Books

Josefa Duran, the flamenco dancer known as ‘Pepita’

Wealth is no guarantee of happiness. Look at the Sackville-Wests

10 May 2014 9:00 am

When Robert Sackville-West was writing Inheritance (2010), his history of Knole and the Sackvilles, he was ‘struck’, as he recalls…

Exclamation marks, no; aertex shirts, yes!

10 May 2014 9:00 am

Jonathan Meades, the architectural, food and cultural commentator, appears on television in a pair of retro shades and a trademark…

One of three portraits of Dylan Thomas by Alfred Janes

Dylan Thomas: boozer, womaniser, sponger, charlatan — or master craftsman?

10 May 2014 9:00 am

In Dylan Thomas’s centenary year, Hilly Janes recalls her father’s friendship with the poet and his visits to the Boat House at Laugharne

Incoming: anti-Vietnam war protests during President Johnson’s visit, Sydney, 22 October 1966

A noble cause

10 May 2014 9:00 am

I supported Australia’s Vietnam commitment in the decade between 1965 (when the Menzies Coalition government deployed combat forces to South…

Portrait of the artist

8 May 2014 1:00 pm

Who the hell was Dylan Thomas? Boozer, womaniser, sponger, charlatan — or master craftsman, besotted husband, generosity personified and one…

One of three portraits of Dylan Thomas by Alfred Janes

Portrait of the artist

8 May 2014 1:00 pm

Who the hell was Dylan Thomas? Boozer, womaniser, sponger, charlatan — or master craftsman, besotted husband, generosity personified and one…

Jorge Luis Borges and his ‘bitch’

3 May 2014 9:00 am

Ian Thomson on a miserable mismatch that became the talk of Buenos Aires in the Sixties

The most romantic winter resort in Europe: Taormina, with Mount Etna in the background, by Edward Lear

The fruitcake island of Sicily and its legion of literary visitors

3 May 2014 9:00 am

At the opposite end of the Continent to ourselves, Sicily has always been an attraction for the English who, from…

‘Study of a Velvet Crab’ c. 1870, presented by John Ruskin to the Ruskin School of Drawing (University of Oxford) in 1875

How seriously should we take Ruskin as an artist?

3 May 2014 9:00 am

This stout and well-designed volume nicely complements Tim Hilton’s classic biography of John Ruskin. It is the catalogue for the…

Who’s raiding the fridge?

3 May 2014 9:00 am

There is a problem with describing what happens in Nagasaki: impossible to reveal much of the plot without flagging up…

John Crace digested – twice

3 May 2014 9:00 am

Fiction ‘So how come we’re in the same book?’ Paul from The Stranger’s Child asked Florence from On Chesil Beach.…

The assassination of the Archduke Franz Ferdinand of Austria (Le Petit Journal, 12 July 1914)

Gavrilo Princip – history's ultimate teenage tearaway

3 May 2014 9:00 am

Amid the vast tonnage of recent books about the first world war this must be the most unusual — and…

Half-poetry, half-prose, half-Belgian – and not half bad

3 May 2014 9:00 am

Patrick McGuinness’s prose trembles on the edge of poetry, occasionally indeed tipping gently over into it. This is thoroughly characteristic…

Bitchiness gets in the way of the Gielgoodies

3 May 2014 9:00 am

In the summer of 1955 a group of finals students trooped into a classroom at the Royal Academy of Dramatic…

What would Raymond Chandler do?

3 May 2014 9:00 am

If the inclusion of the erstwhile master of the genre, Raymond Chandler, as a fictonalised character in a pastiche 1930s…

It’s not nice being used and abused

3 May 2014 9:00 am

The term ‘psychological thriller’ is an elastic one these days, tagged liberally on to any story of suspense that explores…

A cult of inspired amateurishness that seized the 60s

3 May 2014 9:00 am

Hugo Williams describes his early association with The Exploding Galaxy — a group of innovative artists, musicians, poets and dancers that burst on the London scene in the late 1960s

Shooting prize-dispensing fish in literary barrels

3 May 2014 9:00 am

Edward St Aubyn’s new novel is a jauntily malicious satire on literary prizes in general, the Man Booker Prize in…

For God, King and Country

3 May 2014 9:00 am

Flags and flowers: three bloody years worked in silk. At the needle’s eye stand easy, ghost, slip through my fingers…

To be topp at lat., throw your Cambridge Latin Course away

3 May 2014 9:00 am

The wisest words about learning Latin were said by that gifted prep-school boy, Nigel Molesworth: ‘Actually, it is quite easy…

The book that brought out the Lady Bracknell in me

3 May 2014 9:00 am

I’ve always said that speech is my second language, so naturally I’m somewhat slang-shy; I love words all written down…

‘The Schooner the Beata, Penzance, Mount’s Bay and Newlyn Harbour’ by Alfred Wallis,

Books and arts

3 May 2014 9:00 am

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Tripping through psychedelia

1 May 2014 1:00 pm

The Exploding Galaxy flashed brightly in the black-and-white world that was just coming to an end as I was growing…

For God, King and Country

1 May 2014 1:00 pm

Flags and flowers: three bloody years worked in silk. At the needle’s eye stand easy, ghost, slip through my fingers…

Tripping through psychedelia

1 May 2014 1:00 pm

The Exploding Galaxy flashed brightly in the black-and-white world that was just coming to an end as I was growing…