Cristiano Ronaldo: The Biography. Guillem Balague. The Orion Publishing Group Ltd, £8.99 The problem with Cristiano Ronaldo is summed up in one famous photograph. Towards the end of the Champions League Final in May 2014, the great man converted a penalty to put Real Madrid 4-1 up against local rivals Atletico Madrid. Los Blancos were […]
King of Kings: The Triumph and Tragedy of Emperor Haile Selassie I of Ethiopia. Asfa-Wossen Asserate, Haus Publishing, $29.95. In late January 1941 a party of soldiers and civilians crossed the border from Sudan into Italian-occupied Ethiopia. The men in uniform included British political advisors, some peculiar soldiers of fortune, and the shambling, eccentric and driven […]
Swiped: How to Protect Yourself in a World Full of Scammers, Phishers, and Identity Thieves. Adam Levin, Public Affairs, RPR £16.99 Fifty years from now, people will laugh at us. ‘Who could be that stupid’ they will ask ‘to put all their information on publicly accessible websites, available to everyone and anyone?’ And they will be […]
The Mask of Dimitrios. Eric Ambler. Hodder and Stoughton, RRP £9.99 First published in 1939 by Hodder and Stoughton The Mask of Dimitrios is considered Eric Ambler’s most praised book and widely acknowledged as one of the great espionage thrillers of the 20th century. The intelligence, authenticity and engrossing story telling that established The Mask […]
Something Rotten, St. James Theatre, New York, NY What to see, as a Londoner in New York with one night to spare? Using an utterly random set of criteria (new, not on in the West End, no difficulty finding seats), I ended up at Something Rotten, a show helpfully described to me as “a musical […]
Review of Crosseyed Heart, the third solo album by Rolling Stones guitarist Keith Richards. EMI, RRP £7.99 It is usually a bad idea to write about one’s heroes. You probably don’t want to read me extolling the virtues of the Rolling Stone’s chief bad boy and guitar-wielding genius, especially if you preferred the Beatles, or […]
The Devil’s Financial Dictionary. Jason Zweig, Public Affairs, RRP £12.99 Jason Zweig, the popular public speaker and personal finance columnist for The Wall Street Journal wrote Your Money and Your Brain (Simon & Schuster, 2007), one of the first books to explore the neuroscience of investing. Now he’s back, publishing The Devil’s Financial Dictionary, Your […]
Dynasty: The Rise and Fall of the House of Caesar. Tom Holland, Little, Brown Book Group, RRP £25 “When people think of imperial Rome, it is the city of the first Caesars that is more likely to come into their minds. There is no other period of ancient history that can compare for sheer unsettling […]
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 […]
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 […]
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 […]
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