On 22 June this year, seven B2 Stealth bombers flew on a 37-hour round trip from bases in the US to drop 14 30,000lb bombs on two nuclear facilities in Iran. A third was attacked with cruise missiles fired from a submarine, possibly in the Persian Gulf. Few can say with any certainty how much
Ferdinand Mount has had an illustrious career, including posts as head of the No. 10 policy unit under Margaret Thatcher, literary and political editor of The Spectator and editor of the TLS. He is a prolific author to boot, with 29 fiction and non-fiction books under his belt. His latest novel, The Pentecost Papers, is
The fantasy of telling disagreeable friends how awful they really are is a relatable one. But rarely does it find such extravagant, relentless expression as in Zoe Dubno’s debut novel Happiness and Love. The narrator is a nameless woman who finds herself among former friends in New York. While she never succumbs to an outburst,
This is an account of the Johnny Depp/Amber Heard court cases with a top-dressing of pretentious tosh about the meaning of celebrity, etc – but you can easily ignore the tosh because the basic story is so gripping. Depp was 46 and already a global superstar when he met Amber Heard in 2009. She was
‘Fucking men,’ spits a woman towards the end of John Niven’s brilliant tenth novel, The Fathers. ‘Why do they always think it’s about fixing everything?’ It’s a classic hit of deadpan humour from a novelist best known for sending up the most appalling blood, spunk’n’booze-spattered excesses of modern men. A former A&R man with a
‘The English cannot assimilate any nation,’ declared the narrator of a French travelogue set in India and published in the aftermath of the uprising of 1857. ‘They can only dominate with brutality, squeezing every last drop of blood from the veins of the oppressed.’ Reduced to ‘slaves’ who ‘tremble before the Englishman’s whip’, the Indians
When Portuguese traders sailed past a verdant, mountainous land on the fringe of the Chinese empire in the mid-16th century, they named it Ihla Formosa – ‘beautiful island’. But Kangxi, the third emperor of the Manchu Qing Dynasty, was less impressed when his naval forces captured it in 1683, scoffing: ‘Taiwan is no bigger than
One of the great works of journalism to have come out of the Jamaican-British encounter is Journey to an Illusion by the late Donald Hinds. Published in London in 1966, the book is made up of a series of interviews with Commonwealth citizens who had settled hopefully on these shores after the war. Hinds, who
In the 18th century, the cash-strapped British crown imposed customs duties on tea imports that rose as high as 119 per cent. Unsurprisingly, such huge tariffs sparked a smuggling boom in coastal towns such as Deal, in Kent, where the cliffs were pockmarked with secret tunnels and half the inhabitants lived off profits from such
Joad Raymond Wren’s ambitious history of early modern European news, capacious in structure, monumental in volume, is named for a witticism by John Earle (c.1601-65). The author of Microcosmography, a compilation of satirical ‘characters’ whose obvious modern heir is Victoria Mather’s ‘Social Stereotypes’, was arguably the funniest member of mid-17th century England’s most likeable clique,
How do you dispose of 48 uniform volumes of the collected works of Lenin and Stalin? Pirkko Saisio and her mother hatch a plan. The books are ‘dumped into the trash bin’ by their apartment block, then coated with ‘a week’s worth of eggshells and fish guts and newspapers’. No one will find them, Mother
