Literature
All the Nice Girls Love a Poet
The latest literary biopic, The Edge of Love, presents Dylan Thomas as a dreary boorish philanderer, not a great writer
Not a Clash of Civilisations
Worlds at War: The 2,500-Year Struggle between East and West by Anthony Pagden
The Art of Being English
Cold Cream by Ferdinand Mount
Something Wicked This Way Comes
The Standing Pool by Adam Thorpe
Ian Fleming
No novelist since Stevenson imparts so much energy into simple-seeming sentences through inch-perfect phrasing and punctuation
John le Carré
Anti-American sarcasm has crept into his work like a cancer, eating away at its integrity
Why Remoaners should back Boris
“Boris, ironically, now offers Remoaners the best chance of a soft Brexit, or at least a sensible one. And to those who want a second referendum—’the people’s vote’—there may even be a chance of that too.”
On the road
“In the summer of 1980, in the grip of some Kerouac-ish fantasy, I opted to hitch-hike from Laredo to New York”
Discovering the Great War of China
A third of a million Chinese labourers helped the Allies defeat the Kaiser, but their huge unsung contribution ended in betrayal