Book review
The inside story
Many books have been written about the corruption, venality and incestuousness that characterise Washington DC, but none has been as…
A legend in his own time
The last time David Peace wrote a novel about football he got his publishers sued for libel, which may help…
What we really really didn’t want
The title of Alwyn W. Turner’s book could deter readers. Even the Hollywood film The Secret Lives of Dentists promised…
Beyond this, nothing
This may sound a little orientalist, but Tangier has some claim to being the most foreign city in the world.…
Ruthless Roundheads
Adrian Tinniswood, so gifted and spirited a communicator of serious history to a wide readership, here brings a number of…
Last man standing
Like Mel Brooks’s character the Two Thousand-Year-Old Man, Peter Lewis has met everyone of consequence. Though he doesn’t mention being…
Life in the Augean stables
What, really, is a literary education for? What’s the point of it? How, precisely, does it help when you’re another…
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…
