Books
Danger: man at work
My heart is always lifted when a book begins with a map; it is like getting on a plane, we…
Valuable second opinions
Professor Roger Louis’s own expertise is in British imperial history; he edited the three-volume Oxford History of the British Empire.…
A fine solo performance
The sort of young person who once drifted into publishing now fiddles about with computers instead. The trade has been…
The penis mightier than the sword
Next time you’re stuck for conversation at a dinner party, why not use one of these fascinating facts to break…
Uncle to the nation
It was only when David Attenborough’s autobiography arrived for review that I realised I had been dodging his television programmes…
A choice of children’s books
This year my village school, like hundreds of others, is scrimping and saving to afford that Holy Grail of modern…
Grand, ritzy and splendid
A consolation of being an international foot-in-the-door man in the 1970s, albeit one selling Monets and Moores, not Hoovers, was…
Home is where the snow is
Some songs are hits – Number One for a couple of weeks. Some songs are standards – they endure decade…
Out of the commonplace
The following extracts are taken from George Lyttelton’s Commonplace Book Zeuxis was said to have painted grapes on a boy’s…
Tony at the Travellers: Anthony Powell as clubman
‘We might go straight into lunch
The greatest Briton
MAN OF THE CENTURY: WINSTON CHURCHILL AND HIS LEGENDby John Ramsden HarperCollins, £25, pp. 652, ISBN 002570343 In January 1965…
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The theme of Henry James’s The Aspern Papers is well known: an unscrupulous biographer seeks the unpublished papers of his…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…
