Books
Good old bad old days
After a career spanning 50 years, 40 books and about a million parties, Anthony Holden has written a memoir. Based…
The bourgeois surrealist
René Magritte’s life, so outwardly respectable, was as full of surprises as his art, says Philip Hensher
Time and motion study
Since the publication of his debut, Remainder, Tom McCarthy has established himself as the Christopher Nolan of literary fiction: his…
A cruel affliction
Obsessed with purity and pain, the boundaries of blame and innocence, Skin is a fascinating meditation on psoriasis, the long-lasting…
The best of the Stuarts
Many girls dream about their favourite princesses. Elizabeth Stuart, a princess herself, took this fantasy a step further and modelled…
No fairytale
I once stood on a Dublin street with Shane MacGowan and watched little old ladies who can’t ever have been…
Fears of popery
Stuart England did not do its anti-Catholicism by halves. In the late 1670s and early 1680s, a popular feature of…
From nomads to emperors
This is the best of times to be writing history, since so much of what has been taken for granted,…
Mawkish melodrama
Rose Tremain’s 15th novel begins with a favoured schmaltzy image of high Victoriana: it is a night (if not dark…
Books of the year II
A further selection of the books enjoyed by some of our regular reviewers in 2021
Death is rarely the end
In March 1963, the Fantastic Four had a fractious encounter with Spider-Man and a dust-up with the Hulk — a…
Do elephants dance?
It’s almost a shock to admit it, but this year’s gift books aren’t bad at all. It’s even possible that,…
Desperate remedies
One of Adrian Tinniswood’s recent books, The Long Weekend, is a portrait of country house life in the interwar years.…
Partying through the pandemic
It is, as you’ve possibly noticed, a tricky time for old-school American liberals, now caught between increasingly extreme versions of…
Best habits of thinking
In the 1964 film My Fair Lady after Colonel Pickering has secured the help of an old friend to pull…
Slippery stuff
As humans, we are supposed to have an aversion to slime. It should repel us. Objects and organisms that might…
BOOKS OF THE YEAR I
Reviewers choose the books they have most enjoyed reading in 2021 — and a few that have disappointed them
Ever-increasing circles
Those for whom Dave Eggers’s name evokes only his much praised memoir A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius (2000) may…
The telling moment
A Tatler photographer once told me that the secret to taking a good photo was the three Ts: tum, tits,…
Feat of endurance
Bernardine Evaristo’s Manifesto — part instructional guide for artists, part call to arms for equality, part literary memoir —shimmers with…
The fruits of their labour
Important historic gardens fall into two main categories: those made by one person, whose vision has been carefully preserved down…
Marrying words and melodies
Whatever your favourite theory of creativity, Paul McCartney has a cheery thumbs-up to offer. You think the secret is putting…
A tantalising mystery
‘Victorian’ stuck, and ‘Edwardian’ too. But ‘Georgian’, as an adjective associated with the next monarch in line, never caught on.…
Titans of tennis
Louis MacNeice once wrote that if you want to know what chasing the Grail is like, ask Lancelot not Galahad.…
Banished queen
Shakespeare wastes no time on Lear’s backstory; we meet the brutal old autocrat as he divides his kingdom between two…
