As you finish this book, the chances are you’ll want to commit suicide. Because all you will have been longing for and expecting is a way of life that’s ‘independent, peaceful, leisured, safe’, where you can remain in good health and can pass on civilised values to the grandchildren - and what happens? asks ROGER LEWIS ...read
What did Shakespeare’s characters eat? wonders JANE SHILLING. His plays are full of feasting, but he is maddeningly vague when it comes to specifics.
Though I am not old yet, like many people in the throes of midlife, I am already worrying about it, admits MARCUS BERKMANN
What big teeth you have. . . The wolf has become demonised in our storytelling and culture, yet conservationists Jim and Jamie Dutcher’s pioneering work with this much misunderstood and endangered species has slowly helped to rehabilitate its image.
Back in May 1951, writes JOHN PRESTON, the then Margaret Roberts took her driving test - and passed on the first attempt. But having paid for another two lessons in advance, she went ahead and had them all the same. ‘This,’ writes Charles Moore, ‘shows a virtually inhuman determination to get value for money.’
CLASSIC CRIME
How to plot a murder with the least chance of detection is about the only practical knowledge to be gleaned from the average crime novel.
POPULAR FICTION
Adrian Laing is the son of a ‘celebrity psychiatrist’. This might mean his first novel about a rehab clinic for the famous pulls its punches somewhat.
HISTORICAL FICTION
The corridors of power are hotbeds of political intrigue, and few more so than those of the Vatican trodden by the Borgias in Renaissance Italy.
Patrick McGrath: CONSTANCE
Book editor Constance Schuyler meets a professor of poetry 20 years her senior, at a Sixties literary party.
Edney Silvestre: IF I CLOSE MY EYES NOW
It's 1961 and two 12-year-old Brazilian boys bunk off school and stumble across the body of a murdered woman.
Melvyn Bragg: GRACE AND MARY
At weekends, John visits his 92-year-old mother Mary in the nursing home where she’s confined by her dementia.
YOUNG FICTION
WARP stands for Witness Anonymous Relocation Programme, an ingenious FBI secret.
Charles Moore will be speaking about his new biography of Margaret Thatcher at the Daily Mail Chalke Valley History Festival on Wednesday June 26th at 5pm.
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Forget the image of genteel ladies in cardigans pottering in the hollyhocks - nothing gets the competitive juices flowing more than Chelsea Flower Show, which opens in London on May 21. ...read
We've all been there. You’re just about to strike your last match when you drop it in a puddle. Disaster! Well, actually no. Simply pick it up, dry it roughly on your coat, stick it in your hair and leave it for a couple of minutes. It’ll be good as new, finds JOHN HARDING
The Bible retold as Science is what the well-known geneticist and science populariser, Steve Jones, claims to give us. The Bible, alas, got its science wrong, writes PETER LEWIS
Did the Fab Four bring down the Soviet Empire single-handed? It’s a wonderful thought, muses MARCUS BERKMANN
For more than a century, the Marquess of Queensberry has been seen (in the words of his biographer) as ‘the perfect type of evil, cruelty, ferocity and brutality’ - a creature who must be reviled throughout eternity as the man who precipitated ‘the tragic downfall’ of Oscar Wilde, remarks ROGER LEWIS
Are you a cat person or a dog person? Stupid question, really, because if you were a dog person, you wouldn’t be reading this — just as it’ll be a cold day in hell before I voluntarily sit down to watch a Lassie film. ...read
Oddly enough, writes JOHN PRESTON, I suspect one of the things that makes Christopher Fowler such a good memoirist is that he doesn’t much like writing about himself.
Kate Humble is the sort of television presenter who makes you feel ashamed to be slumped on the sofa in front of the telly when you could be out in the fresh air, observes JANE SHILLING
After yet another bitterly cold week, who doesn’t fantasise about relaxing in warming sunshine and lush gardens?
As the first glimpse of sunshine warmed some of us this week, what better book to get us in the mood for summer than this bright and breezy collection of the best of the English seaside.
One minute she was shouting ‘Up yer bum!’ in Wish You Were Here, and the next she was the darling of Hollywood. But then the actress fell into a disastrous spiral of failed affairs, drug abuse and mental illness. This is her astonishing story. ...read
He was Margaret Thatcher’s confidant and adviser for 30 years. In our latest revealing extract from his biography of her, ROBIN HARRIS describes how the spartan conditions and Methodist values of her Grantham home life shaped the future Prime Minister.
A new book reveals how Italian police took a cynical view of the supposed kidnap of Paul Getty, son of oil tycoon John Paul Getty Snr.
In a compelling new biography, Prince Harry is revealed as idolising James Hewett, the soldier who many unfairly whispered was his true father, not Prince Charles (pictured).
The 51-year-old who starred in Natural Born Killers and Saving Private Ryan before spiralling into drug addiction, devotes an entire chapter to their three-year liaison in his tell-all memoir published on Thursday.
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