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Richard Needham takes a businesslike attitude to the Troubles
This memoir from Sir Richard Needham, 6th Earl of Kilmorey, businessman and former Northern Ireland minister, has a frank opening:…
Father Christmas battles through the Blitz
When the shrill air raid sirens blared their familiar warning cries over the city at 6.01 p.m. on 29 December…
Culture clash: Things We Don’t Tell the People We Love, by Huma Qureshi, reviewed
Apart from what the title tells us, these stories are about a fundamental difference in cultures. Huma Qureshi writes like…
Suspicious circumstances abound in the latest crime fiction
The old adage that everyone has a novel in them has a new version: anyone can write a thriller. Celebrity…
Who’s to blame if Britney Spears has been ‘devoured’ by celebrity?
All the questions around Britney Spears can be condensed into this one: who should we blame? For a long time,…
What I really said to Gordon Brown: Field Marshal Lord Guthrie sets the record straight
A headline in the Mail on Sunday, taken up eagerly by the BBC’s Todayprogramme, claimed recently: ‘The SAS is getting…
Glasnost merely confirmed Russia’s deep-seated suspicion of democracy
Thirty years ago the Soviet Union was guttering to its close. Those of us who were there remember the exhilarating…
A scrapbook of sketches: James Ivory’s memoir is slipshod and inconsequential
James Ivory and Ismail Merchant formed the most successful cinematic partnership since Michael Powell and Eric Pressburger. Between the founding…
Compassion and a gift for friendship are touchingly evident in Ann Patchett’s These Precious Days
It has to be one of the most extraordinary stories of lockdown — how Tom Hanks’s assistant Sooki Raphael, undergoing…
There is nothing cosy about Penelope Lively
At one time, Penelope Lively was routinely shortchanged by critics. Her protagonists are often middle-class professionals — historians, archeologists, scriptwriters…
Why I was labelled a bitch: Joan Collins remembers the old Hollywood days
Readers of this magazine will have enjoyed Joan Collins’s diaries, and her Past Imperfect was one of the funniest showbiz…
A celebration of natural wonders: the best of the year’s art books
If one of the purposes of art is to help us see the world around us, then Sebastião Salgado’s photographs…
A broken nation: Chronicles from the Land of the Happiest People on Earth, by Wole Soyinka, reviewed
One of the best episodes in Wole Soyinka’s third novel (his first since 1973) takes place not in Nigeria but…
In defence of capitalism – ‘the greatest engine of human progress ever invented’
For all its faults and foibles, its busts and bailouts, modern market capitalism demonstrates a remarkably bullish resilience. We don’t…
Is Christianity about to end in the place it began?
Janine di Giovanni’s book begins in a Paris apartment during the first lockdown. She’s at a friend’s home, which she…
Why the mid-1960s was the golden age of pop music
On a Monday evening in May 1966, Paul McCartney and John Lennon visited a nightclub called Dolly’s in Jermyn Street.…
Why has medicine been so slow to improve over the centuries?
Medicine was founded by Hippocrates in the 5th century BC. Doctors continued to study the Hippocratic texts into the 19th…
Lockdown creations: the best of the year’s cookery books reviewed
‘I may, one day, stop making notes and writing down recipes,’ Nigel Slater says in A Cook’s Book (Fourth Estate,…
Anthony Holden is nostalgic for journalism’s good old bad old days
After a career spanning 50 years, 40 books and about a million parties, Anthony Holden has written a memoir. Based…
A feast for geeks: The Making of Incarnation, by Tom McCarthy, reviewed
Since the publication of his debut, Remainder, Tom McCarthy has established himself as the Christopher Nolan of literary fiction: his…
A macabre meditation on psoriasis
Obsessed with purity and pain, the boundaries of blame and innocence, Skin is a fascinating meditation on psoriasis, the long-lasting…
With Elizabeth Stuart as monarch, might the English civil war have been avoided?
Many girls dream about their favourite princesses. Elizabeth Stuart, a princess herself, took this fantasy a step further and modelled…
How Shane MacGowan became Ireland’s prodigal son
I once stood on a Dublin street with Shane MacGowan and watched little old ladies who can’t ever have been…
How fears of popery led to a century of turmoil in ‘the land of fallen angels’
Stuart England did not do its anti-Catholicism by halves. In the late 1670s and early 1680s, a popular feature of…
The unfamiliar Orwell: the writer as passionate gardener
Sara Wheeler 27 November 2021 9:00 am
This is a book about George Orwell’s recognition that desire and joy can be forces of opposition to the authoritarian…