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Seriously deluded
A friend who works in social care speaks to me earnestly about a troubled young colleague: ‘Of course, she’s got…
Vignettes to treasure
Jan Morris, in all her incarnations, was always able to evoke a place and a moment like no other. As…
Spot the book title 2021
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Smoke and mirrors
On 2 October last year, when he became chief of the UK Secret Intelligence Service (MI6, if you prefer), Richard…
Revenge is rarely sweet
‘Who,’ asks Stephen Bayley, in one of the ‘S.B’ chapters of this irresistibly spiky co-written book, ‘could countenance working for…
Face value
Rising professors do well to be controversial if they wish to be invited to contribute to mainstream media. But the…
Ships of heaven
In his new book on Europe’s cathedrals, Simon Jenkins begins with the claim that the greatest among them are our…
The message in Klingon
The Rosetta Stone has an awful lot in common with a Kinder Surprise Egg. Hear me out. The actual text…
Back to the Dark Ages
She’s done it again: J.K. Rowling has written a captivating children’s book. The Christmas Pig(Little Brown, £20) is about a…
Wrong time and place
Dan Rhodes’s career might be regarded as an object lesson in How Not to Get Ahead in Publishing. Our man…
The glory that was Greece
Imagine a new take on the Greek myth of Pygmalion. A love-shy artist makes a woman out of marble who…
An anarchist cri de coeur
Ten years ago, David Graeber was a leading figure of the Occupy Wall Street movement. He and his fellow protesters…
Night on a bare mountain
Novelists are leery about letting the buzzwords of recent history into their books. The immediate past threatens to upstage the…
A man with a plan
This memoir from Sir Richard Needham, 6th Earl of Kilmorey, businessman and former Northern Ireland minister, has a frank opening:…
In the thick of it
When the shrill air raid sirens blared their familiar warning cries over the city at 6.01 p.m. on 29 December…
Culture clash
Apart from what the title tells us, these stories are about a fundamental difference in cultures. Huma Qureshi writes like…
Sinister accidents abound
The old adage that everyone has a novel in them has a new version: anyone can write a thriller. Celebrity…
A right old song and dance
All the questions around Britney Spears can be condensed into this one: who should we blame? For a long time,…
A principled pragmatist
A headline in the Mail on Sunday, taken up eagerly by the BBC’s Todayprogramme, claimed recently: ‘The SAS is getting…
Gorbachev’s failed experiment
Thirty years ago the Soviet Union was guttering to its close. Those of us who were there remember the exhilarating…
Losing direction
James Ivory and Ismail Merchant formed the most successful cinematic partnership since Michael Powell and Eric Pressburger. Between the founding…
From Sooki to Snoopy
It has to be one of the most extraordinary stories of lockdown — how Tom Hanks’s assistant Sooki Raphael, undergoing…
A beady eye
At one time, Penelope Lively was routinely shortchanged by critics. Her protagonists are often middle-class professionals — historians, archeologists, scriptwriters…
The life of the party
Readers of this magazine will have enjoyed Joan Collins’s diaries, and her Past Imperfect was one of the funniest showbiz…
Animal magic
If one of the purposes of art is to help us see the world around us, then Sebastião Salgado’s photographs…
