Books
Margaret Thatcher’s most surprising virtue: imagination
Margaret Thatcher’s second administration saw bitter divisions at home, but abroad the breakthrough in Anglo-Soviet relations really did change history, says Philip Hensher
The best thing about Harry G. Frankfurt’s On Inequality is the paper
Ten years ago, a philosophy professor at Princeton wrote a book with a provocative, slightly indecent title. It was a…
Curtain call for Ruth Rendell
Ruth Rendell’s final novel, Dark Corners, is about how psychological necessity can drive perfectly ordinary people either to terrible deeds…
The greatest surprise about Nigeria at 100 is that it exists at all
A giant was born in 1914, an African giant. The same year European powers set about each other in the…
The polyphonous Babel of global music
‘Following custom, when the Siamese conquered the Khmer they carried off much of the population, including most of their musicians,…
Mary Beard minds her S, P, Q and R
Having rattled and routed Mark Antony and his bewitching Egyptian at the battle of Actium in 31 BC, Octavian was…
Books and arts opener
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Is City on Fire just a box set masquerading as a novel?
Ninety pages into the juggernaut that is City on Fire, I begin to think that this is really a box…
A crushing case for brutalism — with the people left out
Elain Harwood’s flawed but impressive study of modernist architecture manages perfectly to reflect its subject, says David Kynaston
The many lives of John Buchan
Ursula Buchan casts further light on her grandfather’s famous novel
The man who knows all the Hermitage's secrets - and he's keeping them
The front cover of this book describes the Hermitage as ‘the Greatest Museum in the World’. That sobriquet must go…
Alongside Beans
weeding alongside beans in the same rush as them 6 a.m. scrabbling at the earth beans synchronised in rows soft…
Proof that the British hardly ever had a stiff upper lip
The last time I cried was September 1989. That was my first week at public school. The reason I cried…
Allan Massie’s Bordeaux Quartet: truer to Occupied France than any history
In a recent book review, the historian Norman Stone wrote: ‘Maybe the second world war can now be left to…
Sport’s first celebrity: W.G. Grace
Should you wish to have a good copy of the 1916 edition of Wisden, cricket’s annual bible, you should be…
Retracing The Thirty-Nine Steps in Buchan’s beloved Borders
To celebrate the centenary of the publication of The Thirty-Nine Steps William Cook travelled to Tweeddale, where John Buchan spent his youthful summers
The most gripping sea-catastrophe writing I have read outside Conrad
When the novelist David Vann was 13, his father — a difficult, unhappy dreamer in his thirties, constantly in dread,…
Alongside Beans
weeding alongside beans in the same rush as them 6 a.m. scrabbling at the earth beans synchronised in rows soft…
Alongside Beans
weeding alongside beans in the same rush as them 6 a.m. scrabbling at the earth beans synchronised in rows soft…
Atheist and gay, Frederick the Great was more radical than most leaders today
Reacquaintance with Germany is long overdue for most English people. Before 1914 it was at least as familiar as France…
Superforecasting could spark a revolution in politics
Forecasts have been fundamental to mankind’s journey from a small tribe on the African savannah to a species that can…
How the world's first great republic slipped into empire and one-man rule
Marcus Tullius Cicero was the ancient master of the ‘save’ key. He composed more letters, speeches and philosophy books than…
Patrick deWitt is a literary original but he needs to BE MORE FUNNY
Patrick deWitt is a Canadian writer whose second novel, a picaresque and darkly comic western called The Sisters Brothers, was…
A portrait of a gay boxer
I don’t like boxing. If I ever get into a boxing ring, I’ll be in the corner with the governor…
Why on earth did Jeanette Winterson agree to retell Shakespeare's Winter’s Tale?
It is fair to say that Jeanette Winterson is not Shakespeare, though I cannot imagine why any authors would accept…
