Books
Seeds of a mystery in a great-aunt’s will
There is something cruelly beautiful, delightfully frustrating and filthily gorgeous about a Scarlett Thomas novel. Two family trees open and…
Making do on frogs’ legs and 4,500 brace of grouse
This big, bristling, deeply-furrowed book kicks off with a picture of the British countryside just before the second world war.…
How really to annoy the neighbours: build a basement swimming-pool
This book has brought out my inner Miliband. A punitive mansion tax on all properties with garden squares in Notting…
The long shadow of genocide: Armenia’s vengeance years
One morning in March 1921 a large man in an overcoat left his house in Charlottenburg, Berlin, to take a…
A moving tribute to Janusz Korczak, hero of the Warsaw ghetto
‘My mother and father named me Aron, but my father said they should have named me What Have You Done,…
Trials of the century: sex, sodomy, espionage, theft and fraud
Jeremy Hutchinson was the doyen of the criminal bar in the 1960s and 1970s. No Old Bailey hack or parvenu…
The Durable Postie
(For Karl) He doesn’t even bother to change out of his uniform, just goes straight to the pub after…
Shunned, slighted and starving in Sheffield — the Indian immigrants who have become Britain’s untouchables
Novels of such scope and invention are all too rare; unusual, too, are those of real heart, whose characters you…
Books and arts opener
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The Durable Postie
(For Karl) He doesn’t even bother to change out of his uniform, just goes straight to the pub after…
The Durable Postie
(For Karl) He doesn’t even bother to change out of his uniform, just goes straight to the pub after…
Liberty, philosophy and 246 types of cheese
The French have always favoured grand, elegant abstractions about the human condition, says Ruth Scurr. It’s part of their national identity
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
