Jeremy Paxman has written an excellent book, but it is not the book that he set out to write. His central argument is that, since the empire had a formative influence on modern India, it must also have had a formative influence on modern Britain. If it influenced the colonised, it must have influenced the
A book about a campaign to rid the world of malaria may not sound like a riveting read and Lifeblood is an unlikely page-turner. But you are soon caught up in the challenges of the campaign and, along the way, you learn a great deal about the labyrinthine world of aid, Africa, business and politics.
I should hesitate in any circumstances to compare myself with Marcel Proust; but on opening this marvellous book I knew exactly how he felt with that madeleine. My father was appointed Ambassador to France in 1944, moving in a few weeks after the Liberation of Paris; thus it was that from Christmas of that year
In her foreword to this short study of Virginia Woolf, Alexandra Harris writes that ‘it is meant as a first port of call for those new to Woolf and as an enticement to read more’. There is some justification for such a book — a synthesis giving the outline of Woolf’s life with pertinent interpretative
The ghost stalking this selection is Martin Amis’s father, Kingsley, who, Martin tells us in his introduction, ‘loved Philip with a near-physical passion’, and mused: ‘I sometimes wonder if I ever really knew him.’ Ruth Bowman, to whom Philip Larkin was engaged in the late 1940s, remembers that Kingsley was ‘possessive of Philip and tried
What’s not to like about Candida Lycett Green’s Seaside Resorts (Oldie Publications, £14.99)? Lovely colour photographs of over 100 of England’s prettiest seaside towns, accompanied by spry, architecturally informed little essays that give the reader the gist of each place: if there’s a better book to give for Christmas published this autumn, I’d like to
It is difficult to conceive of a writer more passionately loved by his audience than Dickens was. It went on for a very long time, too. We learn from the historian David Kynaston that, immediately after the second world war, Dickens was one of the five most borrowed authors from public libraries. My grandmother was
At long last Johnson Studies is starting to take off. It had always been my hope, after publishing my own slim volume on Boris Johnson, that the baton could be passed to younger and fitter hands who would place the subject on a proper academic footing. Scholars from Balliol to Bangor would churn out papers
‘Oh no! I’m keeping it for an officer,’ said a girl called Irma when the 17-year-old Alistair Horne made his first determined moves. ‘Oh no! I’m keeping it for an officer,’ said a girl called Irma when the 17-year-old Alistair Horne made his first determined moves. A little later Horne was being trained as a
In the summer of 1780, at the height of the Gordon Riots, a London mob raised a cry of ‘kill the lawyers’ and headed for the Inns of Court. In the summer of 1780, at the height of the Gordon Riots, a London mob raised a cry of ‘kill the lawyers’ and headed for the
This book is about the fate of 230 French women sent to the German concentration camps in January 1943. Arrested as members of the Resistance, they first went to Auschwitz before being transferred to Ravensbrück and Mauthausen as the Allies advanced. In Auschwitz they witnessed some of the most terrible scenes in human history. Only
She was less bitchy than extremely shrewd and sharp-eyed, and didn’t hesitate to say about people exactly what she felt — though she did, I think, sometimes choose frightful people to munch up. . . She was less bitchy than extremely shrewd and sharp-eyed, and didn’t hesitate to say about people exactly what she felt
This is a compelling and somewhat disturbing novel, conducted with Susan Hill’s customary fluency. This is a compelling and somewhat disturbing novel, conducted with Susan Hill’s customary fluency. It features Simon Serailler, the author’s usual protagonist, investigating a cold case of a missing teenager who was last seen waiting at a bus stop some 16
Labels mislead. In the taxonomy of literature, both James Sallis and Agatha Christie are often described as crime writers. True, they have in common the fact that their stories tend to include the occasional murder, but there the resemblance ends. Sallis’s outlook is closer to that of Samuel Beckett, whom he cites as one of
There is an old joke which says that if you are lost in the desert, start making a salad dressing as someone will pop out of a sand dune and tell you that you are making it the wrong way. This, in essence, is what Felicity Cloake does in her recipe book Perfect (Fig Tree,
Jonathan Sumption admires the sweep and bravura of Max Hastings’s account without agreeing with every word The second world war is still generally regarded as the ‘good war’. In the moral balance, the cause of the Axis powers was so unspeakably bad that their adversaries have rarely had to justify themselves. But there is, perhaps,
There is something of Gordon Brown in the older Henry VII: an impression of darkness, of paranoia and barely suppressed rage, not to mention the terrifying tax grabs and tormenting of enemies. But Gordon was never quite as entertaining, or frightening, as Thomas Penn’s Winter King in this brilliant mash-up of gothic horror and political
David Bellos is a professor of comparative literature. He is the main English translator of George Perec and Ismail Kadare, and he has written biographies of Perec, Jacques Tati and the French writer and con man Romain Gary. His most recent book, for which he draws on all his wide range of interests, is a
Even the cover is a mystery. Julian Assange’s memoir carries a contradictory, if eye-catching, title: the unauthorised autobiography. On his WikiLeaks site the author disclaims authorship altogether. ‘I am not “the writer” of this book. I own the copyright of the manuscript which was written by Andrew O’Hagan.’ He claims that the text was ‘distributed
There lived a happy Coelacanth In dim, primordial seas; He ate and mated, hunted, slept, Completely at his ease. Dame Nature urged: ‘Evolve!’ He said: ‘Excuse me, Ma’am, You get on with making Darwin, I’m staying as I am.’ Horace Shipp’s little hymn to the ‘living fossil’ fish-with-legs — thought long extinct then astonishingly discovered