Lucy Mangan has enough comic energy to power the National Grid
After three hot-water-bottle-warmed evenings of highly satisfying bedtime reading, I can confirm that, even in a world where Francis Spufford’s…
Mission impossible? The C of E’s attempt to woo new members
If you work for the Church of England in any capacity, from Archbishop of Canterbury to parish flower-arranger, how do…
How can I prevent my husband from burning all my post?
If you don’t yet watch Gogglebox on Channel 4, start doing so now. Far from making you despise our couch-potato…
What can we learn from Jeremy Bentham’s pickled head?
Under the central dome of UCL — an indoor crossroads where hordes of students come and go on their way…
Descent into hell
It’s awful, but the surname Rausing (once synonymous only with the Tetrapak fortune) now summons up a terrible stench in…
Warning: there’s a plague of fake blue plaques
One of the great distinctions and pleasures of British life has been devalued by cheap imitations
No place for sissies among the Bridge Ladies of Connecticut
Not a single line of this highly distinctive memoir happens out of doors. All of it takes place in rooms:…
The price of a cathedral – and how deans pay it
Deans are facing tough decisions to keep their beautiful buildings in good order
A mother-son relationship that made me feel sick
A boy, a car, a journey, a question: the first sentence of Elizabeth Day’s new novel goes like this: From…
The most annoying word in advertising
There’s a plague of first-person advertising
Private-school ‘superheads’ are a publicity-seeking waste of time
Private-school ‘superheads’ are wonderful for publicity.They may not be so good for teaching
John Irving spoilt my Christmas
This novel, John Irving’s 14th, took the sheen off my Christmas, and here are the reasons. The comments on…
The best short story collections — from childish gabbling to jaded nihilism
Anyone who enjoyed Ali Smith’s novel How to be Both, with its charmingly loopy monologue of an Italian Renaissance painter…
The perfect big bang that opens this book was too good to be true
Houses, as any plumber will testify, do sometimes blow up in gas explosions, destroying their contents and inhabitants, but would…
Breast-feeding isn't always best
New mothers who can’t keep to the breast-feeding orthodoxy face needless misery and shame
Bubble-wrap, berry-picking and the secret pleasures of destruction
The secrets of bubble-wrap and other delicious little sensations
Which comes first — the chicken or the pig?
Here are two parallel books, both by Americans, both 260 pages (excluding indexes) long, both using ‘likely’ as an adverb.…
What does your front garden say about you?
What does your front garden say about you?
Brian Sewell does some donkey work: how Britain’s best-known art critic put his ass on the line
I suppose all children’s authors write the stories they would have liked to read as children. But in the case of…
In praise of messy old kitchens
Against sterile modern kitchens
It takes a village (or six): the battle for rural churches
Can England’s 10,000 rural churches survive?
How to stop being scared of full stops
Modern manners and the fear of the full stop
Bish bash Bosphorus: Elif Shafak’s saga of love and death in Istanbul is crammed with incident on every page
If you like to curl up by the fire with a proper, old-fashioned, saga-style tale about a boy and his…
A beautiful speaking voice is a window to the soul
A beautiful speaking voice draws attention to the words spoken
In search of dead men's bones
Skulls, femurs, ribs, pelvises, piled on top of each other in a chaotic heap: this, Denise Inge discovered, was what…
