Books
A narrow escape
C.J. Sansom is deservedly famous for his Shardlake crime novels, featuring a 16th-century lawyer on the fringes of the court.…
Classic Coe
You sense that writing Seb Coe: The Autobiography (Hodder, £20) must have been a pleasurable task for the Lord of…
The one who got away with it
The first track on Neil Young’s latest album lasts nearly 28 minutes, for while he usually has no problem starting,…
Narrative drive
Michael Holroyd describes this tiny, charmingly pointless publication (On Wheels, Chatto, £9.99) not as a book but as an example…
Too much time in the library
Donna Leon’s The Jewels of Paradise (Heinemann, £17.99)has a promising premise. A young musicologist, Caterina Pelligroni, returns to Venice to…
The darker side of Dawn
I like Dawn French when she is playing a sinister nurse much more than when she’s a jolly vicar. As…
Hart-felt praise
‘I don’t profess this tome to be one of deep reflection or profound, serious thinking,’ writes Miranda Hart, which may…
Our most exotic bird
The Black Grouse (Merlin Unwin, £20) is Patrick Lurie’s first book and the first ever on the the subject. Lurie…
A guide to the media circus
Caitlin Moran’s bestselling How to be a Woman careered with reckless frivolity from the personal (eldest of eight, home-schooled in…
Hell hath no fury…
We all know Edwina Currie as a shrill, tasteless, attention-seeking Thatcherite nuisance from Liverpool. But the private Edwina — as…
Games over
It seems like only hours since they ended, but people have already written and published books about the Olympics, and…
Our national obsession
If Britain is serious about this Olympic legacy thing, we should get ‘talking about the weather’ added to the list…
Bookends: The Saint Zita Society, by Ruth Rendell
Sometimes it seems as if Ruth Rendell’s heart just isn’t in all that killing any more. Certainly, her latest book,…
Bookends: Umpty, umpty, umpty…
According to Ogden Nash, the reason the British aristocracy wrote so much is because they could never understand what they…
Bookends: Heading for the rough
Middle age lays many hazards and traps for us, not the least of which is golf. Breaking 80 (Yellow Jersey…
Bookends: Deftly orchestrated chaos
The headings set the scene: ‘Last Tango in Balham, in which I meet Marlon Brando on the dance floor of…
Bookends: Cycle of pain
Reg Harris by Robert Dineen (Ebury Press, £16.99) is about a man who was once Britain’s number one athlete: a…
From our own correspondent
‘Interviewing Afghan warlords is always something of a delicate dance,’ writes roving BBC reporter Nick Bryant in Confessions from Correspondentland…
Bookends: Arkansas tales
Stranger men have become stars than Billy Bob Thornton, but not many. His obsessive-compulsive disorder encompasses a bizarre list of…
Bookends: One for the road
Jay McInerney is best known for his first novel, Bright Lights, Big City (1984), which winningly combined sophistication and naivety.…
Bookends: Un poco goes a lang Weg
Here esse un curiosité, and kein mistake. Diego Marani (above) esse eine Italianse writer and EU officialisto livingante in Brussels,…
Bookends: The Queen’s message
It is a sad fact that most ‘self-help’ books end up helping no one, other than the people who wrote…
Bookends: Shady people in the sun
Carla McKay’s The Folly of French Kissing (Gibson Square, £7.99) is a very funny, cynical tale about British expatriates in…
Bookends: Prep-school passions
In his introductory eulogy, Peter Parker calls In the Making: The Story of a Childhood (Penguin, £8.99) G. F. Green’s…
Bookends: Pure gold
Even nowadays, a 50-year career in pop music is a rare and wondrous thing, and for a woman triply so.…
