Book review
Dutch comfort
Donna Tartt is an expert practitioner of what David Hare has called ‘the higher hokum’. She publishes a long novel…
Black and beyond
When Prince Albert died in 1861, aged 42, Queen Victoria, after briefly losing the use of her legs, ordered that…
Once upon a time there were…
If you are going to read a novel that plays with literary conventions you want it written with aplomb. In…
China’s iron lady
For susceptible Englishmen of a certain inclination — like Sir Edmund Backhouse or George Macdonald Fraser — the Empress Dowager…
Grand old master of modernism
How minor is minor? ‘Rings a bell’ was more or less the response of two English literature graduates, now successful…
Funny, warm and eccentric
It must have been awful for Diana and Duff Cooper to be separated from their only child during the war,…
This other Eden
Sam Leith is transported by the finest scenery in England
Bloom and bust
‘How could a man who has loved light and flowers so much and has rendered them so well, how could…
An Affair to remember
The Dreyfus Affair, the furore caused by a miscarriage of justice in France in 1894, is a source of perennial…
Best of enemies
The Great War was an obscene and futile conflict laying waste a generation and toppling emperors. Yet here are two…
Low, dishonest decade
When Gordon Brown eventually became aware that his Downing Street was about to be engulfed in the Smeargate scandal, he…
Court chronicler for the coalition
There are two ways of being a political journalist. One is to stay on the outside and try to avoid…
Child-swapping opium addicts…
The last time the general reader was inveigled into the domestic intensities of the Wordsworth circle was by Frances Wilson…
…and murderous, child-molesting mystics
Though alcohol withdrawal is potentially fatal, booze has none of the media-confected glitz of heroin (imagine Will Self boasting of…
Very clever Mr Boyd, but not clever enough
First, an appalling admission: I have never read any of Ian Fleming’s Bond books. Nor have I read any of…
A parable of human weakness
Fred Goodwin’s descent from golden boy of British banking to ‘pariah of the decade’ would be the stuff of tragedy…
Comfort in melancholy
Geoff Nicholson is the Maharajah of Melancholy. The quality was there in his novels, it was there in his non-fiction…
Gay abandon
Richard Davenport-Hines on the charmed, dizzy world of the multi-talented Colette
Lovely, enchanting language
When John Drury, himself an Anglican divine, told James Fenton (the son of a canon of Christ Church) that he…
Vichy from the inside
There can be few characters in modern fiction more unpleasant than Paul-Jean Husson, the narrator in Romain Slocombe’s Monsieur le…
Dishing the dirt
Is poetry in good enough health to be made fun of in this way? The irony is that this long,…
Cheap and cheerful
Mrs Thatcher was widely believed to have said that ‘any man over the age of 26 who finds himself on…
No use crying over spilt blood
Simon Sebag Montefiore’s One Night in Winter begins in the hours immediately following the solemn victory parade that marked the…
Giving Jonathan a drubbing
Peter Snow explains that he decided to look into this extraordinary story when he realised how few people knew about…
An elegant command
Alan Bennett once overheard an old lady say, ‘I think a knighthood was wasted on Derek Jacobi,’ and I know…
