Books
"The right hero" - Douglas Murray reviews Jesse Norman's Burke biography.
Edmund Burke is one of the most difficult thinkers to write about. His philosophy defies easy summary. His career, while noble, was not glittering. Many details that he exhausted himself… Read more
Complete Poems, by C.P. Cavafy - review
Constantine Cavafy was a poet who fascinated English novelists, and remained a presence in English fiction long after his death in 1933. When E.M. Forster lived in Alexandria during the… Read more
5 Days in May, by Andrew Adonis - review
Andrew Adonis enjoyed a week of glory in 2010. The former Lib Dem activist was asked to join Labour’s negotiating team as they tried to forge a coalition with Nick… Read more
Crime fiction reviewed by Andrew Taylor
An epigraph taken from Goebbels’s only published novel certainly makes a book stand out from the crowd. A Man Without Breath (Quercus, £18.99) is the ninth instalment in Philip Kerr’s… Read more
The Society of Timid Souls, by Polly Morland - review
In this book about courage, Polly Morland talks to lots of people who should know what it is. She talks to soldiers, surfers, a matador, firefighters and professional daredevils. She… Read more
Folly de Grandeur, by Nicky Haslam- review
Nicky Haslam is one of our best interior designers, a charmed and charming agent of style, a tastemaker for the sometimes directionless rich, a brighter star than most of his… Read more
Here and Now, by Paul Auster and J.M. Coetzee - review
In love, there is always one who kisses and one who offers the cheek. So too in the luckless genre of letters artificially exchanged for the purposes of publication. There’s… Read more
Big Brother, by Lionel Shriver - review
‘I am white rice’ states Pandora Half-danarson, narrator of Lionel Shriver’s obesity fable. ‘I have always existed to set off more exciting fare.’ The exciting fare on offer is the… Read more
Perilous Question, by Antonia Fraser— review
There are times when a major drama in the House of Commons really does change the course of British history. The period 1974–79, dramatised in the play This House, was… Read more
The Hermit in the Garden, by Gordon Campbell - review
In his 1780 essay On Modern Gardening Horace Walpole declared that of the many ornamental features then fashionable, the one ‘whose merit soonest fades’ was the hermitage. Inspired by the… Read more
And the Mountain Echoed, by Khaled Hosseini - review
The American comedian Stephen Colbert once joked that when he publicly criticised the novels of Khaled Hosseini, his front garden was invaded by angry members of women’s books groups. They… Read more
Beyond the Malachite Hills, by Jonathan Lawley; Last Man In, by John Hare - review
In post when the curtain came down on Britain’s African empire, there survives today a generation of colonial officers whose numbers are dwindling fast. Many were fired by an idealism… Read more
The Tradescants’ Orchard, by Barry Juniper - review
Elias Ashmole, fortune-hunter, scholar and collector, bequeathed his coins, curiosities and books in 1692 to form the nucleus of the Ashmolean Museum in Oxford. The books were later taken over… Read more
The Young Titan, by Michael Shelden; Churchill’s First War, by Con Coughlin - review
One evening in 1906, shortly after the election that brought Campbell-Bannerman’s Liberals into power, an understandably nervous Eddie Marsh, a middle-ranking civil servant in the Colonial Office, paid a social… Read more
Holloway, by Robert Macfarlane - review
This is a very short book recording two visits to the hills around Chideock in Dorset.In the first Robert Macfarlane and the late Roger Deakin, author of Waterlog, go searching… Read more
Peter Oborne is almost right about Iran's non-existent nukes
Whether the United States is a force for global peace is not really up for debate in the self-described ‘indispensable nation’, though the question sharply divides opinion almost everywhere else.… Read more
The Serpent’s Promise, by Steve Jones - review
The weight of bacteria that each of us carries around is equal to that of our brain, a kilogram of the creatures, billions of them, ten times as many in… Read more
The Devonshires, by Roy Hattersley - review
Recalling being taken as a teenager on repeated outings to see Chatsworth, Roy Hattersley disarmingly confesses that in those days ‘I was impressed by neither the pictures nor the furniture’.… Read more
Latest blogs
- MPs defeat ‘wrecking amendment’ as Cameron tries to patch things up with grassroots Isabel Hardman
- David Cameron should be out there making the case for gay marriage James Forsyth
- A point of order, Your Royal Highness Steerpike
- William Hague: Case for changing arms embargo on Syria ‘compelling’ Isabel Hardman
- UKIP, Pierre Poujade and a political class that’s seen to be “out-of-touch”. Alex Massie
- Labour tries to defuse civil partnerships row – by backing government amendment Isabel Hardman
- Will civil partnerships kill the gay marriage bill? Isabel Hardman
