As I swink in the field of Thatcher studies, this book brings refreshment. It is a welcome and rare. Far too many writers attitudinise about Margaret Thatcher (for and against) rather than studying her. I doubt the author likes Thatcher much, but all the more credit to her that she makes a fair-minded effort to
Peter Brown’s explorations of the mindsets of late antiquity have been educating us for nearly half a century, ever since his great life of St Augustine in 1967. His latest book, relatively short in volume but very wide in scope, explores Christian attitudes to the afterlife, from the time of Cyprian of Carthage (martyred in
We live in an age of astronomical marvels. Last year Europe’s Rosetta spacecraft made a daring rendezvous with the comet Churyumov-Gerasimenko, revealing a bizarre double-lobed mountain of ice and rock with landscapes of vertiginous crags and ashen scree slopes. In our image-saturated age it’s easy to forget that such views are only possible through the
In the manner of Richard Holmes’s Footsteps, Julia Blackburn’s story of John Craske is as much autobiography as biography, as much about the hunt for information as the processed results of the search. The facts of John Craske’s life are briefly told: born in Norfolk in 1881 into a fishing family, he suffered some sort
Peter Stanford is a writer on religious and ethical matters. He was for four years editor of the Catholic Herald. Writing Judas: The Troubling History of the Renegade Apostle must have been a difficult task because there are no facts. Judas may quite possibly never have existed at all, and if he did, the Judas
Madison Flight is a divorce lawyer, nicknamed ‘the Chair-Scraper’ for the number of times she leaps to her feet arguing in court. She has been contrary since birth, putting her mother through six days of labour before eventually being pulled out by forceps. ‘Is she saying no?’ asks the doctor, perplexed by the distinctive ‘Naaaaaaaaah!’
The short story likes to play the underdog. Famously unfavoured by publishers, it has none of the commercial clout of the novel. Denying itself the luxury of length, it is a martyr to the cause of shortness. When the short story writer Alice Munro was awarded the 2013 Nobel prize for literature, she seemed to
I suppose all children’s authors write the stories they would have liked to read as children. But in the case of this novella about a sensitive man called Mr B who rescues a donkey in Peshawar, names her Pavlova after the ballerina, and brings her overland all the way back home to Wimbledon to meet his
Madness is an ancient, evidently inscrutable mystery, often regarded with superstitious fear, yet can provide a refuge from reality. Sometimes, however, the refuge turns out to be a trap. The human brain, beyond even the most rigorous thinker’s continuous control, is equally able to afford exquisite privacy and atrocious chaos. Andrew Scull, born in Scotland
Rex Whistler — this book’s ‘bright young thing’ — was an artist of the 1920s and 1930s, and Edith Olivier, the ‘bluestocking’, was a novelist. They both deserve to be more famous than they are, and Anna Thomasson’s absorbing joint biography will doubtless make them so. They met through Stephen Tennant in 1924, when Olivier
Sant’Apollinaire Nuovo, Ravenna Your hands brush marble, feel impelled To touch where crisp cold tesserae Compose a fine array Of arches that once held A gallery of courtiers with gifts they gave A throne in mosaic palace down a long cool nave. Now strung between the arches like a tapestry Hang folds that robbed Theoderic
My uncle in his uniform, dog-collared, briar clutched at an angle, brilliantined hair with a central parting, très debonaire. This could have been central casting for the role of padre in a West End show, his Now let us pray moment, except that he’d left for war the next day. He returned to be vicar
‘I’ve come back because I love the mess. Anarchy. Madness. Things falling apart.’ The lines belong to Roland Nair, one of the morally bankrupt spies who careers around Africa in Denis Johnson’s tenth novel, but they might equally well describe Johnson himself, a writer always happiest in his work when the wheels come off and
Miranda July is a funny and brilliant film director, performance artist, sculptor and smartphone app designer. In 2005, she won the Best First Feature award at Cannes for her debut film, Me and You and Everyone We Know. Two years later, she picked up the Frank O’Connor short story award for her debut collection No
Lesley Blanch (1904–2007) will be remembered chiefly for her gloriously extravagant The Wilder Shores of Love, the story of four upper-class European ladies who abandoned their natural habitat to seek and find romance in the Middle East. If one had to pick only one of Blanch’s books to read there could be no better choice
Leonora Carrington is one of those jack-in-the-boxes who languish forgotten in the cultural toy cupboard and then pop up every few years to a small flurry of excitement. Born in 1917, the child of a rich Lancastrian industrialist, she ran away to Paris to paint and there became the lover of Max Ernst. She lived
In 2001, Tony Blair took Sir Michael Barber from his perch as special adviser in the Department for Education and brought him into Downing Street. Once there Barber set up Blair’s ‘Delivery Unit’ and oversaw his attempts to reform public services. He then moved to the McKinsey consultancy where he cloned his unit for governments
Second world war deception operations are now widely known, particularly those which misled the Germans into thinking that the D-Day Normandy landings were merely a diversion. Great use was made of captured German agents in Britain who sent disinformation about invented army divisions and ships allocated to the supposedly ‘real’ landings still to come. Much
To the 21st-century right, especially in the United States, John Maynard Keynes has become a much-hated figure whose name is synonymous with bogus spending on public works, insouciance in the face of mounting debt and, of course, homosexual promiscuity. It’s a virtue of Richard Davenport-Hines’s new biography that it makes clear how much this under-reads
Coalitions, as David Cameron has discovered, are tricky things to manage. How much more difficult, then, was it for Winston Churchill as he struggled to survive, then win, a world war, while at the same time managing his fractious three-party administration at home. In this scholarly, yet grippingly readable study of the wartime coalition, Jonathan