Blue-sky dreaming
We don’t have an extreme climate, says Richard Mabey in Turned Out Nice Again (Profile, £8.99). We don’t have tsunamis,…
The one who got away with it
The first track on Neil Young’s latest album lasts nearly 28 minutes, for while he usually has no problem starting,…
Hart-felt praise
‘I don’t profess this tome to be one of deep reflection or profound, serious thinking,’ writes Miranda Hart, which may…
Games over
It seems like only hours since they ended, but people have already written and published books about the Olympics, and…
Bookends: Heading for the rough
Middle age lays many hazards and traps for us, not the least of which is golf. Breaking 80 (Yellow Jersey…
Bookends: Arkansas tales
Stranger men have become stars than Billy Bob Thornton, but not many. His obsessive-compulsive disorder encompasses a bizarre list of…
Bookends: Un poco goes a lang Weg
Here esse un curiosité, and kein mistake. Diego Marani (above) esse eine Italianse writer and EU officialisto livingante in Brussels,…
Bookends: The Queen’s message
It is a sad fact that most ‘self-help’ books end up helping no one, other than the people who wrote…
Bookends: Pure gold
Even nowadays, a 50-year career in pop music is a rare and wondrous thing, and for a woman triply so.…
Bookends: A life of gay abandon
Sometimes, only the purest smut will do. Scotty Bowers’s memoir, Full Service: My Adventures in Hollywood and the Secret Sex…
Bookends: Wasp without a sting
‘It may be hard to accept that a chaste teenage girl can end up in bed with the President of…
Bookends: Dickensian byways
Is there room for yet another book on Dickens? Probably not, but we’ll have it anyway. The Dickens Dictionary (Icon,…
Bookends: Doors of perception
Unlike most of the old rockers he writes about, the esteemed US critic Greil Marcus is becoming more prolific as…
Bookends: A shaggy beast of a book
Autobiography is a tricky genre to get right, which may be why so many well-known people keep having another go…
Bookends: The showbiz Boris Johnson
Amiability can take you a long way in British public life. James Corden is no fool: he co-wrote and co-starred…
Bookends
Political sketchwriting, like most humorous writing, is one of those things that looks easy, especially to people who would never…
Bookends
Harry Enfield has said that ‘comedy without Galton and Simpson would be like literature without Dickens,’ and he may be…
Bookends: Laughing by the book
Comedy is a serious business. The number of young people who seek to make a living making other people laugh…
Bookends
Of all the great cultural shifts of recent years, the rise to respectability of American comics may be the strangest.…
Bookends: A friend of mine
A friend of mine was throttled by Pete Postlethwaite once. It was outside a TV studio, people were smoking and…
