Departure(s), whose publication co-incides with Julian Barnes’s 80th birthday, will be his last book, a thank you and goodbye to his readers. Barnes has blood cancer, but the condition is manageable and not terminal; when he dies, it will be with, and not of, the disease. Or rather, as he puts it: ‘I, in dying,
What did David Bowie mean by ‘No confessions/ No religion’ in his lyrics to ‘Modern Love’? Peter Ormerod proposes what at first seems an unlikely theory – that Bowie was talking about Gnosticism, the complex spiritual, though not religious, belief that God lies beyond the material world and that all humans carry a divine spark
If Carlo Scarpa were as well known as Le Corbusier, modernism might not be so reviled. This architetto poeta grew up in Vicenza, whose 21 buildings by Palladio surely had a formative influence on his fast- evolving artistic intelligence. Scarpa studied building design at university, but, instinctively disobedient, never bothered with a licence to practise
I once interviewed the late Enoch Powell for this magazine (the article never appeared, for reasons I forget). One thing he said on that occasion stuck with me. He remarked that loyalty to one’s country should be unconditional. I asked him what he thought people should do if their country were taken over by a
When John Updike died in 2009, aged 76, he left behind the last great paper trail. Novelist, short story writer, poet, essayist and art critic, he published with unstoppable fluidity in every genre. The sheer tonnage of his 60-odd books has now been augmented by A Life in Letters, a comparatively small sampling of the
Can there really be any point in yet another fat book about one of the Mitford sisters? Their antics have been appearing in print since the late 1940s, when the eldest – clever, waspish Nancy – displayed their family eccentricities in her sparkling novel The Pursuit of Love. Since then, by a rough count, there
Simon Winchester has found an excellent subject. While invisible, wind makes itself apparent through its effect on other things. This may mean flying detritus, scudding clouds and the rustle of foliage; or it may mean the ways in which it irresistibly alters and directs larger movements in society and culture. Much of the history of
Religious conversions do not, for the most part, make for good anecdotes. An exception can be found in Patricia Lockwood’s memoir Priestdaddy, which describes the author’s father Greg’s road to Damascus experience in a nuclear submarine off the coast of Norway, where he watched The Exorcist 72 times: That eerie, pea-soup light was pouring down,
Philip Hensher I have a theory that Mick Herron’s Slow Horses novels are an ingenious variation on Shakespeare’s Henry IV plays. If, in a future episode, River Cartwright ascends to his kingdom renouncing Jackson Lamb, and if Catherine tells us of Jackson/Falstaff’s death offstage, don’t be surprised. In any case, Clown Town (Baskerville, £22) is
Antony Beevor In Captives and Companions (Allen Lane, £35), Justin Marozzi has brought together a scholarly yet vivid history of slavery in the Islamic world in all its varied forms. Everything is covered, from the former slaves recruited by the Prophet, who achieved immense influence, to agricultural slavery, military conscription with Mamluks and Janissaries, the
The Delft painter Johannes Vermeer, now probably the most beloved artist of the Dutch Golden Age, had an unusual career. His reputation in his lifetime was small. For some reason he painted almost exclusively for the van Ruijvens, so only those who knew the family would have been able to view much of the work.
Thomas Pynchon is so well known for being out of the public eye that he often seems to be hiding in plain sight, much like Edgar Allan Poe’s ‘purloined letter’. He is famous for avoiding the camera and the few extant photos of him – especially one from his high school yearbook – are paraded
Irreverent, outspoken and unfailingly opinionated, with knowledge as broad as his vocabulary, Robin Holloway is exactly the person you’d want to sit next to at a concert. The warmest of interval chardonnays would spontaneously chill and fizz at his exhilarating put-downs; the music would be brighter, clearer and more compelling for his idiosyncratic analysis. But
This is a treasure house of a book, filled with curiosities and evidence of a rare breadth of patient investigation. Anyone who has read one of Graham Robb’s books, from his early biographies of classic French writers, through a wonderfully amusing study of 19th-century homosexuals, to a series of historical and geographical studies of France
Edward FitzGerald had a good story about rowing across Lake Windermere at the end of May 1835 with his old friend Alfred Tennyson. As they rested on their oars and gazed into the clear, still water, Tennyson recited some lines from his work in progress, ‘Morte d’Arthur’, describing how the Lady of the Lake fashioned
Slavery was – and importantly continues to be – a moral abomination. Its existence in the 21st century is a disgrace. Whole communities such as the Uighurs are subject to forced labour; two years ago it was estimated that 5.8 million people were living in slavery in China. And slavery is a problem much closer
‘If Eve had had a spade in paradise, we should not have had all that sad business with the apple,’ claims the narrator of the novel Elizabeth and her German Garden (1898). The author, Mary Annette Beauchamp, eventually adopted the pen name Elizabeth von Arnim, merging her identity with the fictional character she had created.
In October 2018, Andrew Hussey, the convivial and courageous observer and analyst of the political and social travails of modern France, was cycling back to his office after lunch through the rather staid and un-bohemian environs of the Boulevard Raspail on the Left Bank in Paris. To the ‘middle-aged man who already has a heart
Stephen Greenblatt tells the story of being approached in the 1990s by a screenwriter who wanted to make a Shakespeare -biopic. Greenblatt repeatedly told him to forget Shakespeare and look instead at his predecessor Christopher Marlowe. The screenwriter knew what he was about and ignored Greenblatt’s advice – the result was Shakespeare in Love. The
Few among Muriel Spark’s circle of friends would have disputed the judgment of Storm Jameson when recommending Spark to the publisher Blanche Knopf in 1963: ‘I warn you, or remind you, that you are taking on a tartar. She has worn out two Macmillan directors already.’ Even tartars are forgiven, however, when they exhibit a
