Book review
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…
Crime and no punishment
Edward Jay Epstein is an American investigative journalist, now in his late seventies, who has spent at least half a…
Riding for Rwanda
This is a book about Rwanda. It’s a book about cycling. But it’s not, in the end, a book about…
Behind the masque
Music has always been integral to the image and power of monarchy. Our present Royal family should take note, says Jonathan Keate
The essential vade-mecum
After Zorba the Greek, here comes Horace the Roman. The peasant Zorba, you’ll remember from the film, releases uptight, genteel…
Father of tartan noir
Laidlaw was first published in 1977, 36 years back from now, 38 on from The Big Sleep. Like Chandler’s classic…
The future that was
Here, for time travellers, is the whack-job spirit of ’68 in distillate form, paperbound and reissued in facsimile (with some…
World-weary world power
A year or so after the ‘liberation’ of Iraq, an unnamed senior Bush administration official (later revealed to be Karl…
Cheaper than chimps
After the Morecambe Bay Hospital scandal a new era opens of compassion, -whistle-blowing, naming names and possible prosecutions. But what…
Still a ticking timebomb
No book about Dr David Kelly could start anywhere other than at the end. Kelly is found, dead, in a…
