More from Books

Sons and discoveries

Listing page content here ‘Who are we? Where are we going? Has public provision been a success?’ These are the kind of ‘weighty, unanswerable’ questions, Jeremy Harding asks himself as he mooches around west London housing estates in search of the mother who gave him up for adoption 50-odd years ago. The questions in Jonathan

Under the shadow of the Minster

Listing page content here This heavy, clanking, finely wrought adventure story is set mainly on or around York station in the winter of 1906 and washed down with handfuls of soot, clinker, ‘bacon and eggs and related matters’ and, I would estimate,  some 90 pints of Smith’s ale. The Lost Luggage Porter is Andrew Martin’s

Working into the night

Listing page content here The influence of an intellectual is not necessarily proportional to his merit. The late Edward Said was a prime example of this dissociation between influence and merit. His most famous book, Orientalism, has had a profound and lasting effect on writing about the Middle East, yet it is badly written, worse

Sam Leith

Why didn’t we give peace a chance?

Listing page content here Now comes a war and shows that we still haven’t crawled out on all fours from the barbaric stage of our history. We have learned to wear suspenders, to write clever editorials and to make chocolate milk, but when we have to decide seriously a question of the coexistence of a

Looking back in judgment

Listing page content here The heart starts to sink on the very first page, p. xiii to be precise, because this is still the Preface: ‘When I began work on Osborne’s biography, hoping for the best, I asked his wife Helen, “What does no one know about your husband?” ’Already you can see the gleam

Wives and wallpaper

Listing page content here Anyone baffled by the conundrum of what to read on the beach this summer need look no further than A Much Married Man. This thoroughly good-natured comedy of manners is perfectly pitched so as to provide something for everyone: witty social observation, convincing glimpses into the worlds of high finance and

Genesis

Listing page content here Sitting at the window shelling peasinto a battered colander between my knees(sweet, pod-swollen peas of early May)till suddenly I find I’ve slipped awaysixty years and vividly recallrough stone on bare legs astride a wallswinging sandalled feet, a summer tanon knees, arms, face and summer in my hair;a cat sprawled in the

Captain of a dreadful crew

Listing page content here To meet Oswald Mosley was a most unpleasant experience. You knew at once that you were in the presence of someone who had lost touch with everything except his own ego. So he bullied, so he lied, denying that he had been a willing agent of Hitler, that he would have proved

Martin Vander Weyer

A philosopher rescued from politicians

Listing page content here In February 2005 the then chairman of the US Federal Reserve, Alan Greenspan, travelled to Kirkcaldy on the windy shores of the Firth of Forth in the company of our very own Chancellor of the Exchequer, so that both could pay tribute to the town’s most famous son, Adam Smith, in

Giants in petty strife

Listing page content here ‘In London, if a man have the misfortune to attach himself to letters, I know not with whom he is to live, nor how he is to pass his time in suitable society.’ David Hume was notorious for preferring Edinburgh’s intellectual life to London’s, but the city where the philosopher was

Ghosts from the past

Listing page content here Andrew Taylor has written on a wide range of subjects, but it is for his crime thrillers that he has become famous and won so many awards. By my estimate he’s written 26, which is just under half of the 59 books he’s credited with by Amazon. Until now I have

Fighting a war in all but name

Listing page content here There is much in common between a Richard Holmes book and a bottle of the finest Speyside malt. Both look and feel good, full of promise. Extract the stopper from one, open the other and the anticipation quickens. After that it is a question of taste or habit as to whether

Serious but not solemn

Towards the end of the Seventies I was asked to write a short, critical study of Muriel Spark’s novels. I accepted, with some trepidation and misgivings. At least I hope there were misgivings. There should have been, first because nothing equipped me for the task apart from my admiration for her novels and, perhaps, the

Making the best of defeat

Listing page content here Vae victis, the Roman warning to the defeated, was probably more threatening than sympathetic. Ever after they themselves had been subjugated — forced, literally, to bow their heads under the Samnite yoke — they made a habit of ruthless winning. The defeated could expect slavery and pillage. After June 1940, both

Infant identity crisis

Listing page content here Women in peril flit through the pages of traditional Gothic fiction, murmuring ‘Had I but known!’ as they fall for the wrong man, open the wrong door or apply for the wrong job. The poet Sophie Hannah takes the trusty formula in both hands, gives it a vigorous shake and uses

The man who loved one island

The poet and storyteller George Mackay Brown was the son of the postman at Stromness, Orkney. His father John had also been an apprentice tailor before becoming the postman. George, in one of his poems, speaks of how ‘not wisdom or wealth can redeem/The green coat, childhood’. In his knowledge of every cranny of the

A free spirit in Philadelphia

‘Eakins errs just a little — a little — in the direction of the flesh,’ Walt Whitman observed in the late 1880s. Ideally he would have had the Frenchman Millet do his portrait, but the painter of humble peasants was already dead. Eakins made him a flushed old soul in jovial mood. Sidney Kirkpatrick’s account