Books
The Boston marathon bombers: Muslim radicals or ordinary American citizens?
As Masha Gessen herself admits — and as friends and journalist colleagues repeatedly told her — it was a strange…
Parmenion
Athens The air-raid siren howls Over the quiet, the un-rioting city. It’s just a drill. But the unearthly vowels Ululate…
Crossed swords and pistols at dawn: the duel in literature
Earlier this century I was a guest at a fine dinner, held in a citadel of aristocratic Catholicism, for youngish…
Milan Kundera’s fun-free festival
We begin in Paris with an introduction to five insignificant friends. One (Ramon) is walking past the new Chagall exhibition,…
The smartphone is like having a singles bar in one’s pocket 24/7
An American stand-up comedian Aziz Ansari, who usually performs in Los Angeles and New York, has found time to conduct…
Sound and fury — the pianist James Rhodes is very angry indeed
Ours is the era of everybody’s autobiography. Bookshops groan with misery-lit memoirs — Never Let Me Go, Dysfunction Without Tears…
The honour of the Habsburgs was all that mattered to the imperial Austrian army
John Keegan, perhaps the greatest British military historian of recent years, felt that the most important book (because of its…
Iain Sinclair and me — Michael Moorcock meets his semi-mythical version
In the late 1980s Peter Ackroyd invited me to meet Iain Sinclair, whose first novel, White Chappell, Scarlet Tracings, I…
It’s amazing how many different subjects Sir Thomas Browne’s latest biographer doesn’t care about
On the evening of 10 March 1804, Samuel Taylor Coleridge settled at a desk in an effort to articulate what…
The first Clive Palmer
When former Liberal Prime Minister, John Howard, was finishing off his autobiography Lazarus Rising in 2010 I asked him whether…
Parmenion
Athens The air-raid siren howls Over the quiet, the un-rioting city. It’s just a drill. But the unearthly vowels Ululate…
Parmenion
Athens The air-raid siren howls Over the quiet, the un-rioting city. It’s just a drill. But the unearthly vowels Ululate…
From ambrosia to zabaglione — now with added slavery
This Oxford Companion ranges from the sweet to the decidedly salty, while being the most politically correct reference book you will ever consult, says Paul Levy
The ‘art’ of stealing presented as English heritage
The publicity blurb about the two unpleasant criminals whom this dismal book romanticises says that they are ‘continuing their ancestors’…
An Austenesque Aga saga with hints of postmodernism
Lovely, gentle Isabel, just 40, makes masks. Her husband Dan, erstwhile ‘student of the Classics’ and playwright manqué, is ‘bored…
Which comes first — the chicken or the pig?
Here are two parallel books, both by Americans, both 260 pages (excluding indexes) long, both using ‘likely’ as an adverb.…
The forgotten army: abandoned by the British to the horrors of Partition
It is often said that cricket was ‘a game invented by the English and played by Indians’, and every so…
The long shadow over China’s only children
This book starts with a Chinese boy so privileged and pampered that, at 21, he can’t open his own suitcase,…
Roger Federer helped me through my nervous breakdown, says William Skidelsky
Good writing about sport is rare — and good writing about tennis is that much rarer — so it’s conspicuous…
While I was wining and dining bands, the future of the music industry was stealing CDs in North Carolina
In 1994 I was working in marketing at London Records, a frothy pop label part-owned by the Polygram Group —…
The dark side of Delhi
When Sara discovers that her husband died in India, rather than being killed in Afghanistan as she was told, she…
What can we do with Dartmoor?
In his poem ‘Eden Rock’, Charles Causley conjures up a dreamy memory of a childhood picnic ‘somewhere beyond Eden Rock’.…
Message
A tiny fly is moving over the page of my dull book this sultry evening, and it is my conceit…
Message
A tiny fly is moving over the page of my dull book this sultry evening, and it is my conceit…
Message
A tiny fly is moving over the page of my dull book this sultry evening, and it is my conceit…
