Book Extract: Sashenka, By Simon Montefiore

Sunday, 6 July 2008

Irvine Welsh: The secret romantic

Friday, 4 July 2008

Meeting Irvine Welsh on his home turf in Edinburgh, it is hard to know whether he has changed, is still the same, or was never what people thought he was in the first place. He now lives in Dublin, via London and Miami, but manages to make it back "home" at least once a month. He has a Hibs season ticket. He's still pals with the boys he knew when he was six. And, yet, something about him is definitely different. "When you're kids you do things like burning insects with magnifying glasses," says the man whose books have mainly dealt with smack, scatology and the sordid sides of life. "But now if I see a snail walking across a path I've got to go and pick it up... I seem to get very emotional about suffering. If there's a cheesy romantic comedy on a plane, I'm the one with tears rolling down my face. Oh God," he laughs, "what am I saying?"

Winston Fletcher: Hard sell, soft options

Friday, 4 July 2008

Opines Winston Fletcher, advertising boosts the economy. No enemy of cliché, Fletcher was born. Appearing in the same sentence, "torrid" and "riven by strife" are expressions he uses. Not averse to annoying constructs, his book is written like this. With offices in London Auckland, Taipei and Madrid, it is published by Oxford University Press. A peerless academic publisher, I wonder what they were thinking of.

Boyd Tonkin: Memories of the pain in Spain

Friday, 4 July 2008

Seventy summers ago, Spain versus Germany meant more than the final of a football tournament. The outcome differed, too. When the forces of the Spanish government made their last-ditch push on the Ebro against Franco's rebels in July 1938, ferocious bombing by the Nazi planes of the Condor Legion helped to halt the advance. Within months, Madrid fell and a 40-year ice age began.

Cover Stories: Hamish Hamilton; Dannie Abse; Caroline Michel's income; the generosity of Nikita Lalwani

Friday, 4 July 2008

* As old Commonwealth ties mean less and less and publishers in countries once coloured red on the map seek more autonomy, how curious that Penguin should now launch Hamish Hamilton in Canada.

Book Of A Lifetime: Wuthering Heights, by Emily Bronte

Friday, 4 July 2008

To select the book of a lifetime is no easy task. Masterpieces clamour from all sides. My own shortlist would include Moby-Dick and Heart of Darkness, both watery tales, both dominated by men who are huge, flawed colossi. My book of a lifetime, however, is Wuthering Heights, in which another towering figure bestrides a wild place, and incarnates the elemental principle of storm. It confirms, too, the universal truth that in the absence of institutions, man is liberated from morality.

Family inheritance: Revenge of the stepmothers...

Wednesday, 2 July 2008

First came Bridget Jones who made it acceptable for young single women to go home and drink a bottle of wine on their own. Then came "mummy lit", which made nappies as aspirational as a City bonus. Now, the biggest familial taboo is about to be broken: the wicked stepmother is to get her own back.

The Ten Best Children's Audio Books

Tuesday, 1 July 2008

Joanna Kavenna: How the author turned from unpublishable failure to prizewinning writer

Sunday, 29 June 2008

'... "Dear Viracocha, Buddha, Osiris, Isis, Zeus, Allah, Jehovah, Shiva, Humbaba, Zabalon and the rest, What is it that you want me to do? Just what is it? Yours expectantly, Rosa."

Boyd Tonkin: A Week in Books

Friday, 27 June 2008

As Queen, Shirley Bassey and (doctors permitting) Amy Winehouse line up in Hyde Park to serenade Nelson Mandela, the bland pieties of politics, showbiz and the media hide history from our eyes. You might imagine from all the Mandela hagiography that no one on these shores ever believed that South African apartheid could be justified. Yet the system profited from an elite squadron of friends in high places. Its suave apologists, until the late 1980s, stretched from the boardrooms of City banks to the Cabinet table of Margaret Thatcher.