Alan Judd’s latest spy novel, ‘Queen & Country’, is published by Simon&Schuster.
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There’s a fascinating new book about a man with a passion for a house which he lost and regained, brick by red Jacobean brick. The house was Thrumpton in Nottinghamshire, its devotee the late George Seymour, a complex man whose daughter, novelist and biographer Miranda Seymour, tells all with elegance and insight in In My
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Chugging up the drive to a friend’s shoot in the ancient Land Rover, the first two guns I saw were men of about six feet seven. My immediate thought was that all the guns, bar me, had been chosen for their height. If so, the line would look pretty impressive until it reached a mere
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The car manufacturer of the year has to be JCB. I’ve long wanted one, of course, and it’s not hard to find them in the local classifieds. What is hard, for we unlucky enough not to be digger drivers, is to know what you’re buying. It’s not only the nomenclature — what exactly is a
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Ford recently declared losses of £3 billion in three months and is to ‘restate’ its earnings since 2001. According to my (failed) eleven-plus maths, that’s around £30 million a day. How long can any company survive such haemorrhaging? All right, it includes one-off job-shedding and writing-down asset costs, with provisions for restructuring and 30,000 redundancies.
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The late Leonard Setright was a rightly admired, genuinely idio- syncratic, provocatively pedantic and engagingly discursive motoring writer who loved any excuse to show off his Latin or to get Milton, Mozart or Ecclesiastes into a car column. He relished his reputation for having been quoted more often than anyone else in Private Eye’s Pseuds’
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We don’t often get second chances. Education, the direction of your career, first love, life itself — they’re none of them dress rehearsals, unless you’re lucky with the first two. And if they were, would we do any better? Best not ask. That’s one reason why it’s always so much more cheering to think about
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Am I an anorak? An uncomfortable thought, like discovering that some feature you had never noticed in yourself — your Adam’s apple, perhaps, or your ears — is what people always remember about you. I wore an anorak, long ago during my teenage motor-scooter period. That comprised Lambretta 1, which cost £8, was a slow
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Since its launch in 1989, Land-Rover’s popular Discovery has demonstrated that critical issues for motoring correspondents, such as handling and reliability, count for little when it comes to looks, comfort, usability and aspirations. Actually, that’s a little hard on the dear old Disco of that era. The V8 petrol version performed well and, although the
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There died last month the doyen of British motoring writers, an idiosyncratic, eloquent, deeply informed, erudite enthusiast: L.J.K. Setright. A bearded patrician, elegant and opinionated, intolerant of fools, mysterious and forbidding, his detestation of speed limits was as passionate as his fondness for strong Sobranie cigarettes (he died at 74). His style varied from the
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I once considered attempting a biography of Siegfried Sassoon. Having now read Max Egremont’s comprehensive and perceptive book, based partly on access to private papers unavailable to previous biographers, I’m relieved I didn’t. Egremont has produced a thorough, sympathetic, balanced, engrossing account. There are two aspects to the 1886-1967 life of Captain Siegfried Sassoon, MC
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It’s often said that the best time to sell your convertible is during good summer weather. This may be so; or it may be one of those self-sustaining beliefs that appears true because so many sellers act on it, i.e., more rag-tops are sold because more are for sale. There’s no doubt, however, that hot
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While Rover sank (it was warned, twice, in this column), another car was launched, in Venice. An amphibian? No, a Bentley. Perhaps because it rarely advertises, Bentley’s car launches are like no other. Each is divided into three- to four-day segments designed for different audiences. The basis is driving and learning about the car, with
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In 1850 when William Melville was born in Sneem, Co. Kerry, there was no British secret service. There was the Secret Vote, used by the Foreign Office to pay the pensions of retired agents, code-breakers and letter-openers and as an embassy slush fund; and there were intelligence departments of the War Office and the Admiralty
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Years ago, when the Times was a newspaper for grown-ups, it was said to have published a letter illustrative of our misuse of statistics. This was to the effect that there were about 3 million people in Wales, of whom about 3,000 had one leg and 300 no legs at all. Thus, the ‘average’ number
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It’s hard to find an exciting biographical subject who has not been done and on whom sufficient unpublished papers and records exist (not to mention alluring photographs). By good fortune, persistence and enthusiasm, Miranda Seymour has done just that with Hélène Delangle. Who she? Well, she was born in 1900 (her preferred date was 1905)
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The theme of Henry James’s The Aspern Papers is well known: an unscrupulous biographer seeks the unpublished papers of his subject, a long-dead poet, through the cultivation of the poet’s former mistress, a forgotten old lady living with her spinster niece in Venice. He insinuates himself into the household, leading the niece to hope for
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Prominent in any contemporary dictionary of received opinion should be the assumption that all terrorism has ‘root causes’ that render violence ‘understandable’ because the aggrieved have ‘no alternative’. It comes with all the shock and invigoration of a cold bath to find someone arguing against this contemporary shibboleth. Alan Dershowitz believes that the assumption of