Bookends
Bookends: Prep-school passions
In his introductory eulogy, Peter Parker calls In the Making: The Story of a Childhood (Penguin, £8.99) G. F. Green’s masterpiece, which, though not popular, attracted the admiration of E.M.… Read more
Bookends: Pure gold
Even nowadays, a 50-year career in pop music is a rare and wondrous thing, and for a woman triply so. And yet Carole King’s golden jubilee passed a couple of… Read more
Bookends: … and the inner tube
In the early 1990s, when Boris Johnson was making his name as the Daily Telegraph’s Brussels correspondent, Sonia Purnell was his deputy, and last year she published a biography of… Read more
Bookends: Tilling tales
Several years ago, I listed as my literary heroes Herbert Pocket in Great Expectations and E. F. Benson’s Lucia. The latter was the more damaging admission. Lucia is an egotist… Read more
Bookends: Terribly Tudor
History publishers like a gimmick, so I assumed Suzannah Lipscomb’s A Visitor’s Companion to Tudor England (Ebury, £12.99) must be a cheeky rip-off of Ian Mortimer’s Time Traveller’s Guide series.… Read more
Bookends: A matter of opinion
In an age when the merely mildly curious believe they can get all they really need to know from Wikipedia for free, A. N. Wilson’s fellow literary professionals must take… Read more
Bookends: Down on the farm
Can we please have an inquiry into why already talented people are allowed to go off and be brilliant at something else too? As a quarter of Blur, Alex James… Read more
Bookends: Wasp without a sting
‘It may be hard to accept that a chaste teenage girl can end up in bed with the President of the United States on her fourth day in the White… Read more
Bookends: Dickensian byways
Is there room for yet another book on Dickens? Probably not, but we’ll have it anyway. The Dickens Dictionary (Icon, £9.99) is John Sutherland’s contribution to the great birthday festival… Read more
Bookends: Short and sweet
Before texts and Twitter there were postcards. Less hi-tech, but they kept people in touch. Angela Carter (pictured above) and Susannah Clapp were friends, and over the years, postcards from… Read more
Bookends: Trouble and strife
It isn’t true that Joanna Trollope (pictured above) only produces novels about the kind of people who have an Aga in their kitchen: what she writes about are families. Her… Read more
Bookends: Doors of perception
Unlike most of the old rockers he writes about, the esteemed US critic Greil Marcus is becoming more prolific as he enters his twilight years. An eccentric monograph on Van… Read more
Bookends: The year of living dangerously
Most people who recall 1976 do so for its appallingly hot summer, when parks turned brown and roads melted. Some will also remember that the celebrity culture throve then as… Read more
Bookends: A shaggy beast of a book
Autobiography is a tricky genre to get right, which may be why so many well-known people keep having another go at it. By my reckoning Tales from an Actor’s Life… Read more
Bookends: An unreal world
Even by Hollywood standards, Carrie Fisher is pretty crazy. She was born a Hollywood princess, and remembers her parents — Debbie Reynolds and Eddie Fisher — as ‘not really people… Read more
Bookends: A metropolitan menagerie
London has always loved its animals. James I kept elephants in St James’s Park (allowed a gallon of wine per day each to get through the English winter), while as… Read more
Bookends: Saving JFK
Stephen King’s latest novel is a time-travel fantasy about the assassination of John F. Kennedy. At almost 750 pages, 11.22.63 is drawn-out even by blockbuster standards. Critics have bemoaned its… Read more
Bookends: Not filthy enough
The Pursued (Penguin, £12.99) is a lost crime thriller by C. S. Forester, the author of the Hornblower novels. It was written in 1935, rediscovered in 2003 and is now… Read more
Bookends: About a boy
The Go-Between was L.P. Hartley’s best novel, Joseph Losey’s best film, and probably Harold Pinter’s best screenplay. In the novel, the Norfolk house and estate are fairly incidental but, as… Read more
Bookends: Spirit of place
A new book by Ronald Blythe is something of an event. In recent years the bard of Akenfield has mostly published collections of articles, which makes At the Yeoman’s House… Read more
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