Why Jonathan Powell thinks we'll have to negotiate with al-Qa’eda
Jonathan Powell is best known as Tony Blair’s fixer. He was intimately involved with the Northern Ireland peace process, about…
The cold, remote plateau of Vichy France where good was done
It is with a heavy heart that I pick up anything to do with the Holocaust. Not because it’s wearisome…
Goodwood Festival of Speed
You smelt them, it was said of the Mongol hordes, before you heard them, and by the time you heard…
Civilisation’s watery superhighway
The clue is in the title: this is not about the blue-grey-green wet stuff that covers 70 per cent of…
‘A public urinal where ministers and officials queued up to leak’
Anyone brought up as I was in a Daily Express household in the 1950s — there were approaching 11 million…
Empire of the Deep, by Ben Wilson - review
‘I never before came across a man whom I could fancy being a Napoleon or a Nelson…His ascendancy over everybody…
A narrow escape
C.J. Sansom is deservedly famous for his Shardlake crime novels, featuring a 16th-century lawyer on the fringes of the court.…
Bookends: The year of living dangerously
Most people who recall 1976 do so for its appallingly hot summer, when parks turned brown and roads melted. Some…
Bookends
I like books with weather and there’s plenty in this one, all bad, which is even better. Set in London…
