Answers to ‘Spot the Play Title’
1. Cat Honour Hot Tin Roof 2. Frank Hen Stein 3. Ark A Deer 4. Hammer Day S 5. Hiss…
Powerful punch lines
James Andrew Taylor's Walking Wounded: the Life and Poetry of Vernon Scannell does justice to a contradictory character
A Yorkshire Christmas Eve
His nearby town wore annual evening-dress, cheap jewellery of lights, white fur and bright drapes of Santa red which might…
A dogged opportunist
It wasn't brains, and it certainly wasn't integrity, as Philip Short's biography reveals
Strands of Scottish history
What messages are threaded through Alistair Moffat's Great Tapestry of Scotland - and Alexander McCall Smith's commentary?
The President and the muckrakers
The Bully Pulpit: Theodore Roosevelt and the Golden Age of Journalism tells us little new about the progressive era
A Herculean achievement
Martin Gayford's Michelangelo: an Epic Life bucks the trend for micro-history in compelling style
The Price of Fame
Try not to meet us in the flesh We’ll disappoint you if you do, Our dandruff and our garlic breath…
Dutch courage in the trenches
Robert Gore-Langton's Journey's End: the Classic War Play Explored considers R.C. Sherriff's continuing power to move - and to upset
The making of the myth
Philip Dwyer's Citizen Emperor demonstrates that Bonaparte's myth was very far from self-made
Ho, ho, oh no
Read Eric Schlosser's Command and Control, and you'll be astonished we've survived the atomic age - so far...
Beginning at the end
It's a river that runs through centuries of pain, warfare and achievement - and Nick Thorpe has found a new way to navigate its history
As grand as the Grand Canyon itself
The Men Who United the States is a mystifying series of tenuous connections
The Pleasure’s All Mine, by Julie Peakman – review
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Food for the soul
'We don't realise how incredible life is,' says Patrick Reyntiens, whose work for churches up and down the country has finally been documented in a magisterial book
The music of innocence
Why do carols move us? Because they speak to us of innocence, and childhood. Here's my favourite carol...
Give me a child…
DO leave your bourgeois ideas at home, DO buy a toy, DON'T forget to feed them — and DO prepare for trips to the loo
Building a future
Forget Hamleys, it's full of saccharine tat — here's a present that will help your child understand nature, play, and everything else
The lady vanishes
Birgitte Hjort Sorenson seems trained in the diplomatic art of giving answers that are balanced, nicely phrased — and short on substance
Male order
Plus: Playing in a football league composed of Tranny United, Lesbian Rovers, Man City and Barely Athletic
That’s what I call music
It was a year of musical retrenchment where I only bought 25 CDS — so let me go back further in time
‘What ho, Giotto’
Stanley Spencer infused his war paintings with images of resurrection, as the exhibition Heaven in a Hell of War shows
