Mark Amory

Members of the Hypocrites Club were Oxford undergraduates, and those with whom David Fleming’s book is chiefly concerned were born between 1903-5. It had originally been a respectable club, founded in 1921, its two most mentioned members being L.P. Hartley, the novelist, and David Cecil, the biographer and historian. But all that changed when Harold

‘Dark Star’ is a suitable enough title in itself, but the definition makes it a brilliant one: ‘A Dark Star’, we are told in this book, ‘is shadowed, often detectable by its gravitational effect on other bodies. It is often a component of a binary star and can cause the brightness of its visible partner

Anne Tyler’s Vinegar Girl (Hogarth, £16.99), her modern version of The Taming of the Shrew, came as a surprise: the funniest book she has written, much funnier than Shakespeare. Private Eye considers that I should not praise Ferdinand Mount because I was at Eton with him but we never spoke to each other there, so

A Life Revisited, as the modest, almost nervous, title suggests, mainly concerns Evelyn Waugh’s life with comments on but no analysis of his books. There have been at least three major biographies already, as well as large volumes of diaries, letters and journalism and many slighter volumes. There is more to come. Waugh’s grandson, Alexander,

Since retiring from coping with new books I have found it a pleasure not to have to glance at any of them. One, however, Anne Tyler’s 20th novel A Spool of Blue Thread (Vintage, £7.99), was pure pleasure. A quiet family drama over four generations, set in Baltimore as usual, it was never obvious which

A new literary editor looks among his acquaintance for potential reviewers. There was no one I approached more confidently in 1985 than Juliet Townsend (who died on 29 November). She had been a friend for 25 years and run a bookshop since 1977 with her husband John. They had looked over my own books to

Being a slow reader, I first try the shortest, or anyway shorter, works of famous novelists unknown to me. This year, with many misgivings, I read The Confusions of Young Törless by Robert Musil (Penguin, £8.99) and was shocked and impressed by the intensity of the sex and violence he describes at a military boarding school in

I’m delighted to present the first View from 22 books podcast. We begin with Allan Mallinson’s new book 1914: Fight the Good Fight (reviewed here by Peter J. Conradi), which argues that the Great War might have been won in 1915 if the British Expeditionary Force had been used as a strategic reserve in 1914. Mallinson

In the Christmas issue of The Spectator there was a review of Showtime: A History of Broadway Musicals, a book which ran to 785 pages. Ruth Leon, in The Sound of Musicals (Oberon Books, £9.99), deals with the whole lot, well perhaps 20 in practice, in 128 much smaller ones; so she has to be

‘The Half’ is how actors refer to the half hour before their play begins, when they ready themselves, steady themselves, for their performance. For 25 years Simon Annand has been allowed to catch these vulnerable moments and the result is a series of intimate, revealing and beautiful portraits. Many of the subjects are famous, a