Eight presidents
Peregrine Worsthorne’s dealings with leaders of the free world, as a journalist, as a friend, and as a little boy running in the hallway
Cometh the hour, cometh the man
And if not, what exactly is the point of The Churchill Factor: How One Man Made History, by Boris Johnson? Apart from a couple of good jokes, that is...
The Unbeaten vs the Unbeatable
If you want Sharpe-like drama, go for Bernard Cornwell. For Eurocentric revisionism, go for Tim Clayton. If you’re short of time, there’s Brendan Simms’s 80 pager. But in a class of its own is former soldier Robert Kershaw making ‘order out of disorder’
Who did fall at the Reichenbach Falls?
Anthony Horowitz's Moriarity makes an entertaining job of Sherlockian London without Sherlock or Watson – but it would be so much better to have them back
Title Stories: Doctor Faustus By Christopher Marlowe
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Dwelling in the past
A review of The Making of the Home, by Judith Flanders, and Common People, by Alison Light. Both books are absorbing but it’s Light’s history of subsistence living that I’ll want to read twice
Cold cases warm up
A review of The Burning Room, by Michael Connelly. The 19th book for Connelly's obssessive detective Hieronymous Bosch is as strange and relentless as ever
Beyond satire
A review of Jeff Koons: Conversations with Norman Rosenthal. Koons’s sub-adult work is not worth getting cross about – although it has nonetheless proved poisonous to younger artists
Poison pen letters
Literary Rivals: Feuds and Antagonisms in the World of Books, by Richard Bradford, is a compendium that never sees the roses for the thorns
Supreme painter of the inner life
Veronese can show you a beautiful Madonna; but Rembrandt lets you read Bathsheba's thoughts
Surviving the Soviets
On the eve of the UK premiere of Shchedrin’s new opera at the Barbican, Ismene Brown talks to the Russian super-couple about how they survived the Soviet Union
East up West
Plus: East is East is one of the gems of the theatrical repertoire, especially in this near-flawless Theatre Royal Stratford East production
Screwed up
In I due Foscari at the Royal Opera House, however, nightmares were more artistic than psychological
Home again
Plus: James Walton senses BBC2’s Gunpowder 5/11: The Greatest Terror Plot is trying to tell us something
High life
There's enough blood on the screen in Brad Pitt's new blockbuster to turn Dracula to masturbation
Long life
A big wedding will doom your marriage. Or possibly save it. It's just another day in the world of worthless newspaper-baiting research
Wild life
Once, there were 3,500 cattle in our ranch on Kilimanjaro's slopes. But the Tanzanian government needs to eat
Bridge
Forget the 5-2 diet. To lose weight the easy way, why not take up competitive bridge? I’ve just come back…
