“I think my mother’s death is the best thing to happen to me since ... well, since my father’s death,” the hero of this novel, Patrick Melrose, acerbically remarks to a friend on the day of the funeral of his mother, Eleanor. It’s a measure of Edward St.

So it requires a slight feat of memory to recall a time when Christopher wasn’t the celebrity “Hitch” but an unknown young, ambitious aspiring journalist just down from Oxford. Sometime in the early 1970s, Frank Johnson, later editor of the British Spect

The second-highest-rated show on Super Bowl Sunday, “Downton Abbey,” aired its season finale last night. The Crawley family drama has captivated audiences on both sides of the Atlantic and sparked an interest in other shows from across the pond. Below ar

When Ivana Lowell was asked by Lucian Freud to sit for him, to her surprise, her normally remarkably laissez-faire mother, Caroline Blackwood, was adamantly opposed. "You are never going to sit for him," Ivana recalls her mother saying. For good measure

There is nothing worse than a book funk, those dreaded times where no matter what you might have on your bookshelves/at the library/in the local charity shop nothing, but nothing, seems to tempt you. Thank goodness then for friends’ bookshelves, as spott

The pretty pink tin of Yardley of London's English rose talc would nestle nicely onto Lady Mary’s dressing table. SUPPLIED PHOTO My slavish devotion to the television drama series Downton Abbey knows no bounds. The seeds of my great English country home

It is perhaps useful to remind visitors to Tate Britain's new exhibition, Picasso and Modern British Art, just how long ago Picasso was and how, in this particular context, the term Modern British is stretched to embrace the full century from Duncan Gran

Feb. 16 (Bloomberg) -- If he happened to meet Picasso walking down the road, Winston Churchill once disclosed, he planned to give him a kick in the rear. This encounter never occurred. Churchill’s attitude, though, was representative of one British respo

In-Flight Entertainment Stories by Helen Simpson Hardcover, 165 pages | purchase close Purchase Featured Books In-Flight Entertainment Stories Helen Simpson Amazon » Independent Booksellers » Your purchase helps support NPR Programming. How? Fiction More

Ed Goldman, president of Goldman Communications Inc. , is a Sacramento writer and marketing consultant. Anglo Files — KVIE-TV Channel 6 is throwing a $150-per-person fundraiser/party this coming Sunday from 4-6 p.m. to celebrate the season finale of Downt

How many good novels about cricket are there? Sarah Crompton remarked the other day that American novelists are more likely to write about baseball than English ones about cricket. “Don’t mention 'The Go-Between'”, she quite rightly said, because the cri

Patrick J. Ryan, S.J. , the Laurence J. McGinley Professor of Religion and Society at Fordham University, has spent about half his life as a Jesuit priest working mostly in Nigeria and Ghana. Ayaan Hirsi Ali must be the only atheist ex-Muslim scholar at t

Ayaan Hirsi Ali must be the only atheist ex-Muslim scholar at the American Enterprise Institute, a conservative think tank in Washington DC. Originally from Somalia, the most dysfunctional state in contemporary Africa, Hirsi Ali is best known in the US f

Guillermo del Toro, long attached to produce a new version of "Beauty and the Beast" for Warner Bros. , has signed on to direct the movie, TheWrap has confirmed. Andrew Davies, who adapted Evelyn Waugh's "Brideshead Revisited," Alexander Dumas' "The Three

Guillermo del Toro, long attached to produce a new version of "Beauty and the Beast" for Warner Bros. , has signed on to direct the movie, TheWrap has confirmed. Andrew Davies, who adapted Evelyn Waugh's "Brideshead Revisited," Alexander Dumas' "The Three

In an undated handout picture released by TMC – NBC Universal on December 8, 2011 British actress Michelle Dockery (R) playing Lady Mary Crawley and actor Dan Stevens (L) in his role as Matthew Crawley pose on the set of hit British television series Dow

Théodore Beauchesne couldn't have been more wrong. His words would sound absurdly optimistic for decades to come. Picasso had not yet shown any of his Cubist paintings on British shores, but when he did, five years later in 1910, they were met with hilar

Though he was obsessed with the late Graham Greene, Pico Iyer, author of The Man Within My Head, never actually met the novelist. It was just as well. Better to keep the man within your head, when you're obsessed like that. Iyer, a well-known cultural jo

Writer Salman Rushdie attends an event in the Joan Fuster state library in Barcelona, March 31, 2009. (Credit: ©Gustau Nacarino / Reuters) Plates and glasses are cleared away, and a hush descends on the packed private dining room of a fancy Manhattan Ind