Books
Found and lost
Byron Rogers for years wrote the ‘Village Voice’ column in the Daily Telegraph, and this collection of articles on his…
What will the oracle answer?
THE WEST AND THE RESTby Roger ScrutonContinuum, £12.99, pp. 196, ISBN 0826464963 Two reincarnations of the Old Oligarch – alike…
Playing with Henry James
The theme of Henry James’s The Aspern Papers is well known: an unscrupulous biographer seeks the unpublished papers of his…
A selection of art books
I cannot think of many less festive offerings than Richard Avedon Portraits (Abrams, £24.95), but it has to be admitted…
Smoothing the rough edges
Much is made by writers these days of the need for ‘getting distance’, for putting frontiers, oceans, whole continents between…
Not rushing to judgment
It is hard to overpraise this admirable – indeed one would have thought impossible – account of the history of…
The price of admission
I first met Tim Slessor when we were contemporary undergraduates at Cambridge, half a century ago. Etched into my memory…
A choice of funny books
‘I don’t know if it is a sign of old age,’ wrote P. G. Wodehouse in the mid-1950s, ‘but I…
Pure and impure genius
As Hamlet said, ‘Look here upon this picture and on this.’ Early this year Garry O’Connor produced a book about…
Master of the shrug
Long long ago, they used to say that the difference between the Hohenzollerns and the Habsburgs was this. In Berlin,…
The lines are immaterial
I once met a thoroughly heterosexual old naval officer who had been a midshipman on the ship that sailed to…
Stooping to conquer
Anthony Lane has been film critic for the New Yorker since 1993, and the light lash of his humour is…
The self-promoting recluse
‘If Charles Darwin had spent the first half of his life in the world of Jane Austen, he now stepped…
Can you spot the difference?
FAUNA BRITANNICAby Duff Hart-DavisWeidenfeld, £30, pp. 415, ISBN 0297825321 Time was that this sort of confusion did not occur. In…
A good tale spoilt in the telling
Michael Dobbs is a charming, intelligent and self-effacing man, but you would not have guessed it from the blurb on…
New figures in our national story
In the first two volumes accompanying his History of Britain television series, Simon Schama had a clear framework in which…
Finding Paradise in your own back garden
Gardening is the nation’s hobby. It is worth around £3 billion in annual business, much of it generated by television…
Naughty but nice
The first story in this very fine collection takes the most risks, not unlike its protagonist. Ariel, a sophisticated, self-aware,…
Magnificent joint venture
One might think that Henry Kamen, having written books on Spain in the 15th, 16th and 17th centuries, on the…
Christmas Books II
Hugh Massingberd ‘It is difficult’, writes A. N. Wilson in The Victorians (Hutchinson, £25), ‘for me to conceive of a…
The young woman and the sea
When Ellen Macarthur was nine she saved her pocket money, by eating less, to buy her first little boat and…
Accentuating the positive
There was a time when our man at the BBC was the most famous foreign correspondent in India, his broadcasts…
Waiting for the Bogeyman
On 19 August 1805, two months before his death at Trafalgar, Vice-Admiral Lord Nelson rejoined Emma Hamilton at their home…
Bruiser, cruiser but no boozer
The subject of this intelligent biography was among the founders of the Modern movement in British art before the first…
Very trying indeed
Ralph Steadman has always employed graphic spatter. The pen jabs, the ink spurts and – yoiks! – how the victims…
