Steve Donoghue’s posts from the original Open Letters Monthly Archives.
Our book today is The Other Nile, a slim, somewhat fey travelogue written in 1986 by Charlie Pye-Smith about his travels down the Nile through Egypt, the Sudan, and Ethiopia. The book is evocative as all travel-writing should be; the author is forever describing things that are being overtaken by other things – his book […]
Read MoreIn time for the 200th anniversary of the Battle of Waterloo comes the concluding volume in Rory Muir's magisterial biography of the battle's victor, the Duke of Wellington
Read MoreOur book today is The Last Ship by William Brinkley, a 1988 exponent of the whole sub-genre of military techno-fiction Tom Clancy had created virtually from scratch four years earlier with The Hunt for Red October – but also an exponent of a much older sci-fi tradition: the post-apocalyptic survival-story, along the lines of Alas, […]
Read MoreThe enigmatic and compelling aristocratic author Vita Sackville-West is the subject of an approachable new biography
Read MoreReading the cover story of the latest Harper’s, David Bromwich’s magisterial, damning assessment of the Obama presidency, certainly did no wonders for my lunch-time digestion. Just the first paragraph reads like a cold halibut across the face: Any summing-up of the Obama presidency is sure to find a major obstacle in the elusiveness of the […]
Read MoreCelebrated biographer H. W. Brands has written the first full-dress of Ronald Reagan since the former president's death in 2004 - but does Reagan elude him, as he has so many biographers? Steve Donoghue reviews.
Read MoreThis is a place for all of my writing about books.