Books
Wealth is no guarantee of happiness. Look at the Sackville-Wests
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!
Jonathan Meades, the architectural, food and cultural commentator, appears on television in a pair of retro shades and a trademark…
Dylan Thomas: boozer, womaniser, sponger, charlatan — or master craftsman?
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
A noble cause
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
Who the hell was Dylan Thomas? Boozer, womaniser, sponger, charlatan — or master craftsman, besotted husband, generosity personified and one…
Portrait of the artist
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’
Ian Thomson on a miserable mismatch that became the talk of Buenos Aires in the Sixties
The fruitcake island of Sicily and its legion of literary visitors
At the opposite end of the Continent to ourselves, Sicily has always been an attraction for the English who, from…
How seriously should we take Ruskin as an artist?
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?
There is a problem with describing what happens in Nagasaki: impossible to reveal much of the plot without flagging up…
John Crace digested – twice
Fiction ‘So how come we’re in the same book?’ Paul from The Stranger’s Child asked Florence from On Chesil Beach.…
Gavrilo Princip – history's ultimate teenage tearaway
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
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
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?
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
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
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
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
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
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
I’ve always said that speech is my second language, so naturally I’m somewhat slang-shy; I love words all written down…
Books and arts
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Tripping through psychedelia
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
Flags and flowers: three bloody years worked in silk. At the needle’s eye stand easy, ghost, slip through my fingers…
Tripping through psychedelia
The Exploding Galaxy flashed brightly in the black-and-white world that was just coming to an end as I was growing…
