Nicholas Haslam 
Design For Living
Writing in The Spectator a few weeks ago, Ed Vaizey praised the Prime Minister for hosting a party at No. 10 during London Fashion Week to honour the contribution that… Read more
Schlock teaser
The somewhat straightlaced theatre-going audiences of 1880s America, eager for performances by European artistes like Jenny Lind and solid, home-grown, classical actors such as Otis Skinner, were hardly prepared for… Read more
What a difference a gay makes
Edmund White is among the most admired of living authors, his oeuvre consisting of 20-odd books of various forms — novels, stories, essays and biographies — though each one is… Read more
All the Men’s Queen
It is entirely possible that nobody, not even perhaps Queen Elizabeth herself, has ever known what she was really like, so great the charm, the smiling gaze, the gloved arm,… Read more
Salt of the earth
As a young girl in Athens, Maria Callas would watch the films of the extraordinary Hollywood actress Deanna Durbin, and, entranced by that child-star’s utterly perfect voice, vowed to become… Read more
Getting a kick
One frequently reads of chaps for whom their epiphany was the first sight and sound of Julie Andrews. Mine happened a good few years earlier, lying bed-bound with polio, just… Read more
How now Browne cow?
The Christmas book market is about to be flooded, if that’s the word for these somewhat juiceless jottings, by not one but two biographies of the actress Coral Browne. This… Read more
Around the world in 80 years
Two summers ago at La Rondinaia, during one of those last evenings before he flew from his sky-high eyrie for the last time, Gore Vidal advised me to read the… Read more
Essex girl goes West
This highly entertaining and self-deprecating autobiography should dispel the myth, however craftily put about by the boy himself, that its author could ever have been a successful rent boy. Promotion… Read more
Marriage à la mode
It is surely rare to find a book that describes a marriage with such breathtaking intimacy as Diana Melly does in her autobiography, Take a Girl Like Me. Not only… Read more
Brilliance and bathos
That most astute of reviewers, Lynn Barber, recently wrote of this curiously bloodless biography that the subject is a minor star, now only remembered for one film, Alfred Hitchcock’s Lifeboat.… Read more
Latest blogs
- The words ‘terrorist attack’ only dignify the barbarism Rod Liddle
- The View from 22 — Osborne’s property bubble, the ongoing Tory wars and Google’s taxing issue Sebastian Payne
- Woolwich eyewitness: one of the men fired a gun, but it backfired and he lost his finger Fraser Nelson
- Kindling by the pool – the changing face of holiday reading Mark Mason
- Woolwich attack: the aftermath James Forsyth
- ‘Not in our name’ – British Muslims denounce the Woolwich attack on Twitter Fraser Nelson
- ‘Soldier beheaded’ in south London: the Islamists repeatedly said they would do such things Douglas Murray
