Was Hitler’s favourite actress a Russian spy? asks the publisher’s ‘shout line’ on the book-jacket, positioned to look like the author’s subtitle, suggesting that we are to be plunged into the world of a latterday Mata Hari. Readers hoping to have the curtain lifted on boudoir vamping, messages in invisible ink, or le Carré intrigue
Amid the enmities of contemporary letters, it’s salutary to recognise that for most of us allegiances go farther back, and are just as partisan. Neill Powell’s excellent evaluation of Crabbe delights me not just because Crabbe has always been one of my favourite poets but because this study of a writer usually held to be
Of Nicci French’s six novels three deal with the subjugation of women by an aberrant man. Now the seventh tips the scale by making four out of seven. At least in the last novel, The Land of the Living, and in Secret Smile the heroines do not knuckle under; but one cannot help wondering whose
It is almost impossible to write a good biography of Shakespeare. His plays contain at once too much and too little for the biographer; his extraordinary impersonality means that he hardly ever reveals his hand. Every voice has its counter-voice; no single character speaks on behalf of the author. Christopher Marlowe, by contrast, is a
Can a writer be guilty of an excess of sympathy for his characters? Sympathy, we are forever being reminded (Tolstoy and Chekhov being the great exemplars), is the hallmark of great fiction. But unless it is combined with a touch of icy objectivity, it can come to cloy, honeying the sensibility rather than truly taxing
A gushy woman told Whistler that she thought he was the greatest artist since Velazquez. ‘Why drag in Velazquez?’ Whistler drawled. One of the bonuses of any book on absinthe is that it drags in — corrals — more or less all the great French artists and writers from the 1860s to the early 1900s,
In 1976 Godfrey Hodgson published In Our Time, a portrait of America in the years from ‘World War II to Watergate’. To this American, newly arrived in Britain, it seemed remarkable that the best social history of my country during my then brief lifetime should have been written by an Englishman. His sharp eye captured
W.B. Yeats became a member of the magical Order of the Golden Dawn on 7 March 1890. According to its founder, W. W. Wescott, the Order was based on certain magical manuscripts written in code, and discovered on a book barrow in the Farringdon Road. Subsequent research proved this to be an invention, so everyone
It’s not often that one can recommend a biography of a writer as long as this, particularly since Isherwood was not, in the end, a writer of the first rank. But in this case there is no doubt: this is a book which simply must be read, a triumph which produces from years of dense
James Joyce scholars and the Irish tourist industry are both gearing up for 16 June, the centenary of the day on which Leopold Bloom, the hero of Ulysses, set out on his odyssey through the bars and brothels of Dublin. We can expect a deluge of new books and monographs to explain or ‘deconstruct’ Joyce’s
Do not be put off by the silly sub-title: this is an admirable book on several levels. Botanical origins; plant-hunting; the arrival of plants in England; hybridisation, and the American connections. There is much history, including that of great gardens like Exbury. All is here, plus some gorgeous illustrations, including one of Marion Dorn, designer
In 1919 my grandfather was in Kars, near what is now Turkey’s north-eastern frontier, as part of a British occupation force connected with what might be regarded as the first oil war. Kars had recently been abandoned by the Russians after nearly a century (Pushkin stayed there) and was soon to be handed over to
The subtitle, ‘On Settling’, is apt; the book is about the author’s settling in (you could nearly say ‘into’) what he calls ‘the claylands’, near Malmesbury in Gloucester-shire, and about the ‘settled’ nature of that place, the threats it has survived, the way it has adapted and, by extension, the manner in which England and
3:59:4: The Quest to Break the Four-Minute Mileby John BryantHutchinson, £14.99, pp. 310, ISBN 0091800331 Fifty years ago, on 6 May 1954, it was a blustery evening in Oxford. On the Iffley Road cinder track an event took place which has since become synonymous with everything that was good about sport. To run a mile
In this fascinating book about her two autistic sons Charlotte Moore describes what would be a nightmare life for most of us. I’d like to be able to have a bath without anybody else joining me in it … to open my handbag without finding a bitten-off lipstick or a capless, leaking pen … to
‘I do really feel it would have been a better world without Teller… I think he is an enemy of humanity.’ With this uncompromising assessment of his fellow physicist, the Nobel laureate Isidor Rabi expressed a view that has found many an echo throughout the last five decades. There are several reasons to regard Edward
In June 1937, Nancy Cunard, a supporter of the Republicans’ battle against Franco’s nationalists circulated a questionnaire to the writers of the time. It asked, ‘Are you for, or against, the legal government of the people of Spain?’ Inspired by Authors Take Sides on the Spanish War, Jean Moorcroft Wilson and Cecil Woolf have repeated
I could tell you about Graham the man, the hard-drinking, wild and wayward Scots poet who spent most of his life in Cornwall among the artists of St Ives, but I hear his voice in my head saying, ‘Tell them about the poems’. So I will. Graham’s are the most talkative poems of the 20th
When I interviewed him about his novel Asylum, Patrick McGrath described himself as a ‘psychological novelist’, adding that he would be ‘very happy to spend the next 30 years working through different species of madness’. That was eight years ago, and he seems to be keeping to schedule. Asylum and then Dr Haggard’s Disease were
I’m not susceptible to ghosts, and never see or sense them; my partner, who is, reports a mildly inquisitive nocturnal presence in our house in Florence, a town where estate agents all acknowledge the likely presence of such infestations, it being so common there. Who our ghost is or was, I don’t know; I am