Palace Notebook
Parties, hats and dancing around handbags – everything you need to know about becoming a dame
Wine tasting
They thought it would be fun to let a team of journalists compete against the students from Oxford and Cambridge. We didn’t know what we’d be facing…
Sign of the Vulcan
She was considered the cleverest girl in the school, and deservedly so, and as such started the lower sixth with…
The blood-dimmed tide is loosed
It will be a travesty if the Easter Rising is commemorated with jolly fancy-dress parades and hagiographies of dead heroes, says Roy Foster
All things to all men
Not much is known about St George, says Christopher Howse, reviewing Samantha Riches’s biography, except that he had many lookalikes (including Islamic) — and his dragon was a bit of an afterthought
A safe pair of hands
Steve Davis was so boring Spitting Image nicknamed him Interesting — giving him the title for his third autobiography to date
Gunning for freedom
Americans have an almost mystical belief that guns are synonymous with freedom, says Michael Moorcock, reviewing Gun Baby Gun. Every time there’s a call for stricter arms control, the sales of guns rocket
Dirty dealing across the board
I lose the will to live if forced to play Monopoly. But the story of the game’s invention, as related in Mary Pillon’s The Monopolists — now there’s a thing...
Bitten by the bug
However hard we try to eradicate bedbugs, they constantly outwit us, according to Brooke Borel’s Infested — and from Horace to Henry Miller they infest literature too
A peephole into Peru
Two innocent men face kidnapping, death threats and haunting by the devil — and The Discreet Hero is Llosa-lite — a mere jeu d’esprit
Gore blimey
Gore Vidal’s deservedly forgotten pulp thriller, now resurrected after 60 years, is so bad it’s good
Heigh-ho, heigh-ho…
You don’t want to end up like those sour-faced children of the idle rich who invariably go to the bad, says Julie Burchill, reviewing All Day Long, by Joanna Biggs
Passionate pioneers
If only Charlotte Gordon's Romantic Outlaws would let Mary Wollstonecraft and Mary Shelley speak for themselves
Toujours la politesse
The 34-year correspondence between Bernard Berenson and Kenneth Clark was a substitute for a friendship that didn’t happen, says Duncan Fallowell, reviewing My Dear BB, edited by Robert Cumming
Indulge your inner reptile
Move Up is a torrent of random words arranged into perfectly focused falsehood
i.m. AMSTRAD
Dear Lord Sugar, it’s been a sad week. A kind of bereavement, really. Today, a council employee in a yellow…
Spring
The sparrows banter in the bushes that crowd the walls of the World’s End alleyway as I walk to the…
Talisman
She’s meant to be good with words, used to medicating others with a timely postcard — FABULOUS WOMAN YOU! Today…
Mistress of modernism
The celebrated conductor/soprano talks to Philip Clark about her forthcoming tour with the Britten Sinfonia and how atonal music is like a deep tissue massage
Off colour
Plus: a Classical Opera revival of J.C. Bach’s Adriano in Siria that’s entertaining, absorbing and much more than a scholar’s pet
Lethal weapon
Plus: Kirov goddess Diana Vishneva shows what happens when Russian ballerinas disappear up their own mythology
