Harry Enfield has said that ‘comedy without Galton and Simpson would be like literature without Dickens,’ and he may be right. Their two most lasting creations, Hancock’s Half Hour (illustrated above) and Steptoe & Son, influenced almost everything of worth that came after, from Fawlty Towers and Porridge to The Office and Gavin and Stacey.
No one could say that we didn’t have warning of these events in the most specific terms. A month before 11 September 2001, the President’s daily intelligence brief was headed ‘Bin Laden Determined to Strike in US.’ Other official warnings from this time and earlier were so specific, and so specifically ignored, that a former
In 1971, at the height of the Indo-Pakistan war, my parents took me with them to Bombay. I was ten and it was my first trip abroad. My father worked for Brooke Bond, and had ‘tea business’ to attend downtown. First we checked into the Taj Hotel. On the waterfront, beggar children with lurid wounds
A fact which often surprises those who pick up the Bible in adulthood, having not looked at it for years, is how very short the stories are. Adam and Eve, Noah’s Ark, the Feeding of the Five Thousand — in spite of their familiarity they are raced through in just a few lines. It is,
‘This book is a chronicle of one day in the history of one city.’ As first sentences go, that one is hard to beat — particularly given that the ‘one day’ is the last day of the Soviet Union, the city is Moscow and the author, an Irish journalist, was there and knew most of
The most telling figure in Carey Schofield’s book on the Pakistan army is Faisal Alavi, a major general who was murdered in November 2008. The most telling figure in Carey Schofield’s book on the Pakistan army is Faisal Alavi, a major general who was murdered in November 2008. As head of Pakistan’s special forces, Alavi
Of all the Allied fighting service branches in which you wouldn’t have wanted to spend the second world war, probably the grimmest was submarines. Of all the Allied fighting service branches in which you wouldn’t have wanted to spend the second world war, probably the grimmest was submarines. Sure, their losses weren’t quite as bad
In his Modern English Usage, Henry Fowler used the term Wardour Street for ‘a selection of oddments calculated to establish (in the eyes of some readers) their claim to be persons of taste and writers of beautiful English’. In his Modern English Usage, Henry Fowler used the term Wardour Street for ‘a selection of oddments
The words that echoed constantly in the back of my mind as I read this book were from Paul Simon’s song ‘Train in the Distance’: ‘the thought that life could be better is woven indelibly into our hearts and our brains’. The words that echoed constantly in the back of my mind as I read
Dr Temperance Brenner, like her creator, Kathy Reichs, is a forensic anthropologist. She works in North Carolina, specialising in ‘decomps and floaters’. This ensures that in Flesh and Bones (Heinemann, £18.99) you get plenty of authentic sounding detail with your gore. So when a human hand is found sticking out of a drum full of
Ysenda Maxtone Graham’s Mr Tibbits’s Catholic School captures the hilarity and pathos of an eccentric headmaster and the unusual establishment he founded in Kensington in the Thirties. A.N.Wilson introduces us to his funny, peculiar world There are two sorts of school stories. Much the most popular, of course, are those that observe the drama of
‘Owl?’ said Pooh. ‘What’s a biography?’ ‘A biography,’ replied Owl, ‘is an Important Book. Such as an Interested Person might read. Anyone who is interested in the real-life toys which inspired you and Piglet and the others, for instance, might be tempted to read The Life and Times of Winnie the Pooh by Shirley Harrison.’
This inter-war story of an Anglo-Irish family in crisis opens with a bang. Caroline Adair, recovering from measles at Butler’s Hill, her aunt and uncle’s lovely house in the South-west, wakes in the night to find Sinn Feiners surrounding the place. This inter-war story of an Anglo-Irish family in crisis opens with a bang. Caroline
Christopher Ondaatje is best known as a member of the great and the good and a generous patron of the arts, notably the National Portrait Gallery. The pieces collected in this book give glimpses of another, quite different life as a traveller and writer. Ondaatje’s family were long-established Dutch tea planters in Ceylon. In 1947
These two books make mutually illuminating and surprisingly contrasting companions, given the similarity of their subjects. Both are written by those with hands-on experience in the field of art preservation and security. Sandy Nairne was Director of Programmes at the Tate Gallery in 1994 when two important paintings by J.M.W. Turner were stolen while on
During the Twenties and Thirties, the Estonian capital of Tallinn was known to be a centre for espionage, infiltrated by White Russian intriguers bent on blocking Bolshevik access to north-west Europe. Graham Greene first visited in the spring of 1934 — ‘for no reason’, he writes in his memoir Ways of Escape, ‘except escape to
An Oxford don and poet, Patrick McGuinness lived in Bucharest in 1989, and in this fictionalised account of the regime’s death throes he puts his first-hand experience to compelling use. An Oxford don and poet, Patrick McGuinness lived in Bucharest in 1989, and in this fictionalised account of the regime’s death throes he puts his
Many among you, I know, have been fretting that thanks to a combination of political correctness, New Labour educational policy and the European Union’s usurpation of everything the free-born Englishman holds dear, big-picture narrative history is on the point of vanishing from the earth. All that our children’s children will know of British history, you
In chess, the king is never taken. When defeat is inevitable, the losing player resigns. And so it is in war. Defeated leaders sue for terms. Or they are toppled and replaced by fresh leaders who sue for terms, like Napoleon in 1814 and 1815, Reynaud in 1940 and Mussolini in 1943. ‘Wars are finally
Since I began to watch films on video and not so much in cinemas, I have found that I sometimes get the itch to rewind reality itself, in order to check on what I have seen. There must be many oddities in my way of seeing of which I am less aware. Julian Rothenstein,