Book review
To cull or not to cull?
Lord Arran was responsible for the bill to legalise homosexuality and a bill to protect badgers from gassing and terrier-baiting.…
Six of the best
When one notices the first symptoms of senile dementia (forgetting names, trying to remember the purpose of moving from one…
Tireless tuft-hunting
The novelist David Plante is French-Québécois by ancestry, grew up in a remote Francophone parish in Yankee New England and…
Diplomatic meltdown
In pre-1914 cosmopolitan society, everyone seemed to be related — ambassadors as well as monarchs. But increased militarisation was fast obliterating old family ties, says Jane Ridley
Breaking omertà
According to the medical historian Professor Sonu Shamdasani, Sigmund Freud was not the best, nor actually the most interesting, psychoanalyst…
From underdog to top dog
When we think of David and Goliath, we think of a young man, not very big, who has a fight…
Salad days
The early 1990s in Russia were hungry years. At the time, I was a student, too idle to barter and…
Dutch comfort
Donna Tartt is an expert practitioner of what David Hare has called ‘the higher hokum’. She publishes a long novel…
Black and beyond
When Prince Albert died in 1861, aged 42, Queen Victoria, after briefly losing the use of her legs, ordered that…
Once upon a time there were…
If you are going to read a novel that plays with literary conventions you want it written with aplomb. In…
China’s iron lady
For susceptible Englishmen of a certain inclination — like Sir Edmund Backhouse or George Macdonald Fraser — the Empress Dowager…
Grand old master of modernism
How minor is minor? ‘Rings a bell’ was more or less the response of two English literature graduates, now successful…
Funny, warm and eccentric
It must have been awful for Diana and Duff Cooper to be separated from their only child during the war,…
This other Eden
Sam Leith is transported by the finest scenery in England
Bloom and bust
‘How could a man who has loved light and flowers so much and has rendered them so well, how could…
An Affair to remember
The Dreyfus Affair, the furore caused by a miscarriage of justice in France in 1894, is a source of perennial…
Best of enemies
The Great War was an obscene and futile conflict laying waste a generation and toppling emperors. Yet here are two…
Low, dishonest decade
When Gordon Brown eventually became aware that his Downing Street was about to be engulfed in the Smeargate scandal, he…
Court chronicler for the coalition
There are two ways of being a political journalist. One is to stay on the outside and try to avoid…
Child-swapping opium addicts…
The last time the general reader was inveigled into the domestic intensities of the Wordsworth circle was by Frances Wilson…
…and murderous, child-molesting mystics
Though alcohol withdrawal is potentially fatal, booze has none of the media-confected glitz of heroin (imagine Will Self boasting of…
Very clever Mr Boyd, but not clever enough
First, an appalling admission: I have never read any of Ian Fleming’s Bond books. Nor have I read any of…
A parable of human weakness
Fred Goodwin’s descent from golden boy of British banking to ‘pariah of the decade’ would be the stuff of tragedy…
Comfort in melancholy
Geoff Nicholson is the Maharajah of Melancholy. The quality was there in his novels, it was there in his non-fiction…
Gay abandon
Richard Davenport-Hines on the charmed, dizzy world of the multi-talented Colette
