Books
Bookends: Down on the farm
Can we please have an inquiry into why already talented people are allowed to go off and be brilliant at…
Bookends: Wasp without a sting
‘It may be hard to accept that a chaste teenage girl can end up in bed with the President of…
Bookends: Dickensian byways
Is there room for yet another book on Dickens? Probably not, but we’ll have it anyway. The Dickens Dictionary (Icon,…
Bookends: A network of kidney-nappers
Raylan Givens, an ace detective in the Raymond Chandler mould, has encountered just about every shakedown artist and palooka in…
Bookends: Short and sweet
Before texts and Twitter there were postcards. Less hi-tech, but they kept people in touch. Angela Carter (pictured above) and…
Bookends: Trouble and strife
It isn’t true that Joanna Trollope (pictured above) only produces novels about the kind of people who have an Aga…
Bookends: Doors of perception
Unlike most of the old rockers he writes about, the esteemed US critic Greil Marcus is becoming more prolific as…
Bookends: The year of living dangerously
Most people who recall 1976 do so for its appallingly hot summer, when parks turned brown and roads melted. Some…
Bookends: A shaggy beast of a book
Autobiography is a tricky genre to get right, which may be why so many well-known people keep having another go…
Bookends: An unreal world
Even by Hollywood standards, Carrie Fisher is pretty crazy. She was born a Hollywood princess, and remembers her parents —…
Bookends: A metropolitan menagerie
London has always loved its animals. James I kept elephants in St James’s Park (allowed a gallon of wine per…
Bookends: Saving JFK
Stephen King’s latest novel is a time-travel fantasy about the assassination of John F. Kennedy. At almost 750 pages, 11.22.63…
Bookends: No joke being a comedian
Failure is the very stuff of comedy, but not of showbiz memoirs, so Small Man in a Book (Michael Joseph,…
Bookends: Not filthy enough
The Pursued (Penguin, £12.99) is a lost crime thriller by C. S. Forester, the author of the Hornblower novels. It…
Bookends: About a boy
The Go-Between was L.P. Hartley’s best novel, Joseph Losey’s best film, and probably Harold Pinter’s best screenplay. In the novel,…
Bookends: Spirit of place
A new book by Ronald Blythe is something of an event. In recent years the bard of Akenfield has mostly…
Bookends: The showbiz Boris Johnson
Amiability can take you a long way in British public life. James Corden is no fool: he co-wrote and co-starred…
Bookends: Circling the Square Mile
You want the two-word review of this new book about the City? ‘London porn.’ For those of you with more…
Bookends: Squelch of the bladder-wrack
What’s not to like about Candida Lycett Green’s Seaside Resorts (Oldie Publications, £14.99)? Lovely colour photographs of over 100 of…
Bookends: Getting it perfect
There is an old joke which says that if you are lost in the desert, start making a salad dressing…
Bookends
Political sketchwriting, like most humorous writing, is one of those things that looks easy, especially to people who would never…
Bookends
Joan Collins first came to public notice in the 1950s, as a Rank starlet and sex kitten. In the 1970s…
Bookends
One day in the late 17th century, goes the legend, a French monk named Pierre called out to his colleagues:…
Bookends
Harry Enfield has said that ‘comedy without Galton and Simpson would be like literature without Dickens,’ and he may be…
Bookends
Dr Temperance Brenner, like her creator, Kathy Reichs, is a forensic anthropologist. She works in North Carolina, specialising in ‘decomps…
