Diary
Diana Spencer has been dead for 20 years. I was a journalist on the Evening Standard in those days and…
1944 and all that
The star of this film is the music, composed by Lorne Balfe. I really liked it, which was just as…
Mother Theresa
Tory activists last week were heard to refer to Mrs May as ‘Mummy’. No Corbynista calls their hero ‘Dad’. The…
Welsh wizardry
When Stravinsky visited David Jones in his cold Harrow bedsit, he came away saying, ‘I have been in the presence…
Magnetic and repellent
When he first came to public notice, Rasputin was described in a Russian newspaper as ‘a symbol. He is not…
Diary
The borderline between fact and fiction becomes ever hazier, I find. Last February, Daisy Goodwin — the author of the…
Diary
The borderline between fact and fiction becomes ever hazier, I find. Last February, Daisy Goodwin — the author of the…
Dante’s egomania
Unlike Shakespeare, who kept himself out of all his works, except the Sonnets, Dante was endlessly reworking his autobiography, even…
Diary
Quarrelling about the date of Easter has been a Christian pastime for centuries. The chief bone of contention is whether…
Diary
Quarrelling about the date of Easter has been a Christian pastime for centuries. The chief bone of contention is whether…
What an absolute darling you are!
Iris Murdoch’s emotionally hectic novels have been enjoying a comeback lately, with an excellent Radio 4 dramatisation of The Sea,…
Diary
Should we have celebrated VJ Day? Hearing the hieratic tones of the Emperor Hirohito on Radio 4 the other day,…
Diary
Should we have celebrated VJ Day? Hearing the hieratic tones of the Emperor Hirohito on Radio 4 the other day,…
Early Christian alms race
Peter Brown’s explorations of the mindsets of late antiquity have been educating us for nearly half a century, ever since…
An old classic in a new light
Subscribers to this periodical, while Mark Amory has been literary editor, must often have felt they were enjoying an incomparable…
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…
Diary
Like many inward-looking children, I always doodled stories and poems. Knowing one wanted to be a writer is a different…
Seeing Dante anew
Reading Dante is an experience of a lifetime. You never come to the end of it. But, like Dante himself,…
Between the broad and the high
Oriel was only the fifth college to be founded in Oxford, in 1326. Although it has gone through periods of…
Neither saint nor sage
The inventor of ‘doublethink’ was consistently inconsistent in his own political views, says A.N. Wilson. And no fun at all
My companion for life
There are books we read for pleasure and there are books we are paid to review. However enjoyable the books…
The history girl
Ronald Knox, found awake aged four by a nanny, was asked what he was thinking about, and he replied ‘the…
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…
