‘To me, he was sort of like a unicorn,’ writes Mrs Obama, looking back on her courtship days with Barack. He was affectionate, loving, secure and brainy. Very brainy. ‘He consumed volumes of political philosophy as if it were beach reading.’ He was laid back but his sense of purpose was strong. ‘Barack was serious
It is, proclaimed Charles Wyndham in 1908, ‘an institution alien to the spirit of our nation’. The alien having long since landed, it’s easy to snicker. After all, what would English (British? — that’s another question) theatrical life be without the National? It has become crucial to the way audiences think about themselves — and
The large number of novels written in the first person would suggest it’s an easy voice to pull off: that the closeness of ‘I’ to ‘me’ means it can be accessed by the novelist without much difficulty. But in fact, the writer must come up with a legitimate reason for why a character is giving
Five years ago President Xi Jinping gave a speech in Kazakhstan, launching the ‘Silk Road Economic Belt’, a wildly ambitious set of Chinese-backed infrastructure projects stretching through the steppes of central Asia to the Baltic Sea. Hundreds of billions of dollars later, this project more than any other has come to define China’s radical ambitions
When Britain finally lowered the flag in the Iraqi city of Basra in 2007, the army’s top brass valiantly claimed that they were leaving it to ‘self-rule’ rather than all-out anarchy. Despite the militiamen in the streets and the mortars in the skies, this was what success looked like in Iraq they told the invited
Shakespeare’s Rape of Lucrece is a puzzling and often terrible poem. Lucrece, the devout wife of Collatine, is raped by Tarquin, the son of the king of Rome. Her suffering inspires a revolution led by Brutus, and this is the beginning of the first Roman republic. It’s a rich myth of sex and politics, and
The 20th-century painter Balthus once suggested that the author of a book about him began with the words: ‘Balthus is an artist about whom we know nothing; now let’s look at his works.’Actually, there are many important figures about whom we know nothing, or at least very little. Giovanni Bellini is a case in point.
On 26 August 1880 Henry Russell consummated his marriage in an unusual way. He was, to his own mind, married to the Vignemale, the highest French peak in the Pyrenees, and, wishing to spend the night with his beloved, he climbed to the 10,820ft summit and got his servants to dig a trench, bury him
In 2016, inspired by reports that Donald Trump’s butler had recommended the assassination of Barack Obama, Ben Schott wrote a scintillating squib, published in these pages, about Trump meeting Bertie Wooster. As he later noted in a diary column, it gave him the idea of writing a new Jeeves and Wooster novel. Predictably, reassuringly, soothingly,
A long and messy business is how the chef Rowley Leigh explains his preferred way of eating. Picking at a crab, for example, or eating raw young broad beans straight from the pod. He applies the same phrase to cooking. That too is messy, but not all the recipes in his new book take ages
