… and sense and sensibility
Mount’s admirably wide-ranging essays, covering 30 years of non-fiction reviewing, will save you the trouble of reading some very weighty books
Fleeing Mother Russia
Her memoir of 1918, describing her arduous journey to the Black Sea in flight from the Bolsheviks, is both thrilling and darkly comic
The Feelgood factor
In a cancer memoir with an unusually happy ending, the guitarist Wilko Johnson confounds medical opinion to survive his apparently terminal illness
The feast before the famine
Servants acted as human bed-warmers and in amateur theatricals — but were otherwise ‘just for show’, according to Patricia McCarthy’s history of those eccentric pre-famine days
Gaudy! Bright! Loud! Fun!
The best of postmodernism – and no, that’s not an oxymoron – should be preserved from philistine politicians, developers and architects
Happy ending
'I am trying to understand why otherwise good artists porduced poor late works... and how can I go against that?' Martin Gayford meets Baselitz at White Cube Bermondsey
Close encounters
Plus: a new exhibition at the Fine Art Society counters the notion that the story of British art was an insistent 'journey towards abstraction'
First Lady of Pop Art
Marisol Escobar, who Warhol hailed as the 'first girl artist with glamour', died last month after decades of neglect. Claudia Massie thinks a revival is long overdue
Losing the plot
Liam Scarlett's Frankenstein is yet another luxurious but botched dramatic ballet. To prevent another expensive cock-up, they should look to the Rambert's triple bill at Sadler's Wells
Pulling power
Plus: in Science Stories, Naomi Alderman claims Florence Nightingale was 'a shocking nurse', driven by ambition. And how many of you, like me, have had enough of the Archers?
Bard goes to Bollywood
Plus: a hugely impressive new Zimbabwean drama at the Arcola Theatre that takes a refreshingly balanced approach to land reclamation
Animal attraction
Plus: BBC1's Love, Nina is stripped of the most appealing part of Nina Stibbe's memoir – the high-class gossip
Memories, dreams, reflections
Laurie Anderson's dreamy cine-poem to her rat terrier follows no linear logic – it goes where it goes, drifts where it drifts, sniffs where it sniffs
High life
The lurid anti-Donald propaganda from the phonies in the media is having the opposite effect
Low life
If someone was sitting astride a machine, the gym instructor kissed them and I followed suit
Real life
My thoroughbred Darcy is descended from the original Godolphin Arabian; with that heritage, no wonder she acts up
Bridge
Sometimes Janet teases me that this should be called the David Gold Column, as I mention his name so frequently.…
Cyrus the Great
I think I hold the world record for the greatest number of chess books written (or co-written) and published. At…
No. 409
White to play. This position is from Dubov-Yandemirov, Russian Team Championship, Sochi 2016. How can White exploit the unfortunate placing…
Wild thing
In Competition No. 2948 you were invited to step into the skin of a species of your choice and provide…
2261: Long jump
Six unclued lights are examples of ‘3/4/18’ (four words in total, ignore an apostrophe), a quotation (in ODQ) whose author’s…
To 2258: Perimetrical jigsaw
The perimeter quotation is from L.P. Hartley’s The Go-Between, in which Leo, Marian and Ted are the main characters. First…
My soppy, dopey, deadly predator
No sandwich, leg of ham, Flake 99, loaf of bread or tub of butter is safe from his marauding instincts
