Lead book review
How cool is your fridge?
Mrs Thatcher once explained that she adored cleaning the fridge because, in a complicated life, it was one of the…
Reading Norman Davies’s global history is like wading through porridge
For many of us, life has become global. Areas which were previously tranquil backwaters are now hives of international activity.…
Is Jewish humour the greatest defence mechanism ever created?
If you’re Jewish, or Jew-ish, or merely subscribe to the view that Jews should be trusted to recognise anti-Semitism rather…
More books of the year
Daniel Swift I spent too much of this (and last) year reading anaemic updatings of Shakespeare plays: pale novels which…
Books of the year
A.N. Wilson Elmet by Fiona Mozley (John Murray, £10.99). It is difficult to convey the full horror of this spellbinding…
Reza Aslan doesn’t fear God. But should he fear his fellow Muslims?
Eating human brains, burying one’s face in dead people’s ashes and publicly deriding the president of the United States as…
Romance and rejection
‘Outsider’ ought to be an important word. To attach it to someone, particularly a writer, is to suggest that their…
How pleasant to know Mr Lear
Edward Lear liked to tell the story of how he was once sitting in a railway carriage with two women…
A dazzling vision
There are a number of reports by his contemporaries of Thomas Gainsborough at work. They make you realise what a…
The morality of conducting
Now he is the greatest figure for me, in the world. [Toscanini is] the last proud, noble, unbending representative (with…
A strange vibration
Among the many curiosities revealed in this book, few are more startling than the fact that at the height of…
Taking the rough with the smooth
In The Ambassadors, Henry James sends Lewis Lambert Strether from Boston to Paris to retrieve Chad Newsome, the wayward heir…
High flyers
It is conventional wisdom in the publishing industry that, despite the old adage, readers do indeed judge books by their…
Damage limitation
One of the most pitiful sights in conflict areas is the local prosthetics store, with its rows of artificial limbs,…
In praise of neigh-sayers
Wallace Stevens gave us ‘Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Blackbird’. The German scholar Ulrich Raulff, in this meaty book…
Gilded prostitution
‘An English peer of very old title is desirous of marrying at once a very wealthy lady, her age and…
The city of ugly love
Cuba’s gorgeous, crumbling capital has always been a testing ground for writers. That heady combination of revolution, cocktails, sex and…
Love under wraps
It’s an important subject: the existence of a permanent and significant minority within London’s life. Gay men and lesbians have…
When will we ever learn?
In 2012, sugar became more dangerous than gunpowder. According to the historian Yuval Noah Harari, of the 56 million people…
The wondrous cross
How did the cross, from being such a loathsome taboo that it could scarcely be mentioned, change into an image…
Unearthly darkness
Mask of the Sun: The Science, History and Forgotten Lore of Eclipsesby Norton, £20, pp. 336 On 28 May 1900…
A true original
Leonora Carrington was strikingly beautiful with ‘the personality of a headstrong and hypersensitive horse’ (according to her friend and patron…
The descent of man
Why do humans want to build robots? It seems, on the face of it, to be a suicidal endeavour, destroying…
Review: Dinner with Armand de Brignac
A fine time was had by all at the Dickie Fitz Restaurant and Dining Room in London W1 the other…
Restaurateur Gavin Rankin enjoys a gastronomic trip to Belgium
Restaurateur Gavin Rankin enjoys a gastronomic trip to Belgium but wishes travelling companion, chef Rowley Leigh, had kept his mouth…
