Late November 1950: United Nations forces commanded by the legendary General Douglas MacArthur are approaching the North Korean frontier when Chinese forces suddenly strike, an overwhelming onslaught precipitating a devastating retreat. At a presidential press conference held on 30 November, Harry Truman is pressed by journalists whether the atomic bomb might now be used to
Listening to Jim Norton reading The Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man on this outstanding recording is a first-class way of either revisiting James Joyce’s autobiographical novel or of dipping your toe in the water for the first time. I am a toe-dipper and whilst there were moments when Joyce’s ‘stream of consciousness’
Bernard-Henri Lévy is possessed of a large fortune, great intelligence and film-star good looks (if now a little ageing). He therefore had the wherewithal to go through life like a hot knife through butter, but yet has chosen many times to expose himself to great danger in the continuing wars of torrid zones. Why? In
Harry Thompson’s death last year cut short a rampantly successful television career and a budding literary one. He will not be remembered for his fiction, but his only novel is strong-limbed, clean-cut and robustly hearty. It bravely makes straight for the most torturing of Victorian questions, the challenge to religious faith by the brash self-confidence
Recently an auction house in Swindon sold for more than £11,000 a cracked tooth of Napoleon’s, extracted during his exile on St Helena. Although Napoleon did little except talk, write and dig and garden, his final six years have been the subject of more books than any other period of his life. It was recently
A phrase often used in praise of comics artists is that they ‘transcend the limitations of the medium’. The apologetic subtext to that phrase tells you a lot. Even as we praise the greats of comics, we tend to do so as if their achievements are in spite of, rather than because of, their chosen
Although it was set up as a contest between a flagrant outsider and a more traditional intimist there was little doubt that Michel Houellebecq would lose out in the Goncourt stakes. His sulphurous vision and unapologetic rule-breaking were too much for the reading public, not to mention the Goncourt judges, who took little pleasure in
Until reading this stimulating and sumptuous study from the archives of Country Life I had only associated the name Edward Knoblock, an American-born dramatist, with one of the best-known anecdotes about John Gielgud’s gaffes. You remember the scene: Gielgud and Knoblock are lunching at the Ivy when Johnny absent-mindedly describes someone as ‘nearly as boring
Though the relentlessness of its attack is kept up almost to the end, nothing in Mother’s Milk is quite so funny as its second chapter. This finds the Melrose family — 40-something barrister Patrick, wife Mary, five-year-old Robert and newly born Thomas — hiding in the guest bedroom of old Mrs Melrose’s house in the
Man is a constitutionally ungrateful creature, taking all progress immediately for granted and making the most of whatever complaints still come to hand. However privileged he is, either in relation to people who have lived in previous ages, or to contemporaries living elsewhere in the world or even in his own country, a man can
In 1967 Claude-Anne Lopez brought out a perfectly delightful book, Mon Cher Papa: Franklin and the Ladies of Paris. It described Benjamin Frank- lin’s eight years as the infant United States’ first ambassador to France from the slightly oblique angle of his relations with his French women friends. The book was amusing, subtle, beautifully written
Only a fool would try to explain fashions and tendencies in novel-writing. Everything can change so quickly, and it only takes one really good novel to rescue a genre which we’d all thought consigned to the dustheap. A year ago, I would have laughed drily at the notion that the campus novel still had some
Most readers probably remember the name Guy Liddell, if at all, as the Fifth Man. Or possibly the Fourth, since we remember the first three, Burgess, Maclean and Philby, but cannot remember the next one, since the name kept on changing between Straight, Hollis and others. Liddell’s death in 1958 was largely un- noticed. He
with a foreword by David Hockney and an introduction by Lucinda Lambton It is a well-known fact that artists love dachshunds. Bonnard had Poucette, Picasso Frika, Andy Warhol Archie, and Hockney his Stanley and Boodge. Less often noted is the attraction these adorable creatures have always had for royalty. But simply turn to the magisterial
One evening in the Antarctic winter of 1912, some months after all hope of Scott had been given up, the surviving members of his expedition at base camp sat down to vote on their sledging plans for the coming spring. Along the coast to the north of them a party of five men under the
Paul Foot, the ‘campaigning’ journalist who died last year and whose funeral attracted a crowd of 2,000 mourners, was a Cornish nonconformist who retrained as a Marxist revolutionary. Had he lived a century ago he would have made a stalwart Liberal member for West Cornwall, savaging the tinmasters. But Foot was condemned by the ideology
I imagine that most people, if asked who was responsible for the familiar method of classifying plants and animals into families, genera and species, would name the 18th-century Swedish naturalist Linnaeus. It is true that he named more species than anyone else, but in this magisterial book his work is seen as little more than
Like Sir Edward Marshall Hall and the first Lord Birkenhead, Mr Justice Rigby Swift was one of those lawyers around whom stories accrete like barnacles. He was a Lancastrian who stayed what they call ‘true to his northern roots’; barristers referred to him as ‘Rig-ba’ in imitation of his accent. Born in 1874, the same
‘You have been in Afghanistan, I perceive.’ It could be a fanciful tryst between George W. Bush and Osama bin Laden, but it is something far more auspicious: the first meeting between Sherlock Holmes and his chronicler, John Watson, MD, in 1881. Their friendship spawned many things: worldwide societies, sightseeing tours, commemorative deerstalkers (though Holmes
Of all the books on houses and gardens, inside and out, this one takes the cake. Nancy Lancaster was the possessor of those two attributes, difficult to describe but instantly recognisable, of style and charm. Together with her unstoppable energy and plenty of money, she made an indelible impression on one of England’s most envied