Byron Rogers 
Michael Wharton: A Peter Simple life
He was fascinated by the Welsh, whom he listed, along with walking and gardening, as one of his three recreations in Who’s Who, something that alarmed those few Welshmen he… Read more
Part of the pantheon
Henry Fonda once said that he had never had any ambition to be a film star. But then how could a man want to become someone who came out of… Read more
Now we know what happened
First there was Sir Walter Raleigh, who after ‘getting one of the Mayds of Honour up against a tree in a Wood’ went on to write The Historie of the… Read more
More vindictive than merry
At first I thought this was going to be a terrible book. It starts like a Hollywood B-movie Western on which Ingmar Bergman has done a quick rewrite. This, for… Read more
Out of sight, out of mind
Arthur Newton and Peter Gavuzzi, long-distance interwar runners, are two of the most extraordinary British athletes. They are also the most forgotten. This is because the distances they favoured were… Read more
More sinned against than sinning
When I saw the title of this book, then read that it only covered the period 1600-1800 I hoped this would be a riot of comedy, something along the lines… Read more
Nobody turns up
This is not a book likely to figure in the lists of the reading circles of Home Counties England. There is for a start the little problem of a title,… Read more
Scenes from the Mad Hatter’s tea party
I only ever heard my mother admit twice to fancying other men. One, remarkably, was Saddam Hussein, the other was Richard Burton, and of each she said, ‘He’s a good-looking… Read more
A world of her own
This book, written by someone whose husband was for three years prime minister of Britain, is impossible to review. Yes, it is dull, but it is so triumphantly, so ineffably,… Read more
Nowhere becomes somewhere
There have been quite a few anthologies of British eccentricity. Usually they are roll-calls of the lunatic: a sought-after heiress so snobbish she finally gave her hand in marriage to… Read more
Laughter from the Gallery
This is an amiable book. The parliamentary sketchwriter Simon Hoggart, also the wine correspondent of this magazine, for which he drinks as selflessly as Zorba the Greek, has set out… Read more
Mountain sheep aren’t sweeter
Anyone who can speak Welsh is going to get a lot of fun from this book. Antony Woodward buys a six-acre smallholding 1200 feet up a mountain near Crickhowell in… Read more
Holy smoke
I have seen the last of the things that are gone, brooded the poet Padraic Colum. But then so have we all. We have seen them clustered outside the plate-glass… Read more
The stuff of legend
This book could have been a classic. It starts as an account of the author’s family, no better, no worse than many such; but then, amongst the grandparents and the… Read more
Method in his madness
The car manufacturer Henry Ford dominates this remarkable book, managing, like Falstaff, to be its tragic hero, villain, and comic relief all at the same time. A gaunt, pacing figure,… Read more
Racists, pigs and hysterics
I cannot remember getting so much pleasure from a book. It is not just its beauty, the handmade paper, the quarter leather, the engraving of the Rhaeadr Falls cut in… Read more
The myth survived
You may find this book irritating. A complex exposition of 2,000 years of history, it is intended for the general reader, whoever he is (a general reader would surely not… Read more
But then the snow turned to rain
My daughter when small came home from school one night singing these extraordinary lines: ‘Fortune, my foe, why dost thou frown on me/ And will thy favours never lighter be?’… Read more
Horror in the Arctic
Around the middle of the 19th century a new image of horror appeared in Victorian art. In 1864 Edwin Landseer exhibited something the like of which he had never painted… Read more
Instead of the poem
On this book’s title page its publishers enlarge on Peter Ackroyd’s ‘retelling’: his book, they declare, is at once a translation and — wait for it — an ‘adaptation’ of… Read more
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