Books
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…
Up close and personal
In recycling his most intimate encounters as fiction – including amazing feats of promiscuity in small-town New England – John Updike drew unashamedly on his own experiences for inspiration, says Philip Hensher
What most imperilled country houses in the 20th century was taxes and death duties, not requisition
Servicemen used paintings as dartboards. Schoolchildren dismantled banisters and paneling for firewood. Architects from the Ministry of Works acted like…
Recent crime fiction
Louise Welsh rarely repeats herself, a quality to celebrate in a crime novelist. Her latest novel, A Lovely Way to…
The train stations that don’t really exist
In 1964, as part of his railway cuts, Dr Beeching ordered the closure of Duncraig, a small, little-used station in…
An escape from New South Wales
Thomas Keneally has constructed his latest novel around a framework of true events: the mass break-out of Japanese PoWs from…
The gambler’s daily grind
Lord Doyle is a shrivelled English gambler frittering away his money and destroying his liver in the casinos of Macau.…
Beauty in beastly surroundings
The vast majority of books written about British gardens and their histories are concerned with large ones, made and maintained,…
Books and arts
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‘Qui, moi?’
In 2008, Bob Carr was on an ABC panel show, pontificating about the wisdom of decisions of the US Supreme…
Recent crime fiction
Louise Welsh rarely repeats herself, a quality to celebrate in a crime novelist. Her latest novel, A Lovely Way to…
Recent crime fiction
Louise Welsh rarely repeats herself, a quality to celebrate in a crime novelist. Her latest novel, A Lovely Way to…
Churchill was as mad as a badger. We should all be thankful
The egotistical Churchill may have viewed the second world war as pure theatre, but that was exactly what was needed at the time, says Sam Leith
Ladies' hats were his waterlillies - the obsessive brilliance of Edgar Degas
Lucian Freud once said that ‘being able to draw well is the hardest thing — far harder than painting, as…
A Mughal Disneyland and a ripping yarn
Mysore, once the capital of a princely kingdom in South India, has lost its lustre. In Mahesh Rao’s darkly comic…
From Göring to Hemingway, via Coco Chanel – the dark glamour of the Paris Ritz at war
In Midnight in Paris, Woody Allen did a good job of showing how foolish it is to be obsessed by…
Sudan was always an invented country. Maybe we should invent it again
Sudan — a country that ceased to exist in 2011 — is or was one of the last untouristed wildernesses…
Roger Mortimer writes again
After Dear Lupin and Dear Lumpy, here’s a slightly more prosaically titled collection of letters from Roger Mortimer, longtime racing…
Start with a torpedo, and see where you go from there
Sebastian Barry’s new novel opens with a bang, as a German torpedo hits a supply ship bound for the Gold…
A thriller that breaks down the publishing office door
Like teenage children and their parents, authors and publishers have a symbiotic relationship characterised by well-justified irritation on both sides.…
Wonders written on the wall
‘Take away, utterly extinct and destroy all shrines … pictures, paintings and all other monuments of feigned miracles, pilgrimages, idolatry…
Tea with Greta Garbo's decorator
Many people write, or at least used to write, fan letters to their film favourites. Usually all they received in…
Books and arts
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Letting go
We are not, by our nature, a militaristic people, and it is significant that our most well-known military venture was…
Our leaders have betrayed the noble worker. Oh really?
Alan Johnson cannot accept that the best days of the British working class are over
