I wanted to build a gate for the souk as a permanent gift from the [Coalition Provisional Authority] to Amara, so that there would be at least one enduring trace of our presence. We discussed this with the governor, showed him photographs of traditional souk gates from Egypt to Kuwait, and suggested a competition for [...]
Entries Tagged as ‘books’
13 September 2009
On Richard Overy’s ‘The Morbid Age’
The research, erudition, earnestness and effort that went into Richard Overy’s The Morbid Age: Britain Between the Wars might well have made up three or four striking and worthwhile books. Instead Overy has given a single volume, 521 pages long, in many ways highly unsatisfactory.
In The Morbid Age, Overy seeks to demonstrate that in Britain [...]
3 September 2009
Blasting & Blessing: a back to school edition
Well, that all went quickly, didn’t it?
Yesterday was the first day of the Michaelmas quarter at my son’s school. Hence summer is, for all practical purposes, already receding into the realms of fast-fading memory, at least in this household — cue that much-loved season of mists and mellow fruitfulness, coupled with the novelty of being [...]
10 May 2009
Dilapidated or just complicated? ‘The Roman Forum’ by David Watkin
A few sentences into David Watkin’s The Roman Forum, notice is served that this will be no ordinary guidebook. The first paragraph establishes a tone that will persist throughout:
“The Roman Forum is one of the most famous of all historic sites, the heart of the ancient city, the hub of the Roman empire, the goal [...]
28 January 2009
A few thoughts about John Updike
John Updike is dead.
Here in Britain, reaction has been minimal, at least in comparison with the supersized literary obsequies laid on for e.g. the late Norman Mailer and Kurt Vonnegut. But then the sort of lower-middlebrow British person who ‘loves books’ — less, it must be said, as minor distraction from real things than as [...]
22 March 2008
Briefly Noted: Sukhdev Sandhu’s Night Haunts
Why write yet another book about London? Why buy one? Why read it once it’s been bought?
The most obviously unusual thing about Sukhdev Sandhu’s Night Haunts: A journey through the London night (2007) is that it’s very small — running to a mere 140 pages, not all of them covered in prose — that it [...]
31 October 2005
Babies by the book: a personal journey through the literature of parenting
This article first appeared on 31 October 2005 on the website of the Social Affairs Unit
As with most things in life that ought by rights to come naturally, yet somehow don’t — radiant health, sustaining relationships, happiness, the speedy creation of sophisticated yet effortless-looking dinners for eight and so forth — there are lots of [...]
