Gulliver’s travails
Gekoski focuses the protagonist’s nightmarish vilification around the career and writings of Jonathan Swift
Vintage volume: The Story of Wine
The story of wine is a glorious story which illuminates the topics of more conventional histories
Shakespearean lore and order
A new anthology displays Shakespeare’s engagement with the sonnet form across his career, but at a high cost
Vinous Valhalla
David Womersley reveres Roger Scruton on wine
A keen nose and sharp prose
David Womersley reviews Waugh on Wine by Auberon Waugh
The Man who saved the firm
The Duke of Edinburgh’s genius was to ensure that the more the Royal family changed, the more it appeared to remain the same
Whitehall takes the knee
When the MoD’s top man signs off with a BLM hashtag it’s a brave official who doesn’t get the message
Policing the far Left
Emma Webb says the police are damned if the do, but even more damned in the long run if they don’t
Cheques and balances
John Self says that while writing has always been seen as a vocation, the characters many authors care most about are the ones printed on their royalty statements
The Spectre of Totalitarianism
The worst offenders in the new climate of intolerance are our universities
I’m afraid of Americans
The culture war is not left against right, but the US against everyone else
A kind of loving
Lincoln Allison is moved by a cache of his father’s wartime love letters and what they reveal about conflict, his parents’ relationship — and a huge generational chasm
The problem with adapting classic novels
Following the letdown of the new adaptation of The Pursuit of Love, Alexander Larman says that TV dramatisations of classic novels haven’t always been this bad
The Police Bill isn’t the threat to democracy the Left say it is
If you’re looking for the enemies of free speech, you’re looking the wrong way, argues Robert Poll
Sporting life
This biography on Sir Stanley Rous and sport in the twentieth century is scholarly, balanced and well-written, says Lincoln Allison