Biography
Does Boris Johnson really expect us to think he’s Churchill?
An eccentric, thoroughgoing genius, surfing every wave with a death-defying self-belief — Philip Hensher wonders who Boris Johnson can be thinking of
Is there anything left to say about Queen Victoria? A.N. Wilson has found plenty
A new, revisionist biography argues that it was only after her husband’s death that Queen Victoria found her true self. Jane Ridley is impressed
Peter Levi – poet, priest and life-enhancer
Hilaire Belloc was once being discussed on some television programme. One of the panellists was Peter Levi. The other critics…
The lost Victorian who sculpted Churchill
Ivor Roberts-Jones was in many ways the right artist at the wrong time. Had the sculptor been born a few…
Chris Barber should let someone meaner tell his story
Chris Barber, still going strong with his big band, was born in 1930. He heard jazz as a schoolboy on…
The yes-no-maybe world of Harrison Birtwistle
For better or worse, we live in the age of the talking composer. Some talk well, some badly, a few…
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…
My family's better days
Simon Blow recalls the wealth, recklessness and beauty of his family’s better days
The Angel of Charleston, by Stewart MacKay - review
Above the range in the kitchen at Charleston House is a painted inscription: ‘Grace Higgens worked here for 50 years…
'She's the most important Jewish writer since Kafka!'
Ian Thomson on the turbulent life of Clarice Lispector
What was the secret of Queen Victoria's rebel daughter?
Princess Louise (1848–1939), Queen Victoria’s fourth daughter, was the prettiest and liveliest of the five princesses, and the only one…
The Roth of tenderness and of rage
In the autumn of 2012, Philip Roth told a French magazine that his latest book, Nemesis, would be his last.…
How honest was Bernard Berenson?
Sam Leith suspects that even such a distinguished connoisseur as Bernard Berenson did not always play a straight bat
The mad, mum-fixated maiden aunt of modernism
Marianne Moore’s poems are notoriously ‘difficult’ but her personality and the circumstances of her life are as fascinating today as…
The Last Knight, by Robert O’Byrne - review
I have to declare an interest: for many years the Knight and I were the closest of friends until a…
One Leg Too Few may be one biography too many
It’s no joke, writing about comedians. Their work is funny, their lives are not. Rightly honouring the former while accurately…
The abstract art full of 'breasts and bottoms'
Is there any such thing as abstract art? Narratives and coherent harmonies seem to me always to emerge from the…
The man who shared a bed with D.H. Lawrence and Dylan Thomas (though not together)
Rhys Davies was a Welsh writer in English who lived most of his life in London, that Tir na nÓg…
Why did Penelope Fitzgerald start writing so late?
‘Experiences aren’t given us to be “got over”, otherwise they would hardly be experiences.’ The opening sentence of the first…
George Orwell's doublethink
The inventor of ‘doublethink’ was consistently inconsistent in his own political views, says A.N. Wilson. And no fun at all
Was Bach as boring as this picture suggests?
What, one wonders, will John Eliot Gardiner be chiefly remembered for? Perhaps, by many who have worked with him, for…
Queen Victoria, by Matthew Dennison - review
When Prince Albert died in 1861, aged 42, Queen Victoria, after briefly losing the use of her legs, ordered that…
A Strong Song Tows Us, by Richard Burton - review
How minor is minor? ‘Rings a bell’ was more or less the response of two English literature graduates, now successful…
Music at Midnight, by John Drury - review
When John Drury, himself an Anglican divine, told James Fenton (the son of a canon of Christ Church) that he…
Wilkie Collins by Andrew Lycett - review
In the outrageous 2010 press hounding of the innocent schoolteacher Christopher Jefferies over the murder of his young female tenant…
