Book Reviews

For a crime writer, success comes with its dark side. As Conan Doyle learned to his cost, your readers often become obsessively attached to your series hero, while you yourself find him or her increasingly tiresome — and limiting. Ian Rankin’s well-deserved success with the genre has largely derived from his Inspector Rebus novels set in Edinburgh. When he brought the series to an apparent end with Exit Music in 2007, his readers were curious to know what lay ahead. Last year’s Doors Open, a relatively lightweight caper novel set in Edinburgh, was no more than an expanded version of a previously published short story and clearly a way of

The origin of this unique publication is the 1990s Waldegrave open government initiative, encouraging departments to reveal more. MI5 began sending its early papers to the National Archive and in 2003 commissioned an outsider to write its history, guaranteeing almost unfettered access to its files. It retained right of veto over the book’s content, but the judgments were to be the writer’s own. The lucky man — unsurprisingly, given his record as an intelligence historian — was Chris Andrew, Professor of Modern and Contemporary History at Cambridge. The result, squeezed into one fat volume, is definitive and fascinating. Definitive because, after decades of ill-informed or partial accounts, this book fully

In 1837 The Quarterly Review’s anonymous critic — actually, one Abraham Hayward — turned his attention to Charles Dickens, then in the first flaring of his popularity as the author of Sketches by Boz, The Pickwick Papers and Oliver Twist. In 1837 The Quarterly Review’s anonymous critic — actually, one Abraham Hayward — turned his attention to Charles Dickens, then in the first flaring of his popularity as the author of Sketches by Boz, The Pickwick Papers and Oliver Twist. ‘It requires no gift of prophecy to foretell his fate,’ wrote Hayward. ‘He has risen like a rocket, and he will come down like the stick.’ A bit mean, but

Sometimes you have to pity Literary Editors. Or, to put it another way, one of life’s small pleasures is seeing how newspapers review books written by their own proprietors. I always thought the Telegraph should just have asked Conrad Black to review his own books and like to think that he’d have done it well. By which I mean he’d have done it entertainingly. But pity poor Carol Herman, literary editor* of the Washington Times. Sensibly, I think, she must have concluded that asking an outside reviewer to write a notice for the Reverend Sun Myung Moon’s autobiography would risk trouble. Nobly, then, she took one for the team and

Ronald Blythe writes from his old Suffolk farmhouse, and Susan Hill writes from her old Gloucestershire farmhouse. The view from the windows, the weather, the changing light and the rhythm of the seasons, are evoked by both of them with a similar lyric precision and grace. Reading about their extraordinarily pleasing surroundings and rich interior lives may cause the word ‘complacency’ — well, not exactly to spring, but maybe to sidle, into the mind. But that’s before you remember that nice things are nicer than nasty things, and should be fostered and celebrated. Their lives are no less ‘real’ than the dreadful lives of zillions of their fellow humans, for