In reviewing Robert Harvey’s The War of Wars: The Epic Struggle Between Britain and France, 1793-1815 in these pages three years ago, I asked the question, ‘Who, in the end, defeated Napoleon Bonaparte?’; or rather, I repeated the question that Harvey himself posed at the end of his comprehensive account of the revolutionary and Napoleonic
Michael Palin is the meekest, mildest and nicest of the Pythons. The latest chunk of his diaries traces his attempt during the 1980s to break away from his wacky colleagues and forge a film-making career in his own right. The title, Halfway to Hollywood, reflects his modest, circumspect nature. We first meet the millionaire filmstar
My daughter when small came home from school one night singing these extraordinary lines: ‘Fortune, my foe, why dost thou frown on me/ And will thy favours never lighter be?’ My daughter when small came home from school one night singing these extraordinary lines: ‘Fortune, my foe, why dost thou frown on me/ And will
For a crime writer, success comes with its dark side. As Conan Doyle learned to his cost, your readers often become obsessively attached to your series hero, while you yourself find him or her increasingly tiresome — and limiting. Ian Rankin’s well-deserved success with the genre has largely derived from his Inspector Rebus novels set
A good dictionary of quotations is part-reference book, part-anthology. It is a place where you go to check things up, and where you stay to browse. Many of the items it includes are there not so much because people are actually in the habit of quoting them, but because they are judged to be quotable.
Sometimes you can become too well known. For years Richard Dawkins was a more than averagely successful media don, an evolutionary biologist, fellow of New College, writer of popular science books and tousle-haired face of rationalism on countless television shows. It was a good living, and kept us all entertained, but for Dawkins it wasn’t
It’s odd that a writer as excellent and long-established as Ian Jack hasn’t ever written an actual book but has stuck doggedly to the humble trade of journalism, of which this volume is a collection. It’s odd that a writer as excellent and long-established as Ian Jack hasn’t ever written an actual book but has
The answer is Heathrow Airport’s newest terminal, as seen through the eyes of Alain de Botton, who agreed over the summer to become its first writer in residence. It was a brave task to take on; not only could the result have been very dull but de Botton could have felt bound to be nice.
Whether the refusal to allow the Confederate states the right to self-determination, flying as it did in the face of the Declaration of Independence, was the first overt act of American imperialism is a question that goes largely undiscussed. John Keegan does not raise it. For him, unlike World War I, which was ‘cruel and
