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Why the most important years in history were from 1347 to 1352

A group of retired Somerset farmers were sitting about in the early 1960s, so Ian Mortimer’s story goes, debating which farming invention had most changed their lives. Was it the tractor? Fertilisers? Pesticides? Silos? No, they agreed, it was the Wellington boot. Mortimer tells this old story to illustrate that ‘it is not always the

Was John Cleese ever funny?

Like many of my generation I was enchanted by the surrealistic irreverence of Monty Python’s Flying Circus, until I overheard other boys — it was never girls — excitedly murdering the Parrot Sketch: ‘Ah yes, the Norwegian Blue — lovely plumage…’ This was not out of a snobbish disdain for popularity; I still loved the

Things to do: read this book

It would be perverse not to succumb to the temptation to write this review as a list. So, the first item is how very handsome an object this book is: sturdy and smooth and substantial and full of white space and full-page illustrations (my favourite is Nick Cave’s homemade dictionary, which has two full pages).

The deep Britishness of fish and chips

During the D-day landings, members of the parachute regiment, finding themselves behind enemy lines at night, needed a way of telling whether someone nearby was friend or foe. Their solution was a pair of codewords: one man would call out ‘fish’, the other replied ‘chips’. Brits seem to reach for the words as easily as

A Jamaican civil war, with cameos from Bob Marley

There are many more than seven killings in this ironically titled novel — in fact very long — that starts off set in the Kingston, Jamaica, of the 1970s, amid an efflorescence of political violence. The two major parties, the right-wing Jamaica Labour Party and the left-wing People’s National Party, were pouring guns into West

The Tudor sleuth who’s cracked the secret of suspense

Some reviewers are slick and quick. Rapid readers, they remember everything, take no notes, quote at will. I’m the plodding sort, making more notes than I can ever use and underlining so many quotes that, if I put them all in, it would constitute a republication of the book. But I’ve not done this with