The SAS explode from the shadows in six days that shook Britain
The siege of the Iranian embassy in London in the spring of 1980 achieved nothing for the terrorists. But the previously reclusive elite army unit soon became the stuff of legend
Keeping a mistress was essential to John le Carré’s success
The novelist himself admitted that his infidelities ‘produced a duality and tension that became a necessary drug for my writing’
A trail of dirty money
In 2015, a dedicated DEA agent pursues a Mafia capo involved in a vast cocaine shipment, a Hezbollah militia leader and an elaborate Middle Eastern arms-trafficking ring
Poetry anthologies to treasure
Single volumes that fitted in a knapsack sustained many soldiers in the world wars, and have inspired countless schoolchildren to learn poems by heart
Jan Morris’s ‘national treasure’ status is misleading
Almost two years after the death of Jan Morris, the jaunty travel writer and pioneer of modern gender transition, her…
Lord Northcliffe’s war of words
Andrew Lycett on the pugnacious British press baron dedicated to fighting the first world war through newsprint
The fuss over Mary Seacole’s statue has obscured the real person
Mary Seacole may not have qualified as a nurse in the modern sense, but British troops benefited greatly from her healing skills, says Andrew Lycett
Under deep suspicion in Beirut, Kim Philby still carried on regardless
The story of the Cambridge spies has been served up so often that it has become stale — too detailed,…
The cosmopolitan spirit of the Middle East vanished with the Ottomans
One of the most depressing vignettes in Michael Vatikiotis’s agreeably meandering account of his cosmopolitan family’s experiences in the Near…
Not so dryasdust: how 18th-century antiquarians proved the first ‘modern’ historians
Antiquaries have had a bad press. If mentioned at all today, they are often derided as reclusive pedants poring over…
‘Britain’s Dreyfus Affair’: a very nasty village scandal
It has been described as Britain’s Dreyfus Affair — the wrongful imprisonment in 1903 of a half-Indian solicitor George Edalji…
War was never Sir Edward Grey’s métier
This meaty but easily digested biography pivots around the events either side of that fateful evening of 4 August 1914…
Death in the Cape – the lonely fate of Mary Kingsley
What compelled three well-known British writers to leave their homes and travel 6,000 miles to participate in a nasty late-19th-century…
A page-turning work of well-researched history: The Mountbattens reviewed
He would want to be remembered as the debonair war hero who delivered Indian independence and became the royal family’s…
What really amused Queen Victoria? Dwarfs, giants and bearded women
The American dwarf ‘General’ Tom Thumb is only mentioned once in Lee Jackson’s encyclopaedic survey of Victorian mass entertainment, and…
Paris at its most liberated: the turbulent 1940s
We all have our favourite period of Parisian history, be it the Revolution, the Belle Époque or the swinging 1960s…
Jeremy Thorpe gets off Scott-free
Appropriately for the dog days of British politics, there’s plenty of canine activity in this neatly groomed account of the…
David Astor: the saintly, tormented man who remade the Observer
Before embarking on this book, Jeremy Lewis was told by his friend Diana Athill that his subject, the newspaper editor…
David Litvinoff: queeny aesthete or street-hustling procurer?
Even David Litvinoff’s surname was a concoction. It was really Levy. Wanting something ‘more romantic’, he appropriated that of his…
Diana Athill finally accepts ‘Old Woman’ status, aged 98
There’s something reassuring about 98-year-old Diana Athill. She’s stately and well-ordered, like the gardens at Ditchingham Hall in Norfolk, her…
The real subject of John le Carré’s novels is his conman father Ronnie
John le Carré has been writing about a mirror world for over 50 years — and he’ll continue to do so for as long as his father haunts him, says Andrew Lycett
