In 1961, when he was 62, Ernest Hemingway shot himself. Almost half a century later, this bombastic, vainglorious, paranoid man, whose writing captured the minds not only of his own generation but of all subsequent ones, still exercises a powerful attraction for biographers. Though no one has yet written a better account of Hemingway’s unhappy
The premise of John Sutherland’s new book is that many people wrongly think of reading as an all-or-nothing ability, like, say, tying one’s shoes: either you can do it or you can’t. Such people would no doubt consider a book about how to read a novel as irrelevant as one titled How to Eat Crisps
The arc and light and breadth and nothing kempt,Flat shining fields of sand, the shallow-carvingTigris and Euphrates of the beach streamsWhere individual flying grains are seen,The wet compactions out of which grew keepsI slopped moat water on at the end of the day,Playing decay and knowing I was loved,Coves where my face would drop past
Sir John Soane is London’s lost architect. You can visit his museum in Lincoln’s Inn Fields, and the picture gallery he designed at Dulwich. But since his death in 1837 his greatest masterpieces have gone. The Victorians demolished the law courts at Westminster, and the glittering royal entrance to the House of Lords. The RAC
Cry Shame (1950) by Katherine Everard Cry Shame! is the torrid tale of a 13-year- old girl who leaves home to become a dancer: in her brief career she learns things she is too young to know, runs off with a man four times her age, assiduously breaks the seventh commandment, has an affair with
Anyone interested in the history of Germany, of nationalism or of dynasties will be gripped by this book. Born at the start of the 20th century, heirs of an ancient German dynasty, Princes Philipp and Christopher of Hesse-Kassel were good-looking, modern young men. English was their second language, Queen Victoria’s liberal daughter the Empress Frederick
On an autumn Saturday in 1944 Private Robert Prentice, an 18-year-old rifleman trainee, makes a long journey from his camp in Virginia to New York City, to see his mother. He is soon to be sent abroad, France most likely, and there he’ll see action, which will at least be a change from tedious, thankless
Kate Atkinson’s previous novel, Case Histories, was a successful experiment in crime fiction. One Good Turn is its sequel. In the first book, which was set in Cambridge, Brodie Jackson was a standard-issue private eye — ex-army, ex-police, with a broken marriage and a penchant for country music. Now, thanks to a £2 million inheritance
‘Nothing was over. Nothing is ever over.’ Thus muses Humphrey Clark as he travels towards the small windswept northern port of Finsterness, scene of formative childhood holidays. Humphrey, a reclusive marine biologist, is on his way to collect an honorary degree. Much more significantly, at Finsterness he will re-encounter Ailsa Kelman, his childhood companion and
Before the fire, before the ash, before theBodies tumbling solitary through space, oneThin skin of glass and metal met another….Two man-made behemoths joined in a fatal kiss. Although this poetic and deeply philosophical expression of the author’s love (no other word will suffice) for the Empire State Building ostensibly celebrates the 75th anniversary of the
In one of P. G. Wodehouse’s stories the attempts made by Oliver Sipperley, editor of the Mayfair Gazette, to inject some pep into the mag are hampered by poor old Sippy’s inability to ward off unwelcome contributions from his formidable prep school headmaster on recondite classical topics. I experienced not dissimilar difficulties when editing the
Early in January 2000 the art historian T. J. Clark arrived in Los Angeles for a six-month stint at the Getty Research Institute. He was fortunate to see, in the Getty Museum, two great pictures by Poussin, the Getty’s ‘Landscape with a Calm’ and the National Gallery’s ‘Landscape with a Man Killed by a Snake’,
Mid-August, even so, a faint hint, giftof autumn momentarily — a sweetsoft breeze. With slender branches trees entreata sift of foliage. Their fingers lift.Then half a dozen paper leaves adriftblow in and dance round summer-sandalled feet,though brief, their restlessness another fleetingsign of imminent and massive shift.The season’s on the very cusp. We’ll seethe great sun
When Prince Harry stirred up a fuss by wearing Nazi uniform to a fancy-dress party he found a gallant defender in Paul Johnson who wrote that ‘in treating Nazi insignia as a party joke’ the young prince ‘reflects the instincts of his generation’. ‘The Nazis,’ he added, ‘do have an undoubted fascination for many young
ZABIBA AND THE KING (2000) by Saddam Hussein The first of several novels by the world’s bestselling war criminal, Zabiba and the King is a clunking allegory in which the king represents Saddam, Zabiba (a beautiful maiden) represents the Iraqi people, and Zabiba’s abusive husband represents the USA. Most of the book is presented in
Something is eating away at Father David Anderton, the narrator of Be Near Me, a novel as beautiful and perfectly pitched as its title. An English priest working in the Scottish parish of Dalgarnock, he is afflicted by ‘a large private sense of wanting to depart from the person I had always been’. Not his
Scholars who want to accuse others of ignorant obscurantism have long taunted them with the phrase lucus a non lucendo. This is supposed to exemplify the stupidest kind of concocted etymology, and here it is in Book XVII of Isidore’s stout old compilation: ‘A “sacred grove” (lucus) is a dense thicket of trees that lets
Born in 1965, Howard Sounes was scarcely out of short trousers by the time that Margaret Thatcher took power and kicked us out of the mire of complacent consensus and began to crush the tyranny of the unions. Perhaps his vivacious and enjoyable new book about the culture of the Seventies does romanticise ‘a low
First and most importantly, Hugh Thomson is a good thing. It takes a rare combination of scholarly focus and Boys’ Own derring-do to write books about adventuring in Peru (this is his third) which consistently rise above the level of backpackers’ companions, and convey not only Thomson’s great knowledge of the ancient civilisations of the
You know the famous story about Freud and Einstein? Freud writes to Einstein, sending him one of his books and asking for his opinion of it. Einstein writes back, saying he enjoyed the book very much, that he thought it was outstanding, exemplary even, but that, alas, he was in no position to judge its