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Marrying words and melodies
Whatever your favourite theory of creativity, Paul McCartney has a cheery thumbs-up to offer. You think the secret is putting…
A tantalising mystery
‘Victorian’ stuck, and ‘Edwardian’ too. But ‘Georgian’, as an adjective associated with the next monarch in line, never caught on.…
Titans of tennis
Louis MacNeice once wrote that if you want to know what chasing the Grail is like, ask Lancelot not Galahad.…
Banished queen
Shakespeare wastes no time on Lear’s backstory; we meet the brutal old autocrat as he divides his kingdom between two…
The tyrant of Tirana
For many in the West, Albania remains as remote and shadowy as the fictional Syldavia of the Tintin comics. The…
‘I’m not a vampire’
If you’ve only heard one thing about Peter Thiel (and many have heard nothing at all) it is that he…
Debacle at Dieppe
In my mother’s final days we had a long conversation about the second world war. I asked if she’d ever…
The frailty of love
In the months before the outbreak of the first world war, Anton Heideck arrives in Vienna. Family life offered him…
All or nothing
Pan’s name is thought to derive from ‘paean’, the ancient Greek verb meaning ‘to pasture’. His half-man, half-goat form reflected…
A mysterious muse
If you were to glance only briefly at the title of the Irish poet Doireann Ní Ghríofa’s prose debut you…
So much lost for so little
In 1536 there were 850 monastic houses in England and Wales; just four years later they were all gone. The…
Factory boss
To many people Tony Wilson was a bigmouth Mancunian, brash music impresario and jobbing television presenter. But to the generation…
Sisters in crime
If you’re after jewel thieves, bank robbers and gold smugglers, look no further than Caitlin Davies’s Queens of the Underworld.…
The changing face of war
The strategic bankruptcy of the West has twice so far this century demanded that our brave soldiers risk their bodies…
Doomed youth
Long before Ernest Hemingway wasted his late career playing the he-man on battlefields and in fishing boats, or Norman Mailer…
On borrowed time
I write this in a garret a few doors down from the public library in Muswell Hill, north London. It…
Much ado about nothing
Andrew Mitchell, as he readily admits, was born into the British Establishment. Almost from birth, his path was marked out:…
Tongues will wag
One September day in 1649, in the frontier town of Springfield, Massachusetts, Anthony Dorchester returned from church to the house…
Thoroughly hooked
Trying to catch fish with rod and line is a pursuit that, for many, goes far beyond the pleasant passing…
Forging a new life
At Intelligent Life, the Economistmagazine where I worked for some years, it was easy to feel intellectually challenged. Even the…
A spiritual meditation
‘One player on four strings, with a bow.’ That’s what Bach’s six Cello Suites boil down to, says Steven Isserlis.…
A fine finale
Literary estates work to preserve a writer’s reputation — and sometimes milk it too. The appearance of this novel by…
Names, not numbers
If Joseph Stalin was right about one thing it was his assertion that ‘the death of one man is a…
God is everywhere
Twenty years ago The Corrections alerted a troubled world to the talents of Jonathan Franzen. Though cruel and funny and…
Perfect poise
The tide of survival bias has retreated and left the Anglepoise a design classic. Its contemporaries from the mid-1930s, a…
