An Empty Death (Orion, £18.99) is the second instalment of the series Laura Wilson began with her previous book, the award-winning Stratton’s War. An Empty Death (Orion, £18.99) is the second instalment of the series Laura Wilson began with her previous book, the award-winning Stratton’s War. Time’s moved on to 1944, and Hitler’s doodlebugs are
In the 1950s, when I was 14, I spent a winter fortnight with my parents at the Villa Mauresque, which Somerset Maugham had lent to them to entertain the recently widowed Rab Butler and his daughter, Sarah. It was an uneasy holiday setting for two teenage girls. As I wrote a little apprehensively in my
Delicious is a word that keeps coming to mind as one reads Jane Gardam’s new novel. Delicious is a word that keeps coming to mind as one reads Jane Gardam’s new novel. Delicious and poignant. The 81-year-old author’s mood is elegiac, and so eventually is that of Elizabeth, Betty, the wife of Sir Edward Feathers
Fay Weldon’s new book is told by Frances, Weldon’s imaginary sister — one she would have had if her mother had not had a miscarriage a few years after Weldon was born. Fay Weldon’s new book is told by Frances, Weldon’s imaginary sister — one she would have had if her mother had not had
Kenneth MacMillan was once described as ‘the Francis Bacon of ballet’ — not an analogy that gets one very far, but there’s something in it. Kenneth MacMillan was once described as ‘the Francis Bacon of ballet’ — not an analogy that gets one very far, but there’s something in it. His obsession with victims, outsiders
Is there anything original left to say about Venice? Probably not, but that doesn’t stop the books from coming, tied in, as they mostly now are, with a television series. Is there anything original left to say about Venice? Probably not, but that doesn’t stop the books from coming, tied in, as they mostly now
The English Bar is no longer immune to the celebrity culture. There are lawyers’ equivalents to Hello! magazine and the Oscars ceremony; lists of the 100 most, top ten, five to follow, proliferate. But peer and public recognition do not always coincide. To that rule Michael (or more usually Mike) Mansfield is a notable exception.
Patricia Highsmith, as readers will know, was the author of the upmarket thrillers Strangers on a Train and The Talented Mr Ripley, among others. She was also a keen artist, and illustrated (rather than wrote) the rare book Miranda the Panda is on the Veranda, to text supplied by her friend Doris Sanders. Its pages,
Miranda Carter certainly has a penchant for awkward, often impossible characters. Her fascinating biography of Anthony Blunt explained, as well as anyone could, that strange mixture of aesthete, snob, revolutionary and traitor. Now she turns to the three monarchs who ruled Russia, Germany and Great Britain at the outbreak of the first world war. Nicholas
At the end of his thorough and considered life of William Golding, John Carey remarks that ‘nowadays mention of Lord of the Flies sparks recognition in a way that Golding’s own name does not, or so my admittedly limited market research has indicated.’ Can this really be true? Has Golding’s immense reputation diminished, in the
Noah’s Compass, by Anne Tyler This is Anne Tyler’s seventeenth novel and will be welcomed by her many fans. It will also be familiar, even a little too familiar, to be judged on its own. There is the same Baltimore setting, the same domestic reassurance, the same blameless clueless protagonist, and the same invasive presence
I have read two outstanding books this summer. This is one of them; the other is Summertime by J.M. Coetzee (reviewed on page 42). As I read The Infinities, with its magical, playful richness, its sensuous delight in the power of language to convey the strangeness and beauty of being human, I wondered if J.M.Coetzee
Like Philip Larkin in ‘Posterity’, imagining an American lecturer yawning over his research into an ‘old-type natural fouled-up guy’, J.M. Coetzee places himself in the shoes of a notional English biographer gathering the material that will make sense of the years that followed his 1972 return to South Africa. The result is Summertime, third part
Selina Hastings recalls her visit in 1989 to Lady Beauchamp, mistress of Madresfield Madresfield: the name is now almost as lustrous with literary association as Little Gidding or Adlestrop. To the admirers of Evelyn Waugh, Madresfield is hallowed ground: ‘It’s where Waugh stayed, you know, when he was writing Brideshead Revisited. In fact Madresfield is
I am not I: thou art not he or she: they are not they.’ Few epigraphs to fiction have been so widely disregarded as the disclaimer with which Evelyn Waugh presaged Brideshead Revisited. Immediately it was published, as Waugh’s great friend Nancy Mitford wrote to him, the general view was simply: ‘It is the Lygon
Rick Gekoski is an expatriate American, long established as one of the leading antiquarian book-dealers in Britain. As one might expect, books have been his passion for as long as he can remember, his reading as integral a part of his development as anything experienced in the world outside. ‘Every reading experience vibrates subtly across
All literature, but especially literature of the weird and the fantastic, is a cave where both readers and writers hide from life. (Which is exactly why so many parents and teachers, spotting a teenager with a collection of stories by Lovecraft, Bloch or Clark Ashton Smith, are apt to cry, ‘Why are you reading that
In the last couple of decades or so, a plenitude of biographers have provided us with studies of 20th-century literary celebrities, from Thomas Hardy and George Bernard Shaw to Evelyn Waugh and T. S. Eliot. Roland Chambers now treats the life and works of Arthur Ransome, a lesser mortal than these grandees. Ransome was born
This vast novel, well-plotted and gripping throughout, is the first that Sebastian Faulks has set in our time. It is a state of the nation book, and what a state we seem to be in: if Faulks is less kind to the contemporary than he has been to the past, we cannot blame him, for
Napoleon has humbugged me, by God. He has gained 24 hours’ march on me!’ The Duke of Wellington’s exclamation was at least honest; he made only a show of calmness when told at the Duchess of Richmond’s ball on 15 June 1815 that the French were across the border. His reputation stood in the balance,