Bookends
All Together Now, by David Rowley - review
Too many Beatles books? In my house there’s always room for one more, and this week’s addition is All Together Now (Matador, £9.99), an ABC of Beatles’ songs by registered… Read more
'The Politics of Washing: Real Life in Venice', by Polly Coles - review
Master your disappointment. The Politics of Washing: Real Life in Venice (Hale, £9.99) is as far from the fantasy-relocation genre of hapless writer transposed to sunny European idyll with cast… Read more
Bookends: Byronic intensity
A year before he died from emphysema in 1990, the composer-conductor Leonard Bernstein agreed to be interviewed by the music journalist Jonathan Cott for Rolling Stone. Dinner with Lenny (OUP,… Read more
‘A Slow Passion’, by Ruth Brooks – review
Snails are supposed to hate eggshells. Not the ones in Ruth Brooks’s garden. They clamber over the barrier as though it’s ‘a new extreme sport’. Ditto hair. And grit. She… Read more
The Quickening, by Julie Myerson — review
The plot of The Quickening (Arrow/ Hammer, £9.99) by Julie Myerson (pictured) revolves around pregnant, newlywed Rachel and her sinister husband, Dan. Rachel’s ghostly journey begins when Dan suggests a… Read more
Turned Out Nice Again, by Richard Mabey - review
We don’t have an extreme climate, says Richard Mabey in Turned Out Nice Again (Profile, £8.99). We don’t have tsunamis, active volcanoes, monsoons or Saharan duststorms. ‘What we really suffer… Read more
How Many Camels are there in Holland? by Phyillida Law - review
Phyllida Law has a delightfully natural style, a gift for anecdote and the knack of seeing the funny side of pretty much everything. She’s a good actor: she’s obviously a… Read more
A hero of folk
‘This Machine Kills Fascists’ was the ambitious slogan that Woody Guthrie (1912-1967) painted on his guitars. By fascists he meant the entire American capitalist establishment during the Great Depression and… Read more
Down to a T
There are normally three problems with reviews of books which, like This is the Way by Gavin Corbett (Fourth Estate, £14.99), concern the Traveller community. The first is that while… Read more
Growing old disgracefully
Virginia Ironside’s novel, No! I Don’t Need Reading Glasses (Quercus £14.99) about a 65-year-old granny who belongs to a local residents’ association and does a fair bit of knitting may… Read more
Novel ways of writing
If you consider ‘gripping metafiction’ a self-contradictory phrase (surely metafiction disables tension through its wink-at-the-audience style?), Nicholas Royle’s First Novel (Cape, £16.99), which is in fact his seventh, may change… Read more
The Diana effect
My favourite joke of all time concerns Diana Dors, whose real name was Diana Fluck. She was invited back to Swindon, her birthplace, to open a fete. The vicar, terrified… Read more
The Wiggins streak
As the first British winner of the Tour de France and a gold medalist at London 2012, Bradley Wiggins is a national hero, and though he insists he is an… Read more
Rock solid
Rod Stewart once tried to convince his mother that he had made a lot of money, and wanted to buy her a really big Christmas present. After much thought, she… Read more
A narrow escape
C.J. Sansom is deservedly famous for his Shardlake crime novels, featuring a 16th-century lawyer on the fringes of the court. But he has also written two successful novels with 20th-century… Read more
Classic Coe
You sense that writing Seb Coe: The Autobiography (Hodder, £20) must have been a pleasurable task for the Lord of the Five Rings: it’s about his favourite subject. ‘I am… Read more
The one who got away with it
The first track on Neil Young’s latest album lasts nearly 28 minutes, for while he usually has no problem starting, he sometimes struggles to finish. Some of the same prolixity… Read more
Narrative drive
Michael Holroyd describes this tiny, charmingly pointless publication (On Wheels, Chatto, £9.99) not as a book but as an example of ‘nostalgic intertextuality’, which is a grand way of saying… Read more
Too much time in the library
Donna Leon’s The Jewels of Paradise (Heinemann, £17.99)has a promising premise. A young musicologist, Caterina Pelligroni, returns to Venice to trace a legacy left by the 17th-century composer Agostino Steffani,… Read more
The darker side of Dawn
I like Dawn French when she is playing a sinister nurse much more than when she’s a jolly vicar. As her new novel, Oh Dear Silvia (Michael Joseph, £18.99) is… Read more
Latest blogs
- Why it’s not the 1990s all over again for the Tories James Forsyth
- You’re going to lose. It is only you against many. Alex Massie
- PM avoids knee-jerk response to Woolwich attack Isabel Hardman
- David Cameron’s statement on the Woolwich attack The Spectator
- 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
