Books
A book that rattles like a pressure-cooker with anger, outrage, frustration and spleen
‘You understand, Lenú, what happens to people: we have too much stuff inside and it swells us, breaks us.’ The…
Aussie royals
If the issue of Australia becoming a republic is a marathon rather than a sprint, the republicans never had a…
An unauthorised, and unconvincing, biography of Ted Hughes
Craig Raine says that Jonathan Bate’s unauthorised biography of Ted Hughes gets it wrong on every level
Friday
I have people to see is what I said. I did not say they are all in my head. I…
Shakespeare's London: where all the world really was a stage
Sam Leith on the year 1606, when plague and panic were rife — and all the world really was a stage
Alger Hiss: Tricky Dick’s scapegoat
In the more than 40 years since Richard Nixon resigned as president — disgraced as much by his inveterate lying…
David Jones: painter, poet and mystic
David Jones (1895–1974) was a remarkable figure: artist and poet, he was a great original in both disciplines. His was…
Woody Allen: a life of jazz, laughter, depression —and a few misdemeanours
Woody Allen (born Allan Stewart Konigsberg), the prolific, Oscar-winning auteur, New Orleans-style jazz clarinettist, doyen of New York delicatessen society,…
The best of British — from Agatha Christie to the YBAs
Is it true that, having lost an empire, we reinvented ourselves as an island of entertainers? Do we channel the…
There is good in every tree, says Thomas Pakenham — even the sycamore
I have never written much about the one-acre shaw of native trees I planted in 1994, even though it is…
In Crow’s dark shadow
A dead parent, the interrogation of a literary inheritance, and over everything, a bird: Max Porter is apparently unafraid to…
For William Boyd's war-photographer heroine, life is a series of accidents
Amory Clay, photographer and photo-journalist, was born in 1908, only two years after Logan Mountstuart, writer, poseur and ‘scribivelard’. Amory…
The beloved, mistreated and traumatised dogs of war
If you love dogs and or live with one — I declare an interest on both counts — there is…
Tessa Hadley's masterful new novel of missed opportunities
In The Past (set chiefly in the present) four middle-aged siblings spend an eventful summer holiday in the Devon country…
Mighty monuments — or neo-Gothic horrors?
Briefing his illustrator for the jacket of A Handful of Dust (1934), Evelyn Waugh asked for a country house in…
Books and arts opener
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Friday
I have people to see is what I said. I did not say they are all in my head. I…
Friday
I have people to see is what I said. I did not say they are all in my head. I…
The house that Alfred built
This is a book about boundaries — and relationships. At its heart is the eponymous house by the lake, which…
Remembering P.J. Kavanagh
OBITUARY
The perils of porcelain – and the pleasures of Edmund de Waal
A.S. Byatt on the dark, deadly secrets lurking beneath a calm, white surface
Niall Ferguson's biography of Henry Kissinger is a masterpiece
I have met Dr Kissinger, properly, only three times. First, in Cairo, in 1980, when, as a junior diplomat escorting…
Hoof-trimming
The below is an unpublished poem, written for Moortown, the verse-diary of Ted Hughes’s experiences of farming in Devon in…
The current scarcity of herring may itself be a red herring
Fish stories come in two varieties: the micro-version of a hundred riverside bars, blokeish boastings of rod-and-line tussles with individual…
The perfect big bang that opens this book was too good to be true
Houses, as any plumber will testify, do sometimes blow up in gas explosions, destroying their contents and inhabitants, but would…
