Books
History from below
Professor Linda Colley is a distinguished historian. In her Britons, published in 1992, she proved that good, imaginative professional history…
Coming from the wars of words
It was 1971, at the Dudley Hotel, Hove, late at night during a Tory conference, and Sir (as he then…
From Chaucer to Channel Four
‘Everything of value in our spiritual and cultural life springs from our soil.’ Thus spake Vaughan Williams; and Peter Ackroyd…
The wrong label that stuck
A young writer produced a brilliant novel that attacked religious fundamentalism, rubbished the press, found politics corrupt and the members…
Girls will be girls
You’ll have noticed them on the roads, minibuses, full of schoolgirls, being driven by harassed teachers to some country location…
Trees with personality
The English have loved ancient trees for centuries, have celebrated them in story and poetry, have given them names, sung…
A very African story
The voices we rarely hear in literature are those of the children of the men and women who have shaped…
A window on the world
It is two years since Panorama was shunted out of peak time on BBC1 into exile late on Sunday night.…
A whodunnit below zero
The more one reads about polar exploration in previous centuries, the more one comes to the conclusion that men were…
Sins against theology and haberdashery
From the time I was a little girl, long before I knew I wanted to be a writer, I had…
Third time unlucky
£14.99 for individual volumes The single problem facing any translator of Proust is that there is, really, no equivalent of…
Tales of the expected unexpected
‘Bold, glamorous, sexy, unrepentant,’ promises the jacket. The heroines of Fay Weldon’s short stories ‘offer a quite unique view of…
The organisation man
In 1743, 393 livings within the gift of the Archbishop of York were occupied by clergymen who did not live…
Mastery of time and space
Even Churchill might have been discouraged had he, instead of Lord Portland, been prime minister and surveying the scene in…
A poet under strict controls
This vast work has the distinction of being both unreadable and unputdownable. It consists of nearly half a million words,…
Putting it all in
Not for nothing has Jeffrey Eugenides, on the strength of just one novel published seven years ago, been cropping up…
Driving on a dark night
Ken Nott is the most annoying man in England. It’s his job (he’s a shock jock, a prime-time talk-radio DJ),…
The Orwell of Notting Hill
Roy Kerridge is conservative in attitude, he loves the works of Kipling and he enjoys the company of those whom…
Climbing among the skyscrapers
According to Ward McAllister, the fabled gate-keeper of New York high society in the 1890s, to be counted among the…
Big little man
‘What a swankpot!’ Sir Norman Wisdom pseudo-modestly pseudo-rebukes himself after listing some of the trophies in a display cabinet at…
No petticoat long unlifted
Few admirers of Faber’s recent spate of tales and novellas – the spacious and admirably unadorned The Courage Consort and…
The Margot and Henry show
The publicity material likens this book to The Forsyte Saga, but in fact it’s far more gripping than fiction: the…
Well met by moonlight
One of the best permanent shows in London is the Science Museum’s collection of electrical and magnetic instruments commissioned by…
Past glories prove elusive
Despite many allusions to Virgil and a diligent summary of various interpretations of Poussin’s ‘Les Bergers d’Arcadie’, Ben Okri’s main…
Gentleman and player
During my brief stint as a showbiz scribe – which unfortunately came to an end when I expressed a preference…
