The phrase of the last US president that is least missed today – and there are many candidates – may be the one celebrating ‘clean, beautiful coal’. Keith Fisher will probably not forgive me for saying that his new book brings to mind a similarly oxymoronic statement about oil. In his survey of every appearance of the stuff in world history and literature from the time of the Babylonians to the early 20th century – which reads like a grand Google... read more

Covid finally caught up with us in Venice, though I reckon we caught it on the Eurostar. Mostly the week was spent cancelling the restaurants we’d booked as a reward for three years of missed holidays. The only reservation we managed to keep was the first and priciest, at a bleakly cool stunt-food outlet which had just won its first star and wasn’t going to let you forget it. There was a lot of swallowing hard and pretending to be rich. Isn’t it clever the way the snail chutney cuts the rabbit lung parfait? No, you’re right, it’s horrible. There was no foam or aerosolised soup, but at one... read more

She was daughter, sister, wife or mother to five kings and two queens. On her wedding day, her pale blue velvet train was ostensibly held by three princesses of the blood, but so heavily encrusted was it with golden embroidery that a man had to walk concealed beneath it to carry the weight. Such a start in life might seem to presage a pleasant existence of leisure and luxury, but the career of Henrietta Maria, a Bourbon princess by birth and a Stuart queen by... read more

In a landmark essay on the Englishness of Elgar, published in 1986, Jeremy Crump asked that before we transport ourselves from our high-tech suburban sound systems into the Malvern Hills ‘in the golden glow of a late imperial afternoon’, we might spend a moment reflecting on ‘how it is that a complex series of sound patterns has so specific and literary a ... read more

Many will enjoy The Last Colony and it will undoubtedly sell well. It might also be nominated for prizes, as was Philippe Sands’s East West Street. That earlier book blended the author’s personal exploration of family history with a study of two of the most impactful contributors to the history of international law, Hersch Lauterpacht and Raphael Lemkin, and the concepts that they... read more

Basil Cheesman Bunting was one of literature’s great dodgers. A Northumbrian Quaker, he was born in 1900 and enjoyed a largely undocumented childhood before registering as a conscientious objector in 1918, earning himself a year in prison. Gravitating to Paris, he fell under the spell of Ezra Pound and dabbled in reviewing before a drunken assault on some gendarmes landed him in prison again. As he read François Villon in his cell, having... read more