances
To reject ‘in rainy middle age the poignant emotions that belonged to youth and Italy’ is the lesson learned by…
The changing face of art
This book covers the period 1878-2000, offering thought provoking commentary on some 120 years of experiments in being modern, and…
A multiplicity of Italys
Towards the end of Dandelions, Thea Lenarduzzi’s imaginative and deeply affecting memoir, the author quotes her grandmother’s remark that there…
Centuries of myth-making
Every country has an origin story but nonehas ‘changed it so often’ as Russia, according to Orlando Figes. The subject…
Heroes of the siege
Sometimes the struggle for a single small strongpoint can tip the whole balance of a greater battle. One thinks of…
Wall Street madness
‘I don’t trust fiction,’ the famous author told me, both of us several glasses to the good. ‘It contains too…
Last words
Facing up to the prospect of one’s own mortality is always jarring; but when you’ve spent your life trying, and…
Gothic glories
There can be no clearer illustration of the central role that great cathedrals continue to play in a nation’s life…
The cars that ate Birmingham
During my gap year in 1981, I worked on the 24th floor of Birmingham’s Alpha Tower for the Regional Manpower…
Man of vision
‘Our generation owes an apology to the shades of Harold Wilson,’ the polling guru Peter Kellner once told me. Had…
Communing with the dead
Grief leads us down some strange roads. Few, though, can be as peculiar as those charted by Paul Stanbridge in…
Nazi on the run
Who would have thought that someone would write a novel about Josef Mengele, the Auschwitz doctor and infamous experimenter on…
A mini art form
It sounds disingenuous, not to say dis-respectful, but as a writer of 40 books, give or take, I never read…
Under a bad moon
Million-selling rock bands are rarely happy families. They are an uneasy combination of a creative alliance and a business partnership,…
Foul play in Ferrara
There’s a moment near the end of Robert Browning’s dramatic monologue ‘My Last Duchess’ when it becomes clear that the…
The spirit of beauty
Shelley, walking as a boy through his ‘starlight wood’, looking for ghosts and filled with ‘hopes of high talk with…
Feeding the world
The Shetland Islands and the Faroes may seem to be somewhere out there in distant waters, marginal and in the…
Keeping up with Jena set
Frances Wilson describes a group of self-obsessed intellectuals united by mutual loathing in a small university town in the 1790s
How far could he go?
I have never had much time for Aleister Crowley. Magic(k) is nonsense; the mystical societies he founded were simply pretexts…
Village villainy
Cosy crime was once the literary world’s guilty secret, a refuge for any reader seeking entirely unchallenging entertainment – like…
The Russian Proust
Yuri Felsen, born in St Petersburg, was an exile in Riga, Berlin and Paris and died at Auschwitz in 1943.…
Nasty, brutish and short
As Tory writers reflected on the safe passage of the Stuart dynasty through the Exclusion Crisis of 1679-81, an anonymous…
