The truth is, we could probably all get by with three or four cookbooks; half a dozen at most, which makes my own collection of dozens seem a bit OTT. But what you need among them is a book that covers all the essentials, so that if you’re stuck to know what to do with
Jonathan Swift’s Gulliver believed that the ideal British prime minister was a creature wholly exempt from joy and grief who applies his words to everything except to the indication of his mind. Swift’s dilation on the virtues of political froideur is only one of many ghosts evoked by Paul Bew’s riveting portrait of the man
Jean-Louis Lebris de Kerouac, better known as Jack Kerouac (1922-1969), the son of French-Canadians spiced with the blood of Mohawk and Caughnawaga Indians and subdued, no doubt, by migration from Quebec to Lowell, an old mill town in Massachusetts, eventually fulfilled his adolescent ambition to live the life of the eccentric ‘artist’ . . .
An early sentence in this collection of stories, first published between 1979 and the current issue of Granta, runs thus: We were in the late stages now, about 45 minutes out, and I was thinking it could still change, some rude blend of weather might yet transform the land, producing texture and dimension, leaps of
The Pursued (Penguin, £12.99) is a lost crime thriller by C. S. Forester, the author of the Hornblower novels. It was written in 1935, rediscovered in 2003 and is now published for the first time. Marjorie, a suburban wife and mother, comes home after a ‘jaunt’ in ‘town’ to find her sister dead in the
This book is a mess. Simon Mann may have been brought up on John Buchan, educated at Eton and Sandhurst, and taken Conrad and the Iliad with him on his African travels, but his style is appalling — a sort of demotic militarese. Short sharp sentences. Few verbs. Acronyms sprinkled like confetti. The third sentence
Charlatan, fornicator, liar, inebriate, pugilist, Marxist, anti-Semite; Ken Livingstone has been called many things but never a writer. Actually, that’s a shame because his words following the 2005 London bombings were brilliantly defiant; perhaps the most powerful speech by a British politician in the last decade. He can be witty — the former leader of
When a man is tired of Johnson, he’s liable to vote for Livingstone. Boris has decided to head Londoners off at the pass by writing a book about them, or rather about 18 of their famed predecessors. From Boudica and Alfred the Great, through Shakespeare and Robert Hooke to Winston Churchill and Keith Richards, we
It was the second week of term and my grandson’s birthday. He had just started at primary school and the only alternative to social suicide seemed to be to invite the whole class to his party. With a few old friends that made a total of 30. They ran yelling in various enjoyably noisy games
