This is a giant Teutonic forest of a book, to be progressed through with determination as if by seasoned infantry; it is as far as biography can get from a Viennese waltz. But it has its rewards. It is a very extensive and well-researched chronicle of the subject’s monumental career — 39 years as foreign
Dear Life arrives at a time when the public appetite for the personal accounts of medical insiders shows no sign of abating, with scores of such books having been published in recent years. Their enduring popularity is often — and, arguably, best — characterised as a kind of literary fallout from a decade of austerity
For those of us with nagging doubts about the value of literary biography, books that show the biographer at work — a genre with a solid pedigree — exert a peculiar and not entirely healthy fascination. We traipse through the sausage factory feeling sick to our stomachs yet weirdly hankering for a bite of the
Between 1923 and 1931 the publisher Routledge produced ‘Today and Tomorrow’, a series of 110 short books by intellectual luminaries of the time who were asked to imagine the future 50 to 100 years hence. The writers included Bertrand Russell, his wife Dora, J.B.S. Haldane, C.E.M. Joad, Sylvia Pankhurst, Robert Graves, Winifred Holtby, Basil Liddell
Lizzie, the narrator of Jenny Offill’s impressive third novel Weather, is ‘enmeshed’ with her brother, according to her psychologist-cum-meditation teacher. The word ‘mesh’ returns a few pages later, in a podcast, referring to the interconnectedness of different species: ‘a better term than “web”, they think’. With its paradoxical meaning of both containing spaces and joining
This is a very nuanced and subtle novel by Philip Hensher, which manages the highwire act of treating its characters with affection and anger at one and the same time. Politically, ethically and emotionally it places the reader in a kind of vertigo by addressing a singular moral question: is it better to be steadfast
The insomniac may come to dread the night’s solitude, but the next day poses the greater challenge. That’s when you are obliged to walk among the rested population and pass for one of them, when in truth most interactions are conducted in a state of self-doubting confusion; when harnessing one’s thoughts is like grabbing at
Kapka Kassabova’s previous travel book, Border, was rightly acclaimed and won several prizes. The author travelled to the edge of Europe, between Greece, Bulgaria and Turkey, and teased out ‘where something like Europe begins and something else ends, which isn’t quite Asia’. This is a sequel of sorts. She now travels to another border, that
There is a vogue at the moment for books which use art as a vehicle for examining the writer’s wider life and interests. Toby Ferris will certainly not have seen this as in any way an autobiography, but what it essentially does is use a quest for the 42 surviving paintings by Pieter Bruegel the
Of the many bleak moments that have lodged in my mind since reading this extraordinary book the most unshakeable is the image of the once dignified Otto Neumann, walking to his death in torrential rain, with black shoe polish running down his face and into his eyes. Thus was his fate sealed as the silver
Actress is the novel Anne Enright has been rehearsing since her first collection of stories, The Portable Virgin (1991). It is a perfect jewel of a book, a dark emerald set in the Irish laureate’s fictional tiara, alongside her Man Booker Prize winner The Gathering (2007) and The Green Road (2015). Its brilliance is complex
When an American describes a woman as wearing a ‘Park Avenue Helmet’ you know exactly what is meant. This is a hairdo so precise and sculpted that it trembles, category-wise, between coiffure and armour. Both natural and artificial, it also accurately signals social status. The link between hats, hair and caste was first made by
Georgina Landemare cooked for the Churchill family in all their kitchens, during the 1930s and 1940s. She got as close to the inner workings of the prime ministerial stomach as it was possible to get for a non-family member. At Admiralty House, Chartwell, Chequers, Downing Street and even in the hastily put-up fitted kitchen in
What compelled three well-known British writers to leave their homes and travel 6,000 miles to participate in a nasty late-19th-century conflict in the far-off South African veldt? This question lies at the heart of Sarah Lefanu’s excellent analysis of how Rudyard Kipling, Arthur Conan Doyle and Mary Kingsley found themselves following the flag in Britain’s
In 1935 the troops of Benito Mussolini’s sinister-clownish Roman Empire II invaded Ethiopia, in large part out of spite for Italy’s embarrassing defeat there 40 years earlier. Initially largely uncontested — thanks both to Emperor Haile Selassie’s desperate faith in international brotherhood and to a hearty dose of Quislingism from his leading nobles — when
Way back in 1996 Norman E. Sjoman published a book called The Yoga Tradition of the Mysore Palace, in which he contested that much of what we now (in the West) consider to be yoga — a practice apparently steeped in millennia of ancient Indian tradition — is actually a veritable hotchpotch of disparate influences,
In the world of classic cars, barn-finds sometimes do occur. An old Mercedes Gullwing might be discovered under tarps and hay on a farm somewhere in Florida, say, or an E-type Jag exhumed from out-buildings in Norfolk. Such discoveries are relatively rare, yet news of them reaches far beyond specialist magazines and websites for one
Although widely read in her native Hungary, Magda Szabó, who died in 2007, did not gain international acclaim until the mid-1990s with the translations of her novels The Door and Katalin Street. Abigail, which was originally published in 1970 and is her best-known book, now appears in English for the first time in a superb
In one of the most frequently quoted lines of post-war European cinema, a character in the 1976 Wim Wenders film Kings of the Road remarks that ‘the Yanks have colonised our subconscious’ (‘Die Amis haben unser Unterbewusstsein kolonialisiert’). The Hollywood film, a powerful weapon broadcasting this almost mythological vision of American culture around the world,
Does a practical joke differ from a hoax? It could be a matter of scale. Anyone can deploy a whoopee cushion, but it takes rather more — as Virginia Woolf and others did, long before Ali G — to kit oneself out as Abyssinian royalty for a 1910 state visit by train to the deck