I am on the look out for misuse of words and grammar. It was a pleasure to find Bill Bryson’s very good literary style books (they are his only interesting output, surely?). Read more ›

In my earlier post on Rick Perlstein’s Nixonland I sort of conveyed the book’s message but I didn’t trouble to get across how good the book is, or tackle the way it describes how the voting went in the 1972 Nixon/McGovern election. It matters because Perlstein says some of the same factors are still at work, though plenty aren’t. Read more ›

Actually, as a celibate male, I don’t like Nazi sex. Or perhaps I should say: I’ve never had it so I wouldn’t know. But I do think it’s important to defend people’s sexual fantasies. I’ll go further. I think right-minded people need to stand by people who like Nazi sex. One should stand with them in their liking it. Read more ›

I imagine married men find Francesco da Mosto rather tiresome. He purrs and growls like a muscular old tabby cat - obviously one well-used to prowling the alleys of his native Venice. And used, too, one somehow supposes, to having his way with female felines. Good territory for a bit of jealousy, then. In my own case, I envy much of his solo life, as in his new TV series Francesco’s Mediterranean Voyage. Read more ›

If you liked Donald Draper in Madmen, maybe you should like poor old Richard Nixon. After all, a big bit of that brilliant show was to do with Don’s work for Nixon in the 1960 election which saw John F Kennedy elected. Don seemed to feel that whatever you felt about Nixon, his was a classic American poor-boy story of the kind voters ought to be able to identify with. Not so JFK, with his silver spoon. In Nixonland, Rick Perlstein fleshes out this picture. Read more ›

Barry Goldwater, handsome, manly, outspoken. Just the character we could do with in politics today. Yet forty years ago, he was a bogeyman for my generation. So it did me a lot of good to read Pure Goldwater, an anthology of the great man’s own, mostly informal, writing. Read more ›

This would be a great novel if all it did was add to the heap of comic writing about Jewishness. But Gary Shteyngart’s Absurdistan scores many times over by taking us - breathless, gob-smacked - from the nouveau-riche world of glamorous, dodgy Moscow and on out to the staggeringly vibrant, but staggering, world of the ex-Soviet republics. Read more ›