It’s because it’s the land of the loner that the United States is so loved or loathed. Yet to me the most beguiling novels that have zipped across the Atlantic in the past half-century or so are mostly about groups, specifically groups on campus, usually a rather classy campus at that. Mary McCarthy’s Group were
In a 2013 interview with a Canadian newspaper, Rupert Thomson acknowledged the strange place he occupies in the literary world. ‘If I had a dollar,’ he mused, ‘for every time I’d heard someone say, “Why aren’t you more well known?…”’ Looking back on his reviews, you can certainly see what he means. For more than
The tailor’s art is a triumph of mind over schmatte. Not just in the physical cutting and stitching, but in the faith that style makes content. This, not the question of which way you dress, is the secret compact between tailor and client. ‘Every faculty of his soul, spirit, purse and person is heroically consecrated
Asked how he achieves the distinctive realism for which his novels and screenplays are famous, Richard Price, that sharp chronicler of the American underbelly, tends to cite Damon Runyon’s biographer Jimmy Breslin, who said that Runyon ‘did what all good journalists do — he hung out’. Set in the brutal confines of the Stanville Women’s
Lucky bastard. Such are the words that come constantly to mind while you’re reading Clancy Sigal’s two volumes of posthumously published autobiography. Blacklisted as a (self-confessedly lousy) actor for refusing to name names in the McCarthy era, working as the agent for the likes of Peter Lorre, Rod Steiger and — sigh — Barbara Stanwyck
Here’s a treat for desert lovers. William Atkins, author of the widely admired book The Moor, has wisely exchanged the dank, wind-lashed chill of Britain’s moorland for eight of the world’s fieriest deserts, from the Empty Quarter of Oman and Egypt’s Eastern Desert to the Taklamakan in China and an unlikely stint at Burning Man
Barely a month goes by without a new banking firm popping up. And while some are interesting, and a few perhaps revolutionary, most have simply rolled out mortgage and savings products in an attempt to muscle in on the home turf of the UK’s building societies. Add to the mix a fast deteriorating High Street
Gavin Williamson is the unfortunate victim of the Parliamentary recess. With little in the way of political news, the Defence Secretary’s awkward exchange with Richard Madeley over his ‘shut up and go away’ Russia comment has received a lot of attention. Now the Good Morning Britain presenter has decided to prolong Williamson’s turmoil a bit
“The greatest politician in the world”, a friend quipped recently, “is the Westminster projection of Ruth Davidson”. I do not think this was meant altogether unkindly. It was, in part, a reflection of the age-old truth that what you cannot have so often seems more attractive than what you can. Davidson is a formidable communicator;
Never one to shy away from a platitude, the shadow attorney general, Shami Chakrabarti, has declared that the PM must reform abortion law in Northern Ireland on the basis that women there “have been let down by privileged women and men for too long” and that, so far as Theresa May is concerned, “the test
Bond yields are soaring. Stock markets are tanking. The banks are looking wobbly, and money is starting to drain out of Italy. To listen to the mainstream commentary on the Italian crisis part 782, you’d imagine that a wild and irresponsible ‘populist’ government had just been tamed by the financial markets. And that once some
It’s always the ones you most expect. Roseanne Barr, an icon of Trump culture, has had her TV sitcom cancelled by ABC after she tweeted that former Obama adviser Valerie Jarrett was the product of a union between the Muslim Brotherhood and the Planet of the Apes. Jarrett is black and was born in Iran.
Ruth Davidson’s Glasgow speech is making headlines about the NHS because that’s where most political village attention is right now. We all know that a big government announcement on health funding is coming and Davidson knows it too. As a former hack, she also knows how to hijack someone else’s story, so her speech is
If you have credit card balance on an existing account, you could save vast amounts of money by transferring the balance to another card. Here is a selection some of the best cards on the market with a 0% introductory balance transfer rate, from data supplied by moneyfacts.co.uk.
Is Theresa May a feminist? That’s the question that’s dominating Westminster today following the Prime Minister’s reluctance to back reform of Northern Ireland’s strict abortion law. The Republic of Ireland’s decisive vote to overturn its own law on Friday has seen May come under pressure from Cabinet ministers and some of her own MPs to
With one state-imposed compliance exercise after another getting in the way of business, no wonder our productivity looks permanently sickly. The EU’s General Data Protection Regulation, which takes effect this week, has imposed a huge bureaucratic burden on companies and charities — as well as, for those that do it properly, a sacrifice of valuable
If stoves and fires come under attack, country pubs and restaurants will collapse. This will happen, I suspect, even if Mr Gove does not ban them, because he is opening up a new world in which they will come under official disapproval. Before long, it will be alleged that pub staff suffer from the equivalent
Gavin Williamson – who told the Russians to ‘shut up and go away’ – is usually the one dishing out the rebukes. Not today. The Defence Secretary met his match in the form of Good Morning Britain presenter Richard Madeley after he repeatedly refused to answer a question on whether he was right to use
Two video clips did the rounds in the French media at the weekend. One went global, that of the heart-warming heroism of Mamoudou Gassama, a migrant who rescued a small boy dangling from a balcony in Paris; the other, being more feel-fear than feel-good, didn’t capture the world’s attention in quite the same way. This film was
It is generally agreed that Britain is suffering from a housing crisis, with big cities such as London being particular flashpoints. This year in the capital, the number of renters exceeded the number of homeowners for the first time. In the country, home ownership rates stand at a 30-year-low. And the proportion of 25 to