Bertie takes on the Black Shorts: Jeeves and the King of Clubs, by Ben Schott, reviewed
In 2016, inspired by reports that Donald Trump’s butler had recommended the assassination of Barack Obama, Ben Schott wrote a…
Bohemian life Down Under
Here’s a pair of little books — one even littler than the other — by Robin Dalton (née Eakin), a…
Disgusted of X-ville
Eileen is an accomplished, disturbing and creepily funny first novel by Ottessa Moshfegh, the latest darling of the Paris Review,…
A posh Del Boy
The Art of Smuggling comes garlanded with fraternal encomia from Howard ‘Mr Nice’ Marks, Phil Sparrowhawk (author of Grass) and…
Jack the Ripper unmasked again
The Whitechapel Fiend is a psychic conduit for the vilest aspects of Victorian sex and class, and a creature mainly…
The history man
History for Gore Vidal was a vehicle to be ridden in triumph, perhaps as in an out-take from Ben-Hur, which…
The raffish toff with a winning Formula
Max Mosley’s autobiography has been much anticipated: by the motor racing world, by the writers and readers of tabloid newspapers,…
Not a patch on our own Dear Mary
As Dear Mary so wittily demonstrates, our need for advice is perennial. But fashions change. Mary would probably take issue…
Three men, two men, one man and his dog…
In 1960 John Steinbeck set off with his poodle Charley to drive around the United States in a truck equipped…
Heads will roll
A severed head, argues Frances Larson in her sprightly new book, is ‘simultaneously a person and a thing… an apparently…
Say Cheese
Like many of my generation I was enchanted by the surrealistic irreverence of Monty Python’s Flying Circus, until I overheard…
From dram shop to Queen Mother’s handbag
Gin Glorious Gin: How Mother’s Ruin Became the Spirit of London is a jaunty and diverting history of ‘a wonderful…
Disciplined exoticism
Lewis Jones on Ian Fleming’s Jamaican retreat and the inspiration it provided for the Bond novels
Led a merry dance
When Robert Sackville-West was writing Inheritance (2010), his history of Knole and the Sackvilles, he was ‘struck’, as he recalls…
Setting Kerouac on the road
In 1944, when he was 22, Jack Kerouac lost a manuscript — in a taxi, as he thought, but probably…
Blazing saddles
Unlike many celebrity memoirs, Anjelica Huston’s is worth reading. In her Prologue she writes that as a child she modeled…
Violence was his vocation
Heroically brave and mad, prodigious in his industry and appetites, Norman Mailer was an altogether excessive figure. Since his death…
Giving Jonathan a drubbing
Peter Snow explains that he decided to look into this extraordinary story when he realised how few people knew about…
Change and decay in all around I see
The Unwinding is a rather classy addition to the thriving genre of American apocalypse porn. The basic thesis can be…
