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The Tudor sleuth who's cracked the secret of suspense
Some reviewers are slick and quick. Rapid readers, they remember everything, take no notes, quote at will. I’m the plodding…
Things to do: read this book
It would be perverse not to succumb to the temptation to write this review as a list. So, the first…
Was John Cleese ever funny?
Like many of my generation I was enchanted by the surrealistic irreverence of Monty Python’s Flying Circus, until I overheard…
Why the most important years in history were from 1347 to 1352
A group of retired Somerset farmers were sitting about in the early 1960s, so Ian Mortimer’s story goes, debating which…
What Shami regards as right isn’t necessarily what is right
Shami Chakrabarti, director of the civil rights group Liberty and omnipresent media personality, is on the cover of her book.…
Cronenberg attempts a teleportation from cinema to fiction. Cover your eyes…
Following his beginnings as a science-fiction horror director, David Cronenberg has spent the past decades transforming himself into one of…
The deep Britishness of fish and chips
During the D-day landings, members of the parachute regiment, finding themselves behind enemy lines at night, needed a way of…
A Jamaican civil war, with cameos from Bob Marley
There are many more than seven killings in this ironically titled novel — in fact very long — that starts…
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Does Boris Johnson really expect us to think he's Churchill?
An eccentric, thoroughgoing genius, surfing every wave with a death-defying self-belief — Philip Hensher wonders who Boris Johnson can be thinking of
Four ways to win Waterloo
The Kaiser’s war deprived Britain of her centenary celebrations of the victory at Waterloo. It also set the propagandists something…
While Holmes is away
Careful Sherlockians, on returning in adulthood to the four novels and 56 short stories that they devoured uncritically in their…
The history of the home – with the spittoons put back in
In 1978, a family of Russian ‘Old Believers’ living in a supposedly uninhabited part of the Siberian taiga were discovered…
The man who was mistaken for a deer
‘And anything by Michael Connelly’ were the final words of advice from one of my best friends in discussing books…
Jeff Koons's latest achievement: a new standard in prolix, complacent, solipsistic, muddled drivel
Jeff Koons is, by measures understood in Wall Street, the most successful living artist. But he’s a slick brand manager…
Lolita's secret revenge mission, and other daft theories of literary spite
Richard Bradford has written more than 20 books of literary criticism and biography. This latest one is a compendium of…
Books and arts
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Books and arts
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