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Rescued by reindeer

‘Something about the idea of being a travel writer distresses me,’ laments Jenny Diski in the introduction of her book. ‘So,’ she continues, ‘this is not a travel book.’ Well, distressing as this news may be to both author and reader, this is a travel book. All travel writers have their foibles. Some wish to

Zero tolerance in Florence

It is easy to get misty-eyed about Renaissance Florence. How gorgeous it was, we tell ourselves, this City of the Lily, with its lissom youths and comely maidens, each one a Gozzoli ephebe or a Botticelli Venus, its humanist scholars poring over the latest haul of Greek manuscripts, Donatello and Cellini fashioning flawless marble and

Time out in Cuba

For three years Moazzam Begg, former DHSS officer, one-time Birmingham estate agent and top al-Qaida suspect, survived at the sharp end of America’s war on terror. Seized in the middle of the night from his home in Pakistan, Begg was taken through grim makeshift prisons, endured hundreds of hours of interrogation and ended up one

The murky side of Murano

This is Donna Leon’s 15th Commissario Guido Brunetti novel set in Venice and once again the author succeeds in capturing the light and shade of a city that has plenty of both. As in this edition she even provides maps, including the island of Murano, so that the reader can follow the detective’s various per-

Spring forward, fall back

Republics, as much as monarchies, need founding myths in order to legitimise themselves in the eyes of their subjects. For a long time, the image of Chairman Mao leading his rag-tag troops over 10,000 kilometers, across 18 mountain ranges and 24 rivers, offered abundant proof of communist bravery, endurance and selfless idealism to the Chinese.

Harnessing the horses of Apollo

In my ignorance, before reading this most instructive, entertaining and beautifully produced book, I had idly regarded sundials as agreeable garden ornaments with little or no practical purpose. To quote Hilaire Belloc, ‘I am a sundial and I make a botch / Of what is done much better by a watch’. Yet our expert guide

A talent for losing

Wavell was a great soldier and a great man: wise, courageous, clear-headed, an inspired and inspiring leader, a pattern of integrity. It is peculiarly unfair that the three greatest tasks he undertook all ended in near total failure. He made his name between the wars as a thoughtful, forward-looking soldier who did as much to

Relocation with a vengeance

In 1975, a few months after the two Turkish invasions of Cyprus that had stormed across the northern tier of the island in the preceding summer, I stood in the square of Lawrence Durrell’s old village of Bellapaix and watched the Greek villagers being rounded up for deportation to the south. Within a short space

What next — after the end of history?

Professor Fukuyama is famous for having told us at the end of the Cold War that history was at an end. By this he meant that the slow advance of liberal democracy was inevitable. As he explains in his latest book he did not mean that we should try to accelerate the process by killing

Mad about the Bard

At school there was a group of us who thought that Samuel Beckett was the coolest person on the planet. What could be more thrilling than the apocalyptic minimalism of a play featuring two people who lived in dustbins? We found validation for our passion when a teacher drew our attention to the Polish critic

All go in the name of God

The Bickersteth family has performed its Levi-like role in the Church of England for several generations, providing it with some of its best traditional pastors. Rectories, vicarages, deaneries, palaces have homed them and parish churches and cathedrals have long witnessed their work. And work it still is, as this autobiography of a 20th-century bishop proves,

Slash and burn

‘A ship is sooner rigged by far, than a gentleman made ready,’ scoffed Thomas Tomkis in 1607, about how long men took to dress. But in the 17th century wasting time this way was no male preserve. ‘Women,’ wrote Joseph Swetnam, ‘are the most part of the fore-noone painting themselves and frizzling their haires and

The everlasting bonfire

This splendid book of articles, essays and reviews, some published for the first time, begins with a long, masterly piece on the unfashionable doctrine of Hell, the best thing in the whole book. Having been taught about Hell by the monks of Ampleforth in the 1950s, Piers Paul Read asks, ‘Why was damnation dropped from

Memories of loss

The first short chapter of The Other Side of You looks so simple. After introducing us to Elizabeth Cruickshank, a suicide patient who ‘in a certain light could have been 14 or 400’, Dr McBride explains how he and his psychiatrist colleagues ‘come alive at a certain kind of raving’. For McBride it is ‘the

Pathos of the expatriate

I don’t know if it is still there, but in the museum at Lord’s there used to be a glass case containing a stuffed sparrow killed in mid-flight by Jahangir Khan. It always felt somehow dismally appropriate that the one sparrow to substantiate biblical claims should have to spend its eternity at Lord’s, but a

Martin Vander Weyer

Trying times on Easy Street

The multibillionaire Warren Buffett, a folk hero of the age of affluence, once reminded disciples of his hugely successful investment techniques that ‘money can’t change how many people love you’. Avner Offer’s potent analysis of 50 years of socio-economic data makes a similar point in less folksy style: ‘Affluence breeds impatience, and impatience undermines well-being.’

Ventures into the Spanish past

The complex plots of C. J. Sansom’s novel revolve around the adventures in Spain during the civil war and its aftermath of three old boys of a fictional public school. Harry Brett comes from an army family, prospers at school and is elected a fellow of a Cambridge college. Bernie Piper is a working-class scholarship

Sam Leith

Ministry of fear

Just because you’re paranoid, as the cliché runs, it doesn’t mean that they aren’t out to get you. They certainly were out to get Queen Elizabeth I — and how. Her situation was strange and dangerous. She was a Protestant queen ruling a country the majority of whose citizens remained Catholic. ‘The ancient faith still