Book review – biography
The painter as poser
Bernard Buffet was no one’s idea of a great painter. Except, that is, Pierre Bergé and Nick Foulkes. Bergé was…
A step too far
Captain Robert Nairac was a Grenadier Guards officer serving in Northern Ireland when on 14 May 1977 he was abducted…
Agony and ecstasy in the garden
I usually throw away dust jackets but Robin Lane Fox chose his for a reason. He originally encountered Augustine of…
Bored and lonely in Kathmandu
It started as a ‘shoke’ — the Anglo-Indian slang word for ‘hobby’. Bored and lonely in Kathmandu, the young Assistant…
Homage to awesome Welles on his centenary
One day in May 1948 in the Frascati hills southeast of Rome, Orson Welles took his new secretary, Rita Ribolla,…
Samuel Palmer: from long-haired mystic to High Church Tory
In his youth, Samuel Palmer (1805–1881) painted like a Romantic poet. The moonlit field of ‘The Harvest Moon’ (1831–32) glows…
Charles Williams: sadist or Rosicrucian saint?
Charles Williams was a bad writer, but a very interesting one. Most famous bad writers have to settle, like Sidney…
John Paul Stapp: the fastest man on earth, who saved millions
There’s a moment in Craig Ryan’s spectacular biography of John Paul Stapp — the maverick American Air Force doctor who,…
He knew he was right
A highlight of this year’s Dublin Theatre Festival was the Rough Magic Theatre Company’s production of The Train, a musical…
Super man of legend
On 13 March 2014 a congregation of 2,000 people, including many of the great and the good, gathered in Westminster…
Charlotte Brontë: Cinderella or ugly sister?
Preparations for next year’s bicentennial celebrations of the birth of Charlotte Brontë haven’t exactly got off to a flying start.…
Would even Blair have put Felix Dennis in the Lords?
This is not only an authorised but a commissioned biography. Felix Dennis, the tiny, depraved, manipulative media mogul, was hardly…
Margaret Thatcher’s most surprising virtue: imagination
Margaret Thatcher’s second administration saw bitter divisions at home, but abroad the breakthrough in Anglo-Soviet relations really did change history, says Philip Hensher
Love, loneliness and all that jazz
Woody Allen (born Allan Stewart Konigsberg), the prolific, Oscar-winning auteur, New Orleans-style jazz clarinettist, doyen of New York delicatessen society,…
A hero of our time
I have met Dr Kissinger, properly, only three times. First, in Cairo, in 1980, when, as a junior diplomat escorting…
The history man
History for Gore Vidal was a vehicle to be ridden in triumph, perhaps as in an out-take from Ben-Hur, which…
The bitterness of Bacon
When Michael Peppiatt met Francis Bacon in 1963 to interview him for a student magazine, the artist was already well-established,…
Polymath or psychopath?
They don’t make Englishmen like the aptly named John Freeman any more. When he died last Christmas just shy of…
The man who wrecked New York
John R. MacArthur on the bureaucratic titan who gratuitously bulldozed a great city and displaced and demoralised half a million of its inhabitants
Toxic fun with Mum and Dad
In 2008, when Taylor Wilson was 14, he created a working nuclear fusion reactor, ‘a miniature sun on earth’. At…
Filling in the Bloomsbury puzzle
Even the Group considered Bunny Garnett and Henrietta Bingham quite ‘wayward’. Their powerful charms appealed to both sexes, says Anne Chisholm — and they even managed a fling together
Dizzying swirls of impasto
With a career of more than 60 years so far, Frank Auerbach is undoubtedly one of the big beasts of…
Celebrations of song and humanity
‘All my life, always and in every way, I shall have one objective: the good of Hungary and the Hungarian…
The frog prince
It would not have surprised their friends in the 1930s when Peter Watson had a fling with my grandfather, Robert…
Cats, curates and cardigans
Anyone who has ever listened to the thump of a rejected manuscript descending cheerlessly on to the mat can take…
