Books
The Ottoman empire: the last great casualty of the first world war
In a possibly apocryphal story, Henry Kissinger, while visiting Beijing in 1972 as Nixon’s national security adviser, asked Zhou Enlai,…
Racism, paedophilia and an inverted Snow White
God Help the Child, Toni Morrison’s 11th novel, hearkens back to two of her earliest. Like The Bluest Eye, it…
Sum total
Midnight to dawn adding one more to the serial tally, love and irritation carried over, borrowed and paid back, all…
Older, more angsty...and maybe wiser: the new face of growing up
We live in an age of generational turmoil. Baby-boom parents are accused of clinging on to jobs and houses which…
The world of Thessyros: an icky erotic fantasy
Lore has it that those viewing naughty books in the British Museum could once do so only with the Archbishop…
John Knox: like the blast of 500 trumpets
John Knox, Cranmer complained, was ‘one of those unquiet spirits, which can like nothing but that is after their own…
A lull in hostilities for Matthew Hervey
Allan Mallinson’s historical series concerning Matthew Hervey, the well-bred, thoughtful soldier, details a world where men are practical and not…
Antony Sher: a surprisingly reluctant actor
Understandably given its bulk, Antony Sher’s Falstaff in the Royal Shakespeare Company’s recent production of Shakespeare’s two Henry IV plays…
Before we were famous: Tom Stoppard describes sharing a bedsit in Sixties London with Derek Marlowe
Tom Stoppard recalls bedsit days in Sixties London with his laconic friend Derek Marlowe, as they both embarked on a life of writing
Books & arts
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Local hero
Some of us habitually quote Orwell’s correct comparison of producing first-person prose to ‘dosing yourself with some … very deleterious…
Sum total
Midnight to dawn adding one more to the serial tally, love and irritation carried over, borrowed and paid back, all…
Sum total
Midnight to dawn adding one more to the serial tally, love and irritation carried over, borrowed and paid back, all…
Pitfalls on the road to the Rising
The centenary of the Easter Rising is already being commemorated. Ahead of the flood of books that will follow, Roy Foster chooses two impressive, if sombre ones to be going on with
St George: patron saint of England, patronised by all
What did St George do? Killed a dragon, as everyone knows. And yet, as Samantha Riches points out, no mention…
What did Steve Davis do to succeed at snooker? Everything his dad told him
Among the more intriguing insights into an election that seems to be taking longer than a Cliff Thorburn 50 break…
Americans and their gun culture: attached at the hip
Like the documentary journalist Iain Overton, author of this book, I was taught to shoot and maintain a gun as…
Monopoly is fascinating – as long as you don’t try to play it
I knew there had to be a point to Monopoly. The game itself is tedium made cardboard, the strongest known…
Bigger, better bedbugs bite back with a vengeance
‘Good night, sleep tight, don’t let the bedbugs bite,’ my mother used to say when she tucked me in at…
Social comedy Peruvian-style
Mario Vargas Llosa likes to counterpoint his darker novels with rosier themes: after the savagery of The Green House came…
Brothels, hashish, a poisonous scorpion, a cursed necklace: all excuses for macho antics in the Valley of the Kings
Gore Vidal has form as a crime writer. In the early 1950s, when his sympathetic literary treatment of homosexuality had…
Working is good for you — even if it’s unpaid, in a charity shop — or writing book reviews for The Spectator
Work is a funny old thing — a four-letter word to some, the meaning of life to others. There have…
There’s something about Mary (Wollstonecraft and Shelley)
If Mary Wollstonecraft, as she once declared, ‘was not born to tred in the beaten track’, the same with even…
Bernard Berenson and Kenneth Clark: pen friends, not true friends
Robert Cumming’s opening sentence is: ‘Kenneth Clark and Bernard Berenson first met in the summer of 1925.’ One is then…
Carl Jung meets David Icke (and writes a book of bonkers business-speak)
What do you get if you cross renegade psychoanalyst Carl Jung with lizard-men conspiracist David Icke? It is a question…
