Books
The useful Colonel Houses
Franklin Delano Roosevelt was determined to get the measure of Britain’s wartime prime minister Winston Churchill, and of Britain’s chances…
Disraeli, by Douglas Hurd; The Great Rivalry, by Dick Leonard - review
Sam Leith finds shades of Jeffrey Archer and Boris Johnson in the 19th-century prime minister
The Charleston Bulletin Supplements, by Virginia Woolf and Quentin Bell
The Charleston Bulletin was a family newspaper produced between 1923 and 1927 by the teenaged Quentin Bell and his elder…
Building: Letters, 1960–1975, by Isaiah Berlin
This is the third volume of Isaiah Berlin letters; one more to go. Discerning critics have showered the first two…
Rousseau and the Tiger
This is the Tiger and this is Rousseau. This is the picture I painted to show That this is the…
Seaweeds, by Ole G. Mouritsen - review
On 14 April each year, nori fishermen gather on a hillside overlooking Ariake Bay on Kyushu in southern Japan to…
The history girl
Ronald Knox, found awake aged four by a nanny, was asked what he was thinking about, and he replied ‘the…
She Landed by Moonlight, by Carole Seymour-Jones - review
The subtitle of Carole Seymour-Jones’s quietly moving biography of the brilliant SOE agent Pearl Witherington is ‘the real Charlotte Gray’.…
how to get a life
just to tell you there is nothing better almost nothing better than getting into bed in the middle of the…
The Unwinding, by George Packer - review
The Unwinding is a rather classy addition to the thriving genre of American apocalypse porn. The basic thesis can be…
The Authors XI, by The Authors Cricket Club - review
We were never going to get ‘come to the party’ or ‘a hundred and ten per cent’ from The Authors…
Books and Arts
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A wicket way with words
We were never going to get ‘come to the party’ or ‘a hundred and ten per cent’ from The Authors…
A wicket way with words
We were never going to get ‘come to the party’ or ‘a hundred and ten per cent’ from The Authors…
Music & Monarchy, by David Starkey - review
Music has always been integral to the image and power of monarchy. Our present Royal family should take note, says Jonathan Keate
Horace and Me, by Harry Eyres - review
After Zorba the Greek, here comes Horace the Roman. The peasant Zorba, you’ll remember from the film, releases uptight, genteel…
Laidlaw by William McIlvanney - review
Laidlaw was first published in 1977, 36 years back from now, 38 on from The Big Sleep. Like Chandler’s classic…
Adhocism, by Charles Jencks - review
Here, for time travellers, is the whack-job spirit of ’68 in distillate form, paperbound and reissued in facsimile (with some…
Foreign Policy Begins at Home, by Richard N. Haass - review
A year or so after the ‘liberation’ of Iraq, an unnamed senior Bush administration official (later revealed to be Karl…
Against Their Will, by Allen M. Hornblum - review
After the Morecambe Bay Hospital scandal a new era opens of compassion, -whistle-blowing, naming names and possible prosecutions. But what…
Dark Actors, by Robert Lewis - review
No book about Dr David Kelly could start anywhere other than at the end. Kelly is found, dead, in a…
Jane Gardam on Barbara Comyns - essay
The Vet’s Daughter is Barbara Comyns’s fourth and most startling novel. Written in 1959 when she was 50 it is…
A walking contradiction
Nick Greiner: A Political Biography By Ian Hancock Connor Court, $59.95, pp 480 ISBN 9781922168542 Ian Hancock has, in recent…
Reasons to be angry
As a teenager in the 1980s I liked Jimmy Connors. This meant parking my not inconsiderable jealousy that he’d once…
The end of separatism
In Black & White: Australians All At The Crossroads Editors: Rhonda Craven, Anthony Dillon, Nigel Parbury Connor Court, $29.95, pp…
