Non-fiction
Going to the fair
Why would anyone want to buy this dreadful book? The frightful Simon Cowell appears to have co-operated with the author, and it is littered with repellent photographs — chiefly of… Read more
It concentrates the mind wonderfully
It’s odd, but we mostly go about as if death were optional, something we could get out of, like games at school. Philip Gould, in When I Die, admits that… Read more
Out of sight, out of mind
Arthur Newton and Peter Gavuzzi, long-distance interwar runners, are two of the most extraordinary British athletes. They are also the most forgotten. This is because the distances they favoured were… Read more
Nature study
On my desk is the vertebra of a narwhal. It was given to me by a man in Canada after a convivial dinner. Narwhals are Arctic whales with long spiky… Read more
A moth to the flame
When Hannah Rothschild first met her great-aunt Nica it was 1984. Hannah was 22, and Nica, then 70, had asked her to come sometime after midnight to a basement jazz… Read more
The American way of justice
Conrad Black sympathises with the NatWest Three — victims of British cowardice and a corrupt US legal system It was the misfortune of David Bermingham and his co-defendants to be… Read more
Road to ruins
This is a delightful book, nostalgic, slyly witty, perceptive and at times flirting — deliberately — with old fogeyism. Tom Fort, a BBC radio journalist, starts from the assumption that… Read more
The calls of the wild
This is a weird and wonderful book. Bernie Krause, who started out as a popular musician and then in the mid-Sixties began to experiment with synthesisers and electronic mixing, has… Read more
One that got away
There are six drawings in the back of this book. They’re not very good drawings. In fact they look as if they come from an unusually hamfisted comic strip. However,… Read more
In Blair’s shadow
An ebook arrives! The future of publishing on my hard-drive. All the big profits are in cyber-publishing these days, as I discovered last month when I downloaded an ebook for… Read more
Ultimate issues
In his preface to this anthology of brief memoirs, Robert Silvers suggests that its ‘invisible, tragic core’ is to be found in an account by Isaiah Berlin of one of… Read more
A law unto itself
One could meet any day in Society Harold Acton, Tom Driberg or Rowse: May there always, to add their variety, Be some rather Odd Fish at The House. Thus W.… Read more
Turing’s Cathedral
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Rotten, vicious times
A.N. Wilson recalls the worst decade of recent history and the death throes of Old England There was a distressing news story the other day about a man who did… Read more
An elusive father
In a large upstairs room of the YWCA building behind Tottenham Court Road, a group of actors were nervously waiting for the arrival of the director. There was the powerful… Read more
Dangerous territory
Fifteen years ago Ahmed Rashid wrote an original, groundbreaking and wonderful book about the Taleban, a subject about which few people at the time knew or cared. Then along came… Read more
Man with a trade mission
About the second part of the title of Nigel Cliff’s excellent book there can be no argument. Vasco da Gama’s voyages do indeed remind one of those of Odysseus and… Read more
The picture of health
It must have been hard to settle on a title for this book; but then this is not the book that Richard Cork originally had in mind. In his introduction… Read more
Far from close
In 1598, a certain Margaret Browne of Houndsditch gave a graphic description to the court of her neighbour Clement Underhill engaged in an adulterous act with her lover, as observed… Read more
Spirit of Roedean
Ursula Graham Bower belonged to the last generation of those well-bred missy-sahibs who came out to India at the start of the cold-weather season in search of genteel adventure and… Read more
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