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Golden oldies

Jackie Kay, one of Scotland’s most celebrated living writers, is a woman of many voices. In her latest collection of short stories the voices mainly belong to women of middle to old age. Many are lonely, some are caring for barmy relatives, some are barmy relatives. Reality Reality’s most successful tales glow with a quiet

His own best story

A biography that is also a collaboration with its subject is something of a novelty. Here, Maggie Fergusson writes the life, while Michael Morpurgo contributes seven stories, each springing from the subject matter of the preceding section. Fergusson has previously written an excellent biography of George Mackay Brown, so has now moved from a detached

From Luxor to Heston services

This wonderful book is not a history of food in 100 recipes at all; it is a history of the world in 100 recipes, as seen through the medium of what we ate and how we cooked it. William Sitwell’s erudite work never drags and should not be seen as a collection of recipes (although

‘Am I not God’s chosen?’

Never write blurbs. That is my modest advice to Sir Harold Evans, who in his endorsement of Muckraker describes the life of W.T. Stead as ‘ennobling’. This is particularly odd because Stead (1849-1912) was the shameless precursor of the gutter journalism that Rupert Murdoch’s News of the World and Sun have inflicted on the UK

Bookends: Un poco goes a lang Weg

Here esse un curiosité, and kein mistake. Diego Marani (above) esse eine Italianse writer and EU officialisto livingante in Brussels, qui invented der irreverente lingua des Europanto, ‘eine mix van differente linguas sonder grammatica und regulationes,’ as el puts it sichself. Oui, c’est Franglais, aber more so and avec knobs on, und der late Kilomètres

Don’t hold your breath

The case for Richard Ford isn’t hard to make. Ever since his breakthrough novel The Sportswriter in 1986, his multi-award-winning fiction has combined an unsparing intelligence with an unashamed high-mindedness about what literature can achieve — nothing less than a careful exploration of the best way to live. In some hands, this moral sense might

Orpheus meets Escher

The landscape architect Kim Wilkie grew up in a house on the edge of the Malaysian jungle. ‘Things decayed as fast as they grew.’ Leather shoes would fur over with mould within hours if left outside. His father was posted to Iraq next. ‘Everything was brown.’ But stare long enough at the sand and you

Highbrows and eyebrows

Juliet Nicolson is a member of a literary dynasty second in productivity only to the Pakenhams. She is herself the author of two distinguished volumes of social history describing Britain immediately before and immediately after the first world war. This is her first novel. The danger of letting a social historian write novels is that

No time for bogus pieties

This is the shortest political memoir I have ever been sent for review. It is a marvel of concision: 27 years in the Commons set down in only 168 pages. Can any Spectator reader point to a briefer example of the genre? Yet I confess that I opened Confessions of a Eurosceptic with a degree

A gallery of grotesques

After the turn-of the-century memoir Experience, Martin Amis’s career has been widely perceived as somewhat rocky, shading into moments of disaster. If Experience, with its triple narrative of father, teeth and Fred West, was regarded as a compelling and masterly whole, Amis’s subsequent novels and non-fiction have not been as widely admired. Yellow Dog was

His finest years

Just after 8.50 on Tuesday morning, 26 November 1963, Lyndon Baines Johnson sat down behind the desk in the Oval Office for the first time as President, four days after the assassination of John F. Kennedy.  According to Robert Caro, the new chief executive of the United States, now the most powerful person in the