The SAS was the first unit to be granted regimental status for generations. Its chief aim was to damage the enemy from behind their lines in the North African desert. It was an entirely independent unit, not answerable to any superior command and therefore anathema to the regular army mind. Its creator, David Stirling, had
Here’s a book to make an Egyptologist of everyone. A compendium of accepted gen on the gift of the Nile, Rose-Marie and Rainer Hagen’s (updated and reissued) Egypt: People, Gods, Pharaohs ‘aims to answer some basic questions about life in Ancient Egypt and whet your appetite to find out more’, and achieves both in appropriate
When it comes to speaking of foreign affairs, Rory Stewart is one of the few MPs who does not peddle bland abstractions. Many of his parliamentary colleagues inhabit a blah-blah land where terms such as ‘peace process’ and ‘international community’ have meaning. An upbringing in the Far East, where his father was a diplomat, as
‘Leonard Michaels (1933–2003) was one of the most admired and influential American writers of the last half century,’ states the blurb on this reissue of the author’s first and penultimate novel, originally published in the US in 1978. Admired and influential Michaels may have been, but that was largely in his homeland and then as
Everyone has played it, or one of its manifold variations and rip-offs. Blocks of different shapes fall from the sky; you have to rotate and shunt them around so they fit perfectly together at the bottom, and then that horizontal line of blocks vanishes. This is Tetris, and it was created in 1984 by a
Norman Ohler is rather hard on the Nazis, for compared to what our little group got up to in the late 1960s and 1970s, they were shrinking violets in the drugs department. We smoked cannabis, ate opium and sometimes took strong LSD; lines of uncertain content went up nostrils; and we swallowed countless uppers (speed)
Helen Gurley Brown’s internationally influential career, as the author of Sex and the Single Girl and editor of Cosmopolitan, is revealed in this intimate biography in 50 shades of pink. ‘Let it be understood at the outset,’ writes Gerri Hirshey, an American freelance journalist for many upmarket periodicals: Sex has imbued the soft core, hard
This mighty volume begs a question, although it doesn’t ask it, let alone answer it. Does anyone in the known universe really want to read 650 pages about glam rock? Simon Reynolds must do, because that’s how much he has written on the subject. All writers, if we are to be honest, write books because
Ashraf Marwan was an Egyptian-born businessman, a son-in-law to Nasser and a political high-flyer in the administration of Sadat, who fell off the balcony of his flat in Carlton House Terrace, central London, in June 2007. His death was watched with incredulity by business colleagues assembled in an office across the road, who recalled seeing
In The Cousins’ War (1999), the Republican political strategist Kevin Phillips argued that three ‘civil wars’ had defined politics in the English-speaking world: the English Civil War, the American Revolution and the American Civil War. The ideological battle lines of 1641 recurred in 1776 and 1865, and not just because the Sons of Liberty and
One day in April 1969 Theodor Adorno began teaching a new course entitled ‘An Introduction to Dialectical Thinking’. Feel free, the sociologist-cum-philosopher told the packed hall at Frankfurt University, to ask questions as I go. Two of his charges did so immediately. When was Adorno going to apologise for having set the cops on those
There are two people in a prison cell: Frank and Hal. One of them is a member of a spy ring planning a terrorist act; the other is a police agent planted there to befriend the spy, and gather information on the terrorist cell. But the reader doesn’t know which is the cop, and which
Until it was overtaken by the still more disastrous debacle in Iraq, the Suez Crisis of 1956 was widely judged to be Britain’s worst postwar foreign blunder. Not only, to use Talleyrand’s phrase, a crime, but an error of monumental proportions. The deceitful plot by Britain and France, in secret collusion with Israel, to invade
‘Krapping away here to no little avail,’ writes Beckett to the actor Patrick Magee in September 1969. To ‘no little avail’, note, not to ‘little or no’: there is a difference. It’s the difference that Beckett makes — I can’t go on, I’ll go on, and all that. This final volume of Beckett’s letters contains
Ann Patchett’s new novel is an American family saga involving six children, 50 years and too many coincidences to count. The premise is straight out of John Updike — a writer she admires — but her eye is on free love’s fallout, not its thrills. As the title hints, she’s interested in the larger family
For the first time in living memory, a presidential candidate for a major party has received the enthusiastic endorsement of the Ku Klux Klan; one prominent former member of that fraternity — a Grand Wizard, I think: or was it a Grand Dragon? — is running for the US Senate. Members of the Black Lives
Rachel Cusk is a writer who provokes strong reactions in her readers, and her critical reputation has swung wildly in a short space of time. Many, who not long ago were offended by the overflowing emotion of her memoirs of motherhood and divorce, are now full of praise for her current trilogy of novels, admiring
On the night of 17 March 1959, the 14th Dalai Lama, aged 23, slipped out of the Norbulinka, his summer residence in Lhasa, and began his flight to India, where he arrived on 31 March, after crossing some of Tibet’s most rugged terrain. He was so heavily disguised that the faithful crowds who had gathered
Emma Donoghue’s novel Room was short-listed for the 2010 Man Booker prize and made into a film in 2015. Inspired by Josef Fritzel’s incarceration of his daughter Elisabeth, it described a mother and son held captive in one room for several years. It depicted their intense, private world and focused on maternal love. The Wonder
In the great Iberian empires of the 16th and 17th centuries, a career was already avail-able in global administration not very different from the lives of the bankers or lawyers who globe-trot today. In 1509, as one example among hundreds, Duarte Coelho Pereira, a soldier for the Portuguese crown in Morocco and West Africa, went
