Book review
A Delicate Truth, by John le Carré - review
John Le Carré is one of a select group of novelists whose vivid and internally coherent imaginative worlds are so recognisable that their names have become adjectives — Dickensian, Wodehousian, … Read more
Eleven Days in August, by Matthew Cobb - review
It is fair to assume that Professor Matthew Cobb has often been asked if he is related to Professor Richard Cobb since he begins the acknowledgements of his new book… Read more
'Daphne du Maurier and Her Sisters: The Hidden Lives of Piffy, Bird and Bing', by Jane Dunn - review
Jane Dunn is something of a specialist on sisterhood. She has — we learn from the dedication — five sisters of her own; she has already written a book about… Read more
'The Infatuations', by Javier Marías - review
A café in Madrid. From her table across the room a solitary woman watches an attractive couple share breakfast morning after morning and speculates pleasurably about their relationship. One day… Read more
'O My America!', by Sara Wheeler - review
You might not expect Sara Wheeler, the intrepid literary traveller, to be anxious about passing the half-century point. Surely a person who can survive the mental and physical rigours of… Read more
'Fanny and Stella: The Young Men Who Shocked Victorian England', by Neil McKenna - review
Mick Jagger, the Danny La Rue of rock, impersonates a woman on the cover of the 1978 Stones album Some Girls. Vaudeville performers in the Jagger mould love to put… Read more
William Burges and the High Victorian Dream', by J. Mordaunt Crook - review
It is 32 years since the first edition of this hefty book appeared in 1981. The original was based on the research materials amassed by Charles Handley-Read, the pioneer scholar… Read more
The Childhood of Jesus', by J.M. Coetzee - review
Stripping down prose is not a risk-free undertaking. The excision of adverbs and the passive voice is sound practice in journalism. However, to make very bare writing a thing of… Read more
'Mimi', by Lucy Ellmann - review
Harrison Hanafan is a plastic surgeon in New York. Every day, he slices and stitches deluded women, reshaping healthy flesh to pander to 21st-century aesthetics. One Christmas Eve, absent-minded Harrison… Read more
‘On Glasgow and Edinburgh', by Robert Crawford - review
Glasgow and Edinburgh are so nearby that even in the 18th-century Adam Smith could breakfast in one city and be in the other for early-afternoon dinner. For all that, these… Read more
‘Ware’s Victorian Dictionary of Slang and Phrase', by J. Redding Ware - review
James Redding Ware, with his idiosyncratic treatment of slang, plunges the reader straight into the late 19th-century Bartholomew Fair of undeserving paupers, loafers, Ally Slopers, theatrical types and demi-mondaines. He… Read more
'Lord Horror: Reverbstorm', by David Britton and John Coulthart - review
As the son of the last British artist to be successfully prosecuted for displaying obscene paintings, I have some empathy with David Britton, the last person successfully prosecuted in Britain… Read more
'Diana Vreeland', by Amanda Mackenzie Stuart - review
Over 80 and almost blind, Diana Vreeland was wheeled around a forthcoming costume exhibition at the Metropolitan Museum, issuing instructions all along the way about hats, shoes, lights and mannequins.… Read more
The courage of countless generations
The most stirring sermon I ever heard was delivered by a company sergeant-major in the Black Watch to a cadre of young lance-corporals, barely 19 years old, who were about… Read more
The world in arms
The long summer that led up to the last days of peace in Europe in 1939 — the vigil of Hitler’s assault on Poland and the subsequent Phoney War —… Read more
Girls and boys come out to play
‘You are in the polymorphous-perverse stage,’ the school psychiatrist tells the assembled boys of Favorite River Academy in Vermont in the late 1950s. Just how polymorphously perverse his audience turns… Read more
Hero or villein?
‘Not one word’, exclaimed Turgenev of Tolstoy, ‘not one movement of his is natural! He is eternally posing before us!’ The recurrent underlying theme of A.N. Wilson’s prize-winning biography of… Read more
Rus in urbe
One of the pleasures of my week is walking across St James’s Square. The slightly furtive sense of trespassing as one opens the ironwork gates; the decision as to whether… Read more
The pen was mightier than the brush
Of the making of books about the Pre-Raphaelites, it appears, there is no end. Like the Bloomsberries, most of the PRB are more interesting to read about than the study… Read more
The dirty dozen
I have this fantasy in which I’m the Emperor Nero. I’m relaxing in my toga, and there are these slave girls dancing for me, and one of them has the… Read more
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