Bookends
Bookends: The Saint Zita Society, by Ruth Rendell
Sometimes it seems as if Ruth Rendell’s heart just isn’t in all that killing any more. Certainly, her latest book,…
Bookends: Umpty, umpty, umpty…
According to Ogden Nash, the reason the British aristocracy wrote so much is because they could never understand what they…
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: Deftly orchestrated chaos
The headings set the scene: ‘Last Tango in Balham, in which I meet Marlon Brando on the dance floor of…
Bookends: Cycle of pain
Reg Harris by Robert Dineen (Ebury Press, £16.99) is about a man who was once Britain’s number one athlete: a…
From our own correspondent
‘Interviewing Afghan warlords is always something of a delicate dance,’ writes roving BBC reporter Nick Bryant in Confessions from Correspondentland…
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: One for the road
Jay McInerney is best known for his first novel, Bright Lights, Big City (1984), which winningly combined sophistication and naivety.…
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: Shady people in the sun
Carla McKay’s The Folly of French Kissing (Gibson Square, £7.99) is a very funny, cynical tale about British expatriates in…
Bookends: Prep-school passions
In his introductory eulogy, Peter Parker calls In the Making: The Story of a Childhood (Penguin, £8.99) G. F. Green’s…
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: … and the inner tube
In the early 1990s, when Boris Johnson was making his name as the Daily Telegraph’s Brussels correspondent, Sonia Purnell was…
Bookends: Tilling tales
Several years ago, I listed as my literary heroes Herbert Pocket in Great Expectations and E. F. Benson’s Lucia. The…
Bookends: Disarming but disingenuous
At first glance, Be the Worst You Can Be (Booth-Clibborn Editions, £9.99) by Charles Saatchi (pictured above with his wife,…
Bookends: Terribly Tudor
History publishers like a gimmick, so I assumed Suzannah Lipscomb’s A Visitor’s Companion to Tudor England (Ebury, £12.99) must be…
Bookends: A matter of opinion
In an age when the merely mildly curious believe they can get all they really need to know from Wikipedia…
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: Down on the farm
Can we please have an inquiry into why already talented people are allowed to go off and be brilliant at…
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: A network of kidney-nappers
Raylan Givens, an ace detective in the Raymond Chandler mould, has encountered just about every shakedown artist and palooka in…
Bookends: Short and sweet
Before texts and Twitter there were postcards. Less hi-tech, but they kept people in touch. Angela Carter (pictured above) and…
Bookends: Trouble and strife
It isn’t true that Joanna Trollope (pictured above) only produces novels about the kind of people who have an Aga…
