Two Hours: The Quest to Run the Impossible Marathon. Ed Caesar, Viking, RRP £16.99 Personally, I could not be less interested in marathons. While 26 miles is undoubtedly a long way on foot, and it is an enormous achievement to run that distance, the business of marathons looks strangely unexciting. The sport is long on endurance […]
I don’t know what they’re drinking over at Omega these days, but it’s definitely not pints of lager any longer, and whatever it is it’s working. After too many years of producing over-sized, garish golf club bling, someone at Omega seems to have remembered that it is in fact one of the great houses of […]
Margaret Thatcher: The Authorized Biography, Volume Two: Everything She Wants. Charles Moore, Allen Lane, RRP £30 In the summer of 1983, Margaret Thatcher appeared to be the mistress of all she surveyed. Four years earlier, she had thrust herself into global events, to the dismay of those who had been in charge. Carter, Schmidt, Giscard, Roy […]
To say that Adele’s comeback single is a hit is a bit like saying that Cristiano Ronaldo knows his way around a football pitch. ‘Hello’ is a monster: the first single to be downloaded more than a million times in a week; more than a quarter of a billion views on YouTube; the best US […]
The cellar was cool and damp, a reminder that in Burgundy autumn had arrived. Inside the air was filled with that familiar stone-dust, flinty smell one associates with old country churches. Stood around a barrel were myself, a buyer for a large UK wine merchants’, a negociant and the vigneron, carefully administering small glasses of delicately flavoured […]
You approach a new James Bond film with finely blended expectations of excitement and concern and dread. Excitement at the prospect of the second most expensive action film ever produced, concern at the health of a venerated British institution, and dread at the prospect of yet another prime turkey in the turkey-infested realm of the […]
Dan Ariely is James B. Duke Professor of Psychology and Behavioural Economics at Duke University and bestselling author of Predictably Irrational: The Hidden Forces that Shape Our Decisions. He attributes his ability to observe and reflect on human nature to his injury and its continuing effects: having suffered third degree burns from an accident as […]
Horrible Histories, the children’s books and TV programmes, have arguably created Britain’s most historically literate generation. British children no longer learn the order of England’s kings and queens by reciting “Willy, Willy, Harry, Ste…” Rather, they chant the Chas-and-Dave style number from the show: “I’m William the Conqueror, my enemies stood no chance…” Cleopatra’s murderous […]
Thatcher’s Trial: Six Months That Defined a Leader. Kwasi Kwarteng, Bloomsbury Publishing, RRP £21.99 History is written backwards. Before he embarks on the story, the historian already knows the ending. That can cause a problem. It is possible to slip into the complacency of hindsight and conclude that outcomes were inevitable when they were anything but. For […]
Who won the Scottish independence referendum? To paraphrase the Chinese premier, Zhou Enlai, in 1972 when he was asked about the impact of the French Revolution: “It is too early to say.” Of course, that Zhou Enlai witticism was based on a misunderstanding. He had misheard and thought he was being asked about the events of 1968 in […]
Edmund de Waal, a celebrated potter and ceramicist who had one of the literary hits of 2010 with his biographical memoir The Hare with Amber Eyes has now written a study of the remarkable history and nature of porcelain. De Waal has devoted much of his working life to porcelain, and this is not a […]
Charles Murray, in his new book, By the People: Rebuilding Liberty without Permission, argues that America’s constitutional checks on the growth of spending, taxation, and regulation have largely been undermined. The result, he fears, is an America moving rapidly toward the kinder, gentler tyranny Alexis de Tocqueville warned about. Murray focuses—wisely in my view—on the […]
Harry Mount is the master of, so to speak, the QI book. Like the authors of the BBC show, he is able to hold our interest in the unlikeliest subjects by telling us things that come as a surprise, even when think ourselves well-read. An eager truffle-hunter, he has snuffled his way in previous books […]
“To know your rights are being abused, or that you are abusing someone else’s, you first have to know that you have them, and what they are. But with no comparative information about societies elsewhere in the world, such awareness in North Korea cannot exist…. If the North Korean people acquired an awareness of their […]
This is ideal holiday reading, but there is a caveat. It is an anti-social book. You are part of a house party in Provence. There are plans to deploy allied appetite superiority, advance on the village and lunch chez le Patron Mange Ici. You will be strongly tempted to dodge the column and continue reading […]
John Plender, a journalist on the Financial Times, has written a book about capitalism and whether it is a good thing – and that is taking ‘good’ in its broadest sense, to include ‘moral’ as well as ‘useful’. Now, there are those who would object that a journalist on the famously pink paper is the […]
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