It is a mark of the excellence of this memoir by the highest-ranking woman in American history, ex-Secretary of State Madeleine Albright, that it could not have been written by a man. Imagine Douglas Hurd saying that the happiest years of his life were with a spouse who dumped him for a younger woman and
In a recent column in the Telegraph (8 March) headed ‘How I long for the bombs to start falling,’ Mark Steyn wrote, ‘This interminable non-rush to non-war is like a long, languorous, humid summer, where everyone’s sweaty and cranky and longing for the clouds to break and the cool refreshing rain to fall. Bring it
In this exploration of her pain, terror, and ten years of barely surviving the trauma of rape and near-murder, Susan Brison’s most piercing words are, ‘For months after my assault, I had to stop myself before saying (what seemed accurate at the time),
Gavin Menzies declares, he does not claim, that between 1421 and 1423 the Chinese discovered Australia, South and North America, and nearly reached the North Pole – in short, the world. He is ‘certain’ that if there hadn’t been a disastrous fire in Peking’s Forbidden City, killing the favourite imperial concubine and causing the emperor
Two years ago in The Spectator I praised Ha Jin’s earlier novel, Waiting. It was about a kindly, ineffectual army doctor who waits and waits for a divorce from his peasant wife so that he can marry a nurse, his lover without sex for 13 years. Ha, who teaches English at Boston University after learning