Book review
Escape through the locks
The title, the subtitle, the author’s plain name, even the jacket’s photograph of a laughing old lady in sunglasses: none…
Pomp and severance
The Coronation Chair currently stands all spruced up, following last year’s conservation, under a crimson canopy, by the west entrance…
History’s great success story
The Tudors, England’s most glamorous ruling dynasty, were self-invented parvenus, with ‘vile and barbarous’ origins, Anne Somerset reminds us
My companion for life
There are books we read for pleasure and there are books we are paid to review. However enjoyable the books…
Loved and lost
Author has late-blossoming romance with authoress, both divorcees, and they live together in a cramped house in Harrogate full of…
The urban peasant diet
You know that something’s afoot when Lakeland says so. Lakeland is the kitchenware company which has more of a finger…
Set in a silver sea
‘Tom Island’ — that was the name I was given once by a girl I met on an island in…
No shrinking Violet
Evelyn Waugh once recalled the anguish with which he greeted Edith Sitwell’s announcement that ‘Mr Waugh, you may call me…
A monumental testimony
With Spain’s economic crisis in the forefront of global news, it would be fascinating to see what a reporter of…
The muse in the bottle
The boozer’s life is one of low self-esteem and squalid self-denial. It was memorably evoked by Charles Jackson in his…
A fascist’s fireside chat
This book may sound like it’s going to be about high fashion, but it’s actually about Nazism, satanism, incest and…
Dublin’s dark heart
It’s always a little disconcerting for the rest of us when literary novelists turn to crime. Have they become different…
When the picturesque turns ugly
Under his real name, Charles James Stranks, the author of this little masterpiece wrote on a number of ecclesiastical subjects:…
Tales of the Wild East
The brutality and folly of Russia’s bid to conquer America has the makings of grand tragicomedy says Sam Leith
When every captain was a Nelson
‘I never before came across a man whom I could fancy being a Napoleon or a Nelson…His ascendancy over everybody…
The great American nightmare
Colonel Eli McCullough, formerly known as Tiehteti, is a living legend. The first male child born in the Republic of…
They weren’t all shooting up or shooting each other
Rift Valley, Kenya The other day when I told the headmaster of a top British public school that I came…
The stoic approach
A friend of mine who works for the NHS has been told recently by a superior that his ‘attention to…
Men of mystery
People, they say, want different things from a book over the summer than they do the rest of the year.…
Inspiration from the past
Pastoral elegy is not what you expect to find in a collection of short stories, but then Ali Smith is…
On a wing and a prayer
‘A world without birds would lay waste the human heart,’ writes Mark Cocker. Following his Birds Britannica and prize-winning Crow…
Conspicuous consumption
Margaret MacMillan says that the ostentation of the Edwardian Age focuses the mind painfully on the horror that was so quickly to follow
Blindness and madness
An abandoned lunatic asylum, a nasty pornographer in a wheelchair, a bizarre glass-ceilinged viewing dome beneath a scummy lake, a…
Saints and sinners
There is always meat in Michael Arditti’s novels. He is a writer who presents moral problems via fiction but is…
Was Machiavelli a Machiavellian?
One more anniversary, one more cache of commemorative books. This time we are celebrating the half-millennium since Niccolò Machiavelli produced…
