I thought at first that this was going to be a truly marvellous book, and in many ways it is, but I soon found that, in common with most modern biographies, it is too long, too detailed and there is too much talk about sex. It is hard to believe that non-professionals want quite so
Old Filth is a barrister, a QC and unlike Trollope’s great Old Bailey cross-examiner Mr Chaffenbrass, nobody could ever say of him ‘What a dirty little man!’ In spite of his appearance on this book’s jacket wearing a gown without a coat, Old Filth was always scrupulously neat and tidy. Halfway through an unremarkable career,
Sad to report, but this book is a gem. Why sad? Because Michael Winner, a sensitive, witty and extremely gifted artist, has made such a cock-up of his personal PR that to praise him in public is like applauding the Holocaust. There are nasty silences. Faces go white. Plates drop. The man is not well
Nobody could accuse Pankaj Mishra of lacking ambition. A mixture of memoir, history, political and philosophical treatise, An End to Suffering sets out to tell the historical story of the Buddha and to contextualise his teachings in the development of the Western philosophical tradition. Hindu by birth and rationalist by disposition, Mishra leads us on
It has been Sue Townsend’s misfortune to live on into a time of events more fantastic and of public figures wackier than any of her own comic creations. Her method, like that of the authors of The Diary of a Nobody, was to take a credulous nerd, strip him of any sense of the ridiculous,
Billed on the cover as ‘The True Story of America’s Greatest Crime Wave’, this blockbuster movie of a volume shoots through the months between 1934 and 1936 when a star was born: the Federal Bureau of Investigation. Enter J. Edgar Hoover, vain and dapper. At first he presides over a ‘group of gentlemen’, unarmed because
The really talented observers are not like travellers or journalists reporting colourfully on the unknown (‘Anyone here been raped and speaks English?’), nor even like the real insiders, who risk taking for granted what strikes us as strange, but somewhere in between. They have to mix perception, curiosity and information. Roy Kerridge demonstrates their ambiguous
Here is yet another attempt to interest a wider public in classical music, in the form of a book ‘as told to’ Tim Lihoreau by Stephen Fry, based on a show the latter hosted on Classic FM. Falling concert attendances and CD sales, as well as the general downward slide of the culture, means that
