I have no experience of small boys, I tell my son, driving him home. Well only you. He sits there pertly. They lose things, he chirrups. You must know that. Encouraged by this opening, I warm-up a mother’s inside info. So why did Jago kick Beastly? I quiz and, why did Ant fix his key-fob
A 465-page volume of short stories by a Native American author — it’s not, perhaps, the kind of thing everyone would automatically reach for, if they hadn’t already heard about it. Well, now you’ve heard about it, so you don’t have that excuse. Reach for it. Read it. Because the stories it contains (15 new,
A stomping bestseller is a hard thing to recover from. The author is doomed to see all future works compared and found wanting. Is his new book vivid? Certainly. Funny? Yep. Insightful? Sure — but not as good as that first, cherished work. Readers are loyal creatures. So it will always be for Rian Malan,
The Anfa Hotel in Casablanca has seen better days. Seventy years ago it was the grandest hotel in Morocco, good enough to house Winston Churchill and Franklin D. Roosevelt when they met in January 1943 to devise a strategy that would win the second world war. The views remain as fine and the bedrooms as
After Mother scarpered It was ship’s biscuit With shrapnel sparkles. It was hot spurts and gristle And cold snaps with a wet towel For stealing a puff from Dad’s fag Or sneaking a peek at his titty mags. But we buggers deserved no better. It was us that made her run off, With our bickers
There are normally three problems with reviews of books which, like This is the Way by Gavin Corbett (Fourth Estate, £14.99), concern the Traveller community. The first is that while most people have only just got used to the fact that Traveller now has a capital ‘T’, the reviews must avoid those other words you’re
One of the reprinted reviews which make up the bulk of this book opens: ‘I vividly remember when I first read George Orwell. It was at Eton.’ How would it sound, I mused, if I began a review: ‘I vividly remember when I first read George Orwell. It was at Colchester Grammar School.’ It would
Imagine a piece of land: sandy, roughly rectangular, and about the size of the Isle of Wight. It is surrounded on three sides by desert and hostile neighbours, and on the fourth by the sea. Although almost 1.7 million live in this space, nothing except essentials is allowed in or out. It’s under blockade. By
The contending versions of T.S. Eliot on display in the latest bumper instalment of his collected letters are practically legion. To begin with there is the hieratic, if not downright priestly, Eliot, soberly petitioning Father D’Arcy, the correspondence columns of the Church Times, or studious clergymen who may be flattered into taking charge of his
As someone slightly older than Al Alvarez, and also a regular swimmer — although not in the ice-edged Hampstead Heath pools into which he dived for over 60 years — I was initially disappointed by this book. For the first half it repeats too often the pleasures of extremity-numbing, cold, outdoor swimming when one is
It’s a new version of the Yellow Peril. The Chinese are taking over the world, starting with the nasty bits, like Burma, Sudan and Iran, which we are boycotting for all kinds of high-minded reasons. Two Spanish journalists, Juan Pablo Cardenal and Heriberto Araújo, have returned from an exhausting trip round the globe to tell
It was a bolt from the blue, she said. You mean it was love at first sight? I asked. But no, she meant that they ran past the same tree in a storm and were flung to the ground side by side — an introduction of almost Biblical significance. Of course he helped her up
Hermione Ranfurly wrote two books. One was called The Ugly One. The other, the first, was called To War with Whitaker. Its success came as a surprise to her, but to none of her legion of friends. It chronicled her war. Recently married to Dan, a Northern Irish peer whose father had lost almost everything,
Can there possibly be anything new to say about the old subject of Shakespeare’s sources? As early as the 18th century, scholars realised that he made up very few of his own plots. Whether he was bringing to life Plutarch’s biographies of the noble Romans or rescripting a hoary old drama from the existing repertoire
In 1946, as a Princeton graduate, J. Robert Maguire was attached to the American delegation at the Paris Peace Conference. He befriended an elderly survivor of the Dreyfus Affair, from whom he acquired important unpublished documents, and ever since has been a quiet, discriminating buyer of archival material relating to sensational trials and miscarriages of
‘And what do you do?’ asked Francis Bacon. ‘Er, I’m a cartoonist.’ ‘You are a chronicler of our age, yours is the art that counts, yours is art made history, I salute you!’ Bacon then stumbled off, shouting, ‘Who was that cunt?’ That was the Colony Room. Dangerous! Fasten your seat belts. It’s going to
The decadence of at least two societies or cultures can be seen in Dave Eggers’ new novel, where some bored Americans wait for weeks in a giant cooled tent in Saudia Arabia for the chance to display the latest innovation in conference IT to King Abdullah at the unbuilt ‘economic city’ that bears his name.
The difficult thing about writing a memoir is this: how do you avoid numbing the reader with endless thumbnail sketches of the hundreds of characters who have crossed your path? It’s easier in a novel, where you might have seven to ten main characters and can take time to delve deeply into each one. In
From the London opening of Oklahoma in 1947 until the age of Andrew Lloyd Webber in the 1970s, stage musicals were regarded as an almost exclusively American art-form. Sometime after their opening on Broadway, the best of them transferred to London’s West End. Over half the musicals you have ever heard of and continue to
Adolf Hitler considered jazz a ‘racially inferior’ form of American black music, and banned it from the airwaves. Germany’s gilded youth flouted the prohibition by playing Duke Ellington in secret and greeting each other loudly in English: ‘Hallo, Old Swing Boy!’ Resistance was useless. The Brownshirts raided parties and even beaches in search of portable