Autobiography
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As Luck Would Have It, by Derek Jacobi - review
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An Appetite for Wonder, by Richard Dawkins - review
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As Green as Grass, by Emma Smith - review
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Country Boy, by Richard Hillyer - review
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The World is Ever Changing, by Nicolas Roeg - a review
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Backing Into the Light, by Colin Spencer - review
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Strictly Ann, by Ann Widdecombe - review
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Folly de Grandeur, by Nicky Haslam- review
Nicky Haslam is one of our best interior designers, a charmed and charming agent of style, a tastemaker for the…
Bookends: Spirit of place
A new book by Ronald Blythe is something of an event. In recent years the bard of Akenfield has mostly…
Low life and high style
The return of Roy Kerridge
A well-told lie
Michael Ondaatje takes a journey into childhood
Pig in the middle
Writing an autobiographical account of middle age is a brave undertaking, necessitating a great deal of self-scrutiny at a time of life when most of us would sooner look the other way and hope for the best.
Red badge of courage
The author describes this book as an ‘auto- biographical novel’, but since it would be quite beyond me to distinguish fact from fiction in this hair-raising account of his childhood years, I propose to treat it as if it were all true, especially as I can’t imagine anyone making any of it up.
Cambridge and after
My dread was that someone would ask me my opinion of Lermontov or Superstring Theory or the Categorical Imperatives of Kant.
A charismatic narcissist
In equal measure, this book is fascinating and irritating.
A foot in both camps
As a five-year-old in the Arab quarter of Jerusalem in the 1950s, Kai Bird overheard an elderly American heiress offering $1 million to anyone who could solve the Arab-Israeli conflict.
The dying of the light
The phrasing of the subtitle is exact: a memoir in blindness, not of blind- ness.
Crisp and brave
Among my guests last weekend as I read Lord Mandelson’s book was Ben, aged two and a half.
How are you today?
How am I? Very well, thank you.
Mountain sheep aren’t sweeter
Anyone who can speak Welsh is going to get a lot of fun from this book.
Insufficiently honoured here
‘Next time it’s full buggery!’ said Christopher Hitchens as I helped him onto a train at Taunton station after a full luncheon of Black Label, Romanée-Conti, eel risotto and suckling pig.
Casualties of war and peace
John Simpson quotes Humbert Wolfe’s mischievous lampoon but makes it clear that, in spite of the somewhat disobliging title of his book, he does not accept it as fair comment.
The ghost of an egoist
Very long books appear at intervals about Fidel Castro and Che Guevara.
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