Bookends
All is not lost
Phyllida Law has a delightfully natural style, a gift for anecdote and the knack of seeing the funny side of…
A hero of folk
‘This Machine Kills Fascists’ was the ambitious slogan that Woody Guthrie (1912-1967) painted on his guitars. By fascists he meant…
A hero of folk
‘This Machine Kills Fascists’ was the ambitious slogan that Woody Guthrie (1912-1967) painted on his guitars. By fascists he meant…
Down to a T
There are normally three problems with reviews of books which, like This is the Way by Gavin Corbett (Fourth Estate,…
Down to a T
There are normally three problems with reviews of books which, like This is the Way by Gavin Corbett (Fourth Estate,…
Growing old disgracefully
Virginia Ironside’s novel, No! I Don’t Need Reading Glasses (Quercus £14.99) about a 65-year-old granny who belongs to a local…
Growing old disgracefully
Virginia Ironside’s novel, No! I Don’t Need Reading Glasses (Quercus £14.99) about a 65-year-old granny who belongs to a local…
Knowing your onions
Having fried your leeks in butter, form them into a poultice and apply it to your backside. No, not Heston…
Knowing your onions
Having fried your leeks in butter, form them into a poultice and apply it to your backside. No, not Heston…
Novel ways of writing
If you consider ‘gripping metafiction’ a self-contradictory phrase (surely metafiction disables tension through its wink-at-the-audience style?), Nicholas Royle’s First Novel…
The Diana effect
My favourite joke of all time concerns Diana Dors, whose real name was Diana Fluck. She was invited back to…
The Wiggins streak
As the first British winner of the Tour de France and a gold medalist at London 2012, Bradley Wiggins is…
Rock solid
Rod Stewart once tried to convince his mother that he had made a lot of money, and wanted to buy…
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.…
Classic Coe
You sense that writing Seb Coe: The Autobiography (Hodder, £20) must have been a pleasurable task for the Lord of…
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,…
Narrative drive
Michael Holroyd describes this tiny, charmingly pointless publication (On Wheels, Chatto, £9.99) not as a book but as an example…
Too much time in the library
Donna Leon’s The Jewels of Paradise (Heinemann, £17.99)has a promising premise. A young musicologist, Caterina Pelligroni, returns to Venice to…
The darker side of Dawn
I like Dawn French when she is playing a sinister nurse much more than when she’s a jolly vicar. As…
Hart-felt praise
‘I don’t profess this tome to be one of deep reflection or profound, serious thinking,’ writes Miranda Hart, which may…
Our most exotic bird
The Black Grouse (Merlin Unwin, £20) is Patrick Lurie’s first book and the first ever on the the subject. Lurie…
A guide to the media circus
Caitlin Moran’s bestselling How to be a Woman careered with reckless frivolity from the personal (eldest of eight, home-schooled in…
Hell hath no fury…
We all know Edwina Currie as a shrill, tasteless, attention-seeking Thatcherite nuisance from Liverpool. But the private Edwina — as…
Games over
It seems like only hours since they ended, but people have already written and published books about the Olympics, and…
Our national obsession
If Britain is serious about this Olympic legacy thing, we should get ‘talking about the weather’ added to the list…
