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Caption: European Roller (Coracias garrulus); from Ferdinand Bauer's Remarkable Birds by Jonathan Elphick (240pp. Bodleian Library. 50 [pounds [...]

I was travelling in a lorry recently with a bloke who had a teardrop tattoo under his eye. When I asked if this meant he'd murdered someone --as the urban [...]

Patricia Highsmith was on holiday in Positano in the early 1950s when she 'noticed a solitary young man in shorts and sandals with a towel flung over his shoulder. There [...]

I have been avidly, honestly, avidly, reading the manifestos. Promises, promises, plans, commitments, pledges and visions of the future. I'm an absolute sucker for a manifesto, and I just love [...]

ART PETER CARTY 280pp. Pegasus. Paperback, 10.99 [pounds sterling]. Peter Carty is a journalist who writes about art and culture for various newspapers and magazines; you will doubtless have read [...]

HEADSHOT RITA BULLWINKEL 256pp. Daunt. Paperback, 9.99 [pounds sterling]. In Headshot, Rita Bullwinkel's debut novel, we follow the fortunes of eight young women Artemis Victor, Andi Taylor, Kate Heffer, Rachel [...]

I'll take my own experience as an example, once again, only because it's convenient. My grandparents were unskilled manual workers who never owned their own homes, but retired in their [...]

Older TLS readers might remember the late, great Caroline Aherne, in the persona of the OAP chat show host Mrs Merton, seeking out the views of her audience on The [...]

One reason to go and get a proper haircut in a proper barber's is that you never quite know where the conversation's going to go, just like at All Souls' [...]

The Margaret Thatcher Foundation makes available on its website a 'Complete list of 8000+ Thatcher statements & texts'. Many of these statements and texts comprise handwritten notes, including those for [...]

LUBLIN MANYA WILKINSON 160pp. And Other Stories. Paperback, 14.99 [pounds sterling]. For once they got it right, the blurbers. Lublin is pitched by its publishers as 'Stand by Me in [...]

SPORTS AND SOCIAL KEVIN BONIFACE 130pp. Bluemoose. Paperback, 12 [pounds sterling]. In a sane world Kevin Boniface would be a household name. He's not: he's a postman in West Yorkshire. [...]

THE BAND U2 will soon be coming to the end of their 'historic' residency at the Las Vegas Sphere, at which they are performing their classic sound-of-the-future album Achtung Baby [...]

At this time of year, in search of some new regulatory mechanism the better to govern ourselves, we might try--I don't know, I'm asking for a friend, obviously--dry January? Or [...]

I didn't buy a book all year. Well, hardly any. Maybe a few. Back in January I decided--my wife decided--that the book-buying would have to stop. There are unread books [...]

The validity and authenticity of voice; the limits of speech and language; questions of origins; access to arenas of discussion and debate; constraints on participation: I wouldn't be the first [...]

The recent Times obituary for Mike Yarwood caught my eye. Speaking about her father, Yarwood's daughter Clare was quoted as saying, 'He was famous from a very young age, so [...]

Last week , 2,800 defence and security suppliers descended on the ExCel arena at the Royal Victoria Dock in London in order to display their wares. DSEI (Defence Security and [...]

I LIVE ABOVE A KEBAB SHOP. Every time I leave the flat I am confronted with the sight and smell of glistening, rotating cones of lamb, chicken and whatever the [...]

I tend to spend a lot of time on buses and trains, going to work, visiting family and friends, and generally rolling around the United Kingdom like some pointless, be-backpacked [...]

CONQUEST NINA ALLAN 320pp. riverrun. 18.99 [pounds sterling]. This is complicated. Imagine a diagram in which there is a set of writers whom everyone's heard of and another set of [...]

This is the time of year when you miss having a garden. I do not have a garden. I used to have a garden. Indeed, there was a brief period, [...]

If you hang around for long enough you eventually bump into famous people--you just do. They might seem different to you and me, they might seem to inhabit other realms [...]

GRIMMISH MICHAEL WINKLER 208pp. Peninsula Press. Paperback, 10.99 [pounds sterling]. GRIMMISH IS 'THE STRANGEST BOOK you are likely to read this year', according to J. M. Coetzee. The author of [...]

VIJAY'S GONE. He was there for twenty-four years and now he's gone. Everything's gone: the papers, the magazines, the display units, the cards, the stationery, the tobacco, the alcohol, the [...]

After a very long time--it is a very long book--I have finished the third and final volume of Simon Heffer's edition of the unexpurgated diaries of Henry 'Chips' Channon, The [...]

Last week I went to Walden again. I hadn't been to Saffron Walden for years. We used to visit Walden on school trips, to wander around and to fill in [...]

You know what IT's like. This is the year. This is going to be the one. This year I've got a plan. This is going to be the year I'll [...]

My father lost his hearing when--well, it depends on which story you choose to believe. It was either when he was a child, swimming in the Thames, from constantly swimming [...]

I MAY OR MAY NOT BE conservative, but I am certainly not a Conservative. But recently, like everyone else, I began to wonder if the Conservatives know what a Conservative [...]

WHEN I WAS YOUNG and beautiful, I used to go running early in the morning. Now that I am in late gnarled middle age, I still go running early in [...]

When I was growing up we had precisely four records in the house: The James Last Album; The Very Best of the Band of H.M. Royal Marines; a double album [...]

FOR THE PAST FEW YEARS my dad has enjoyed burning stuff in an old oil drum in his back garden. It's a hobby. He has others. But perhaps more than [...]

I haven't been to the circus in a very long time. Back home in Ireland we used to take the children every summer to whatever dodgy troupe from eastern Europe [...]

I am meeting a bloke in a pub. He has an idea for a book--can I help? Almost certainly not. But one of the things that happens if you've ever [...]

I WAS AT WORK, so it was my wife who found my parents lying on the bathroom floor. My mother had fallen and my father--panicked and confused --simply lay down [...]

DESIREE BAPTISTE The crapaud we murdered bore no relation to what happened to Rex. But, like the Sanskrit kupamanduka --a proverbial frog in a well--my horizons would be restricted if [...]