My clash with Cameron
MPs have a standard approach to political biographies, which falls into three phases: first, preliminary gossip about what will or…
The faded charm of the Isle of Wight
I was worried my first trip to the Isle of Wight might be too late. These days, a holiday island…
The Tudor dynasty owed everything to Margaret Beaufort’s machinations
Of the clutch of female powerbrokers who emerged during the civil wars of the English 15th century, the diminutive figure…
Reasons for remembering things: the refugee’s last resort
A family memoir is a dangerous thing to write: one has to balance between keeping one’s subjects happy and the…
The deadly war game of the Battle of the Atlantic
My father served in the Royal Navy during the second world war. He drank over-proof rum and smoked unfiltered cigarettes,…
The dark side of Venus — goddess of war as well as love
Bettany Hughes has spent a decade, she tells us, exploring the origins of the goddess Aphrodite, first for a BBC…
The coldest war of all: sabotaging the Nazis in Norway
Anyone mildly interested in the second world war probably knows two things about our wartime alliance with Norway, following its…
Baron Wenckheim’s Homecoming is a long, hard slog
The Hungarian writer László Krasznahorkai, who sounds like a sneeze and reads like a fever, is on a mission to…
Why we’re all in love with Fleabag
Why would you need the scripts for Fleabag? It’s hardly a lost classic. It’s always popping up on BBC iPlayer.…
Fear and loathing in Jamaica: Caribbean slaves turn the whip on their masters
In the shadows of the British Enlightenment lurked the Caribbean sugar plantations. Masters routinely raped their slaves, punished minor wrongdoings…
You’d never believe what goes on in the Sainsbury’s car park
Psychogeography takes many forms: Sebaldian gravitas, Will Self’s provocative flash and dazzle and Iain Sinclair’s jeremiads for lost innocence. Gareth…
Robert the Bruce — master of guerrilla warfare
The story of Robert the Bruce runs from the death of Alexander III of Scotland in 1286 to Robert’s own…
From frontispiece to endpapers: the last word on the book
Book Parts — hardback, 352 pages, with colour plate section and in-text black and white illustrations, 234x156mm, ISBN 9780198812463, published…
Benjamin Disraeli — inventor of English political fiction
For our fractured times, the release of Disraeli’s Sybil in unabridged audio, narrated with the respect it deserves by Tim…
David Bowie: the boy who never gave up
A few years ago Will Brooker spent 12 months pretending to be David Bowie. For several weeks he dressed up…
Beethoven wasn’t just history’s greatest composer but also one of its greatest human beings
Ludwig van Beethoven isn’t just my favourite composer: he’s my household god. There’s a bust of him on my mantelpiece.…
Alfred Dreyfus is being erased all over again
In London to promote a book, I received an invitation to a secret screening of An Officer and a Spy,…
Why did David Bomberg disappear?
David Bomberg was only 23 when his first solo exhibition opened in July 1914 at the Chenil Gallery in Chelsea.…
Gripping, immersive and powerful: 1917 reviewed
Sam Mendes’s 1917 is the first world war drama that this week won the Golden Globe for best film and…
Did everyone in punk sell out?
For many people of a certain age (full disclosure: mine), punk has been a weirdly persistent presence. These days, we…
Redneck twaddle: Young Vic’s Fairview reviewed
Fairview by Jackie Sibblies Drury won last year’s Pulitzer Prize. It deserves additional awards for promoting racial disharmony and entrenching…
Chilling: Arthur Pita’s The Little Match Girl at Sadler’s Wells reviewed
Did your feet twitch? That’s the test of The Red Shoes. Did your toes point? Your ankles flex? Your arches…
The Middle East for dummies
Gstaad The French have a saying: ‘Il n’y a rien de plus bête que le sourire du gagnant.’ In…
The death of my desert-island fantasy
I was on the back seat of a golf buggy being driven down to the marina from my beachside villa…
How my new pony swept me off my feet – literally
‘This is the one I was thinking of for you,’ said the lady I might feasibly call my mother-in-law, in…
