High life
I smell a rat when it comes to Harvey Weinstein. Let’s take it from the start. The telephone rang very…
Low life
Early on Friday morning I flew from the north of Iceland to Reykjavik, from Reykjavik to Heathrow, then I hopped…
Diary
I used to long for mid-October when I could say goodbye to the hot rooms, cold buffets, and warm white…
The plots thicken
‘Worst week ever’ is one of those phrases that journalists are, perhaps, too quick to use. Alastair Campbell once quipped…
Blame the grown-ups for the safe-space tribe
A car driver ploughs into a bunch of people outside the Natural History Museum in London and lefties are furious…
Cabbages and kings
The first pastry cook Chaïm Soutine painted came out like a collapsed soufflé. The sitter for ‘The Pastry Cook’ (c.1919)…
Faulty connection
There’s no doubting her passion for the programme of which she is now chief of staff. Talking to Roger Bolton…
How pleasant to know Mr Lear
Edward Lear liked to tell the story of how he was once sitting in a railway carriage with two women…
The problem with Hungary
The name of the Hungarian Prime Minister, Viktor Orbán, is on the lips of most left-wing, liberal politicians and intellectuals…
On the waterfront
Much has been made of the American novelist Jennifer Egan’s mutation, in her latest novel, from purveyor of metafiction and…
Gleaming pictures of the past
If you think you know what to expect from an Alan Hollinghurst novel, then when it comes to The Sparsholt…
Princess Uppity
Princess Margaret was everywhere on the bohemian scene of the 1960s and 1970s. She hung out with all the famous…
His dark materials
In this giant, prodigiously sourced and insightful biography, John A. Farrell shows how Richard Milhous Nixon was the nightmare of…
Highly charged territory
I first heard of this tragicomic spy romp around Israel and Palestine when Julian Barnes sang its praises in the…
Putting the boot into Italy
A young woman, naked and covered in blood, totters numbly down a night road. A driver spots her in his…
The great betrayal
They were at sea for more than two months in desperately cramped conditions. The battered ship, barely seaworthy, pitched violently…
Navigating a new world
In the 1890s, when British-owned ships carried 70 per cent of all seaborne trade, legislators worried about the proportion of…
Recent crime fiction
Gabriel Tallent’s My Absolute Darling (4th Estate, £12.99) has the word masterpiece emblazoned on the cover, alongside quotes from several…
Elle Decoration meets pub food
The Mandrake is a new ‘design hotel’ in London, which means it is for people who treat Elle Decoration magazine…
Why the England team is so unexciting
During a riveting session at the Cheltenham Literary Festival with sporting brainboxes Mike Brearley and Matthew Syed, discussion touched on…
I met Weinstein and, yes, I’d heard the rumours
According to an ex-employee of Harvey Weinstein’s, the movie producer once whispered something to himself that she found so disturbing…
The turf
The mission was simple: take a load of garden refuse to the council dump and be back in time to…
Story of the hurricane
The Great Storm of 1987 doesn’t have a name like those hurricanes that devastate the Caribbean and the United States…
