Books

Bookends

24 September 2011 10:00 am

Joan Collins first came to public notice in the 1950s, as a Rank starlet and sex kitten. In the 1970s…

Bookends

17 September 2011 10:00 am

One day in the late 17th century, goes the legend, a French monk named Pierre called out to his colleagues:…

Bookends

10 September 2011 10:00 am

Harry Enfield has said that ‘comedy without Galton and Simpson would be like literature without Dickens,’ and he may be…

Bookends

3 September 2011 10:00 am

Dr Temperance Brenner, like her creator, Kathy Reichs, is a forensic anthropologist. She works in North Carolina, specialising in ‘decomps…

Bookends

27 August 2011 10:00 am

‘Owl?’ said Pooh. ‘What’s a biography?’ ‘A biography,’ replied Owl, ‘is an Important Book. Such as an Interested Person might…

Bookends: The Jazz Baroness

20 August 2011 10:00 am

She was born Kathleen Annie Pannonica Rothschild. Her father, Nathaniel Charles Rothschild, an ardent lepidopterist, named her Pannonica, Nica for…

Bookends: Laughing by the book

13 August 2011 10:00 am

Comedy is a serious business. The number of young people who seek to make a living making other people laugh…

Bookends

6 August 2011 10:00 am

Of all the great cultural shifts of recent years, the rise to respectability of American comics may be the strangest.…

Bookends: Corpses in the coal hole

30 July 2011 10:00 am

Ruth Rendell has probably pulled more surprises on her readers than any other crime writer. But the one she produces…

Bookends: A friend of mine

23 July 2011 10:00 am

A friend of mine was throttled by Pete Postlethwaite once. It was outside a TV studio, people were smoking and…

Bookends

16 July 2011 10:00 am

I like books with weather and there’s plenty in this one, all bad, which is even better. Set in London…

Bookends: Scourge of New Labour

9 July 2011 10:00 am

Like all politicians, Bob Marshall-Andrews is fond of quoting himself, and Off Message (Profile Books, £16.99) includes a generous selection…

Bookends: Not just for Christmas

2 July 2011 10:00 am

Sticky at Christmas, packed in serried rows around a plastic twig in an oval-ended paper-wrapped box with a picture of…

Bookends: Venice improper

25 June 2011 10:00 am

Books about Venice are almost as numerous as gondolas on the Grand Canal, but Robin Saikia is the first to…

Bookends: When will there be good news?

18 June 2011 10:00 am

I am in love with Jackson Brodie. Does this mean that, in a literary homoerotic twist, I am actually in…

Bookends: Lowe and behold

11 June 2011 10:00 am

It is 1979. You are a 15-year-old boy starring in a hit US television show. You’ve seen the crowds of…

Bookends: Bloodbath

4 June 2011 10:00 am

It may have been first published in 1973, but reading it again in Persephone Books’ elegant re-print, Adam Fergusson’s The…

Bookends

28 May 2011 10:00 am

In the summer of 2003, in a bar in Malta, George Best was approached by a man holding a paper…

Bookends: The voice of the lobster

21 May 2011 10:00 am

In existence for over 250 millions years, lobsters come in two distinct varieties, ‘clawed and clawless’. Human predators tend to…

Bookends: Unbalanced chorus

14 May 2011 10:00 am

Imagine a 77-year-old woman hanging around, say, Leicester bus station, telling people about her life. She confides her belief that…