Books
The Magic Circle: Performing Magic Through the Ages
The loss of enchantment
Michael BaileyTempus, 288pp, £18.99,
Nicholas Harman
Children who have seen an electronic dinosaur wheel across the sky are not much amazed when a man with his sleeves rolled up takes the rabbit out of the hat. Manual illusions have been overtaken by the digital kind, and traditional conjuring is mostly for the nostalgia market. But it finds its niches; Michael Bailey, a former chairman of the Magic Circle (the illusionists’ upmarket trade union) who has written its centennial history, modestly describes himself as ‘the leading British corporate magician’. Far from restoring the fortunes of companies that someone has sawn in half, he helps senior managers with the arcane business of bonding.
Conjuring has gone respectable. For much of its long history it was anything but that. Promoters of dodgy cults used its tricks to lure the credulous, table-turners and
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How to write a wrong
Allan Massie‘When young lips have drunk deep of the bitter waters of Hate, Suspicion and Despair, all the Love in the world will not wholly take away that knowledge.’
The power of the evasive word
Michael HowardThe Economist Book of Obituaries, by Keith Colquhoun and Ann Wroe
Deadlier than the male
Andrew TaylorWhen does a novel stop being a novel and become a crime story? It’s often assumed that there is an unbridgeable gap between them, but that’s not necessarily so.
Not just Hitler
Edward HarrisonThe Third Reich at War, 1939-1945, by Richard L. Evans
The done thing
Margaret MacMillanThe Politics of Official Apologies, by Melissa Nobles
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November 29th, 2007 9:26pmArthur Conan Doyle an Irishman? He was born and educated in Scotland. Although the Doyle family was of Irish origin, his father was born in England and settled in Edinburgh at the age of 17.