Non-fiction

Richard Nixon had met Henry Kissinger only once before he asked him, on his landslide victory in 1968, to be his National Security Adviser, saying to an aide, ‘I don’t trust Henry but I can use him.’ Richard Nixon had met Henry Kissinger only once before he asked him, on his landslide victory in 1968, to be his National Security Adviser, saying to an aide, ‘I don’t trust Henry but I can use him.’ Kissinger, then at Harvard, had strongly supported Nixon’s rival for the Republican nomination, Nelson Rockefeller, openly deriding Nixon and calling him at one point ‘a hollow man … evil.’ Their subsequent longstanding and successful partnership, surviving

Twenty years ago, when William Dalrymple published his first book, In Xanadu, travel writers tended to follow the example of Paul Theroux, whose huge success then dominated the genre, and to cast themselves as the heroes of their narratives. ‘With Nine Lives,’ explains Dalrymple in the introduction to his seventh book, ‘I have tried to invert this, and keep the narrator firmly in the shadows, so bringing the lives of the people I have met to the fore.’ The result is so exemplarily self-effacing — most of the words here are those of others — that it will disappoint some of his fans, who will miss the direct expression of

Time was, back in the Renaissance, when barely a book would be published which did not feature some lavish hero-worship of Cicero. Machiavelli, Erasmus, Thomas More: they all regularly name-checked ‘Tully’. The same could hardly be said of authors today. Even those who do deign to mention Rome’s greatest orator have rarely tended to feel much admiration for him. Typical was Kingsley Amis. In Take a Girl Like You, the raffish schoolteacher, Patrick Standish, finds himself drilling his pupils in the Phillipics, the speeches which Cicero, with immense courage, delivered against Mark Antony, at the eventual cost of his life. To Standish, however, they convey, not the heroism of an

As a young man in the 1970s Michael Bloch was the architectural historian and diarist James Lees- Milne’s last (if, we are assured, platonic) attachment, and later became his literary executor. As a young man in the 1970s Michael Bloch was the architectural historian and diarist James Lees- Milne’s last (if, we are assured, platonic) attachment, and later became his literary executor. Lees-Milne died in 1997, and Bloch has spent much of the last decade editing the remaining diaries and preparing this book. Not only has he had to deal with his own delicate relationship with his admirer and his admirer’s hostile wife, he was faced with the special problems

In historical writing the Restoration era has been the poor relation of the Puritan one before it. It is true that we all have graphic images, many of them supplied by Samuel Pepys, of the years from the return of the monarchy in 1660: of the rakish court and the mistresses of the merry monarch; of the Restoration playhouses and the newly-founded Royal Society; of the disasters of the great plague and the fire of London and the Anglo-Dutch naval war. Yet until very recently there has been no equivalent to the scholarly foundations which were laid by Victorian narratives of the civil wars and the republic, and on which

It is entirely possible that nobody, not even perhaps Queen Elizabeth herself, has ever known what she was really like, so great the charm, the smiling gaze, the gloved arm, the almost wistful voice, the lilting politeness, yet so strong the nerve, so dogged the spirit, so determined the trajectory. And so many were the gossamer veils that enwrapped her aura that these two extremes invariably melded into a rose-centered sweetness. For nearly 70 years Queen Elizabeth, like most royalty, nurtured the cultivation of a façade. To an adoring mass, she was Titania; few glimpsed the dagger beneath her flower-strewn couch. In William Shawcross’s majestic and elegantly written biography, we

It is becoming difficult to say anything new about Churchill as a war leader. The basic facts about the conduct of allied strategy have been known for many years. Diaries and memoirs, and the occasional loose anecdote, still dribble into the public domain, adding spice but nothing fundamental to our knowledge. What remains is analysis and opinion, and even that is a crowded field. Max Hastings’ Churchill as Warlord, 1940-45 covers, within a narrower chronological frame, the same ground as Carlo d’Este’s recent book, Warlord: Churchill at War, 1874-1945. Hastings’ views are a good deal more balanced than d’Este’s, as well as being better researched and argued. But the essential

Anticipate the demise of Gordon Brown. Imagine Labour’s search for a leader with voter-appeal. Picture a younger Shirley Williams, but with the experience and affection she already commands. Wouldn’t she be a powerful contender? Couldn’t a new Shirley Williams, updated for the 21st century and reinserted into the Labour Party, give the rest a run for their money? Lady Williams’s style of politics has weathered better than that of any of her erstwhile Labour contemporaries. She’s just the sort of thing they need. Climbing the Bookshelves is the story of the woman who forsook all that, and what made her. The story of what made her is much the more

Journalists’ memoirs tend to be as transitory as the great stories they so lovingly recall. Journalists’ memoirs tend to be as transitory as the great stories they so lovingly recall. Even the best of them — Arthur Christiansen’s Headlines All My Life, Otto Friedrich’s Decline and Fall, about the death of the Saturday Evening Post, Murray Sayle’s A Crooked Sixpence, recalling Soho gangs and press corruption — seem dated now, the scoops forgotten, the scandals long past. Few of them impart much of value, except perhaps for a fleeting sense of nostalgia. Harold Evans must surely be counted an exception, because, for more than a decade, he ran the best