Tip the staff – and don’t bitch by the pool: how to be the perfect house guest
Come to our house in France, say generous friends, come to Italy, come fishing. ‘How wonderful, what shall we bring?’…
Historian David Edgerton says the ‘British nation’ lasted from 1945 to 1979, the miner’s strike its death knell
It seems somehow symptomatic of David Edgerton’s style as a historian, of a certain wilful singularity, that even his book’s…
Two new books by barristers chronicle the perilous state of our justice system
‘The first thing we do, let’s kill all the lawyers,’ says Dick the Butcher in Henry VI, Part II. Mostly,…
New York times
Seven years ago Stella Tillyard, a successful historian of the 18th century, broke into historical fiction with Tides of War.…
100 Best Novels in Translation is a surprisingly sumptious read
Boyd Tonkin is superbly qualified to compile this volume. As literary editor of the Independent, he revived that newspaper’s foreign…
Why the Romanovs were doomed
The true tragedy of the last Romanovs was a failure of imagination. Both during his last disastrous months in office…
Coach, politician and agony aunt
When I picked this book up, I already loved it — or at least I loved the idea of it:…
Telling tall tales
‘I think you’re an adult when you can no longer tell your life story over the course of a first…
Eat your heart out, Holden Caulfield
Tim Winton’s novel about a journey of teenage male self-discovery is raw, brutal and merciless. You need to be familiar…
Conan Doyle for the Defence tells the fascinating story of Britain’s ‘Dreyfus’
One day in December 1908, a wealthy 81-year-old spinster named Marion Gilchrist was bludgeoned to death in her Glasgow flat.…
The ‘idiot’ artists whose surreal visions flourished in Victorian asylums
In G.F. Watts’s former sculpture studio in the Surrey village of Compton, a monstrous presence has interposed itself between the…
Appealingly meaningless and improbable: Christo at the Serpentine Lake reviewed Plus: memorably pointless paintings at the Serpentine Sackler Gallery
It’s not a wrap. This is the first thing to note about the huge trapezoid thing that has appeared, apparently…
Classical music is awash with virtue-signalling
All my life I’ve wanted to compose music, and now I’ve done it. I’ve written a sonata for solo flute…
Shamelessly derivative and, worse, asks us to root for asshats: Swimming with Men reviewed
Swimming with Men is a British drama-comedy starring Rob Brydon as a disaffected middle-aged accountant who joins his local male…
Contains at least 15 laugh-out-loud moments: Genesis Inc. reviewed
Listen to the crowd. I often delay passing judgment on a show until the audience delivers its verdict. This is…
A new exhibition gives us the real Tolkien – not his awful legacy
To no one’s surprise, the Tolkien: Maker of Middle-earth exhibition at the Bodleian in Oxford, where J.R.R. spent so much…
The great thing about the World Cup is you don’t even have to watch it to enjoy it
Even though I don’t watch much football I love the World Cup because it’s my passport to total freedom. I…
Vexing reading of a perplexing opera: Glyndebourne’s Pelléas et Mélisande reviewed
The femme fatale was invented in France. A giddy, greedy child in her first incarnation, as the antiheroine of Abbé…
A warning to those who argue that we live in a visual society
‘Can one person really grasp the significance of what another person has been through?’ asks Dr Rita Charon in this…
Ignore Lily Allen’s sub-adolescent politics – her new album is brilliant
Grade: B+ Here we go again, then, I thought — another gobbet of self-referential, breast-beating respec’ me bro sputum against…
The limitations of left-wing hacks
Oh, to be in England, and almost die of heat after the Austrian Alps. Yes, Sarah Sands was right in…
Up close with the Rolling Stones
At 7 p.m., panting, I knocked on the door of room 201 of the Hotel InterContinental, Marseille, expecting it to…
Sex and MOTs
Opening a button of my shirt to get the horse lorry through its MOT is the sort of thing I…
The happiest Royal Ascot in memory
Let’s get the crowing over first. The returns from our Twelve to Follow over jumps last season were somewhere well…
Bridge
The Hubert Phillips is a knockout tournament unlike any other. First it is mixed — there has to be at…
