Readers of the thrillers of the American writer Patricia Cornwell will find elements of her new book familiar but others oddly different. Her novels are fiction closely based on fact; Portrait of a Killer purports to be a work of fact but is founded on fiction. It supposedly unravels the mystery of Jack the Ripper,
It is a discomforting thought that, had the present fashion for kiss-and-tell memoirs, or the intense media scrutiny of politicians’ private lives, been in place a century ago, David Lloyd George might never have become prime minister. Yet, as this masterly fourth volume in John Grigg’s biography proves, he was a towering figure in exceptional
This cracking book is missing something and the want is telling. Jeremy Paxman virtually discounts the possibility that people might go into politics driven by ideas or conviction. These being the spur politicians routinely claim, Paxman’s study becomes a detective hunt for ulterior motive or unacknowledged greed. ‘This fellow says he wants to make the
The Italian author, Alberto Arbasino, has recently published a book recalling his stay in Paris as a student during 1956. Entitled Paris,
Whenever, searching through the television channels for something worth watching, I come across a Dad’s Army repeat I invariably stay with it. The series has not dated, partly perhaps because it was dated when it started. Few of us who were young in the 1960s had clear memories of the Home Guard and many of
If Harold Pinter’s plays are about the weasel under the cocktail cabinet, Matthew Parris’s autobiography is about the butchered segment of electrical cable that lies on the dusty roof of the throne of the Speaker of the House of Commons. For several decades this piece of copper wire, unused, long-neglected, has rested above the heads
Art can raise our spirits, stimulate our intelligence and increase our knowledge; it is therefore disappointing that much of our arts writing is so impenetrable. Academics seem to address their peers and forget us; it is like eavesdropping on a private conversation carried on in a foreign language. Despite this, business is booming. In 1910
It was a Catholic priest – Dom Philip Jebb, the ‘fighting monk’ and later headmaster of Downside School – who introduced Richard Cohen (alongside, as it happens, your reviewer) to fencing in the 1960s – just one of the many ironies which this new and full history of the ancient art and modern sport of
