Books
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…
Too much and too late
By the criteria of the day before yesterday, the late William Whitelaw, a much loved Tory politician who served as…
Our man in the thick of it
There he is on the cover, our handsome 57-year-old Boys’ Own adventurer, probably doing a piece to camera, cheered on…
Nature versus Nurture: the state of play
The Blank Slate, more readily recognised in its original Latin as tabula rasa, is the soubriquet for the view that…
A world of drivers and passengers
VJ night, the war in the Pacific is finally over, and in William Kennedy’s Albany the war of senatorial election…
The way to the tomb
This queer, black novel is mainly concerned with the special funeral train service which once plied between Waterloo Station and…
Out of the bottom drawer?
Two years ago in The Spectator I praised Ha Jin’s earlier novel, Waiting. It was about a kindly, ineffectual army…
Singing for your supper
On 23 February l937 a small boy of seven arrives at Victoria station, London. Here he is met, as arranged,…
Boots, boots, boots, boots
KEANE: THE AUTOBIOGRAPHYby Roy KeanePenguin/Michael Joseph, £17.99, pp. 294, ISBN 07181455 One could imagine an American visitor to Hatchards being…
Not one to be stared down
No ghostwriter haunts this account of a cricketing life, so obviously written by the man who played the way he…
Pedalling into politics
Perhaps it is not a good idea to call Dervla Murphy ‘redoubtable’. She is a strident anti-militarist and might not…
The heart of the master
THE HUMOUR AND THE PITY: ESSAYS ON V. S. NAIPAULedited by Amitava KumarBuffalo Books, in association with the British Council,…
When inner and outer reality collide
Coleridge’s Notebooks have been a companion during most of my mature life and this is a marvellously judged and varied…
He is cheap, he is pure, he is capable – and he isn’t doomed
In any discussion about the English judicial system with foreigners, they are always amazed to learn that more than 90…
Unblinking, even for a second
Some novels are something; others are about something. If fiction is an art, then the former class is more likely…
A new lease of life
The heroine of Margaret Drabble’s new novel is on first sight pretty depressing, and supposed to be so. The opening…
As sharp as cut tin
In fiction, as in other branches of the creative arts, reputation is all, or nearly all. One of my most…
Raw skin over bone
At the Edinburgh Book Festival this year, Dr David Starkey, the television historian and iconoclast, pronounced that history was elitist…
How the master of landscape was transformed
In 1760s Bath, the promenade from the Pump Room to the tree-lined Walks of Orange Grove passed a row of…
Deceiving only those who want to believe
Forgery ranked with murder as a capital crime well into the 19th century. Faked texts and signatures could falsify wills…
