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‘That Shakespeare,’ a German friend of mine once said to me, ‘knew a thing or two.’ ‘That Shakespeare,’ a German friend of mine once said to me, ‘knew a thing or two.’ You can say that again. Sometimes, indeed, I think he knew everything, at least everything about human nature. When a religious fanatic tells
Listing page content here When I was younger, I used to think, ‘If ever you become famous, on no account agree to be interviewed by Lynn (“Demon”) Barber.’ The call never came; but, if it had, I hope my resolve would have remained adamantine, whatever her blandishments. You can see what she made of her
Listing page content here During 1956 three major powers made dramatic efforts to prop up their position by the use of armed force. The British and French, in collusion with Israel, invaded Egypt to overthrow its dictator and regain the Suez Canal; their attempt failed within a few hours. The Soviet Union used its tanks
Listing page content here Reading David Mitchell’s fourth novel, which is told through the eyes of a 13-year-old boy, reminded me why girls have little or no interest in the contents of boys’ heads until they are well out of their teens. It’s horrible in there. Thirteen-year-old boys, in particular, are revolting concoctions of fear
Listing page content here It was not easy to be an attendant at the court of King Pablo, for Picasso, ‘with his fringe of white hair round the back of his head, his never tiring black eyes, his red shirt, is always the centre of everyone’s thoughts, especially as everyone else’s movements depend on his
Listing page content here ‘We have forty million reasons for failure, but not a single excuse.’ Kipling’s re- proof, in ‘The Lesson’, on the conduct of the Boer war would serve well as the subtitle of this impressive review of the mess that is the Iraq intervention. The authors are the chief military correspondent of
Listing page content here I misjudged this book. I thought the airport fiction promised by the literary editor would take me nicely to New York, where I was going the next day. However, at 846 pages, weighing in at one kilo, Jilly Cooper’s Wicked! is long enough to get you to Australia. On my second
Listing page content here The councils of the early Christian Church were not always agreeable occasions. The bishops quarrelled terribly, at times getting so angry with one another as to clash in frenzied battles of ripped clothes, flying fists, blood and broken noses on the council chamber floor. Of all the issues that most inflamed
Listing page content here The title of this well edited and interesting book is misleading. First it suggests a complete collection, which would, if it were ever accomplished, require several volumes. Second, the letters, though mostly written by Pepys, include a considerable number of those written to him and even occasional papers which are not
Michael Dyson is Foundation Professor in the Humanities and Professor of Religious Studies and Africana Studies at the University of Pennsylvania, the author of 12 previous books, and an ordained Baptist minister. Pride is his own contribution to a series of linked lectures and books on the seven deadly sins. There is no doubting the
The Church of Scotland has recently published a new edition of its hymnary, the first for 30 years. A committee of ministers had the difficult task of deciding which of the old hymns to reject in order to make room for the new songs — many of them from Africa and South America — which
It is, if you stop to think about it, an important literary question: what, exactly, is the point of short stories? They so often can — to this reader at least — be dismissed merely as stunted or early-aborted novels, a single idea gestated in the writer’s imagination that has inescapably failed to divide, multiply
‘Competitive and rapacious and amoral and moralising and just plain mad.’ That’s how middle-class American motherhood seemed to Judith Warner when she returned to the ‘pressure cooker’ of Washington DC after having her first child in Paris, where she had enjoyed the readily available support and relaxed attitude to parenting that French mothers apparently take
An old biographer friend of mine, having churned out several lives of the great over the years, eventually told me over a boozy and depressing lunch that he had had enough, and that he wouldn’t be writing another one ‘for as long as I live’. As it happens he didn’t live that long, but you
The preceding volume in the New Oxford History of England, covering the years 1727-1783, described the people as ‘polite and commercial’. Boyd Hilton does not imbue their sons and daughters with Byronic qualities, as his title might suggest; rather, it expresses the extreme volatility of the period. In the 1820s 60 per cent of the
Lecterns have been installed in some bookshops enabling customers to flip through the 625 tabloid-format pages of what must be the largest volume ever devoted to a single modern artist. Andy Warhol ‘Giant’ Size is Warhol the Lot, a bulk buy, a gross amplitude of Warhol the Simple, Warhol the Smart and Warhol the Resourceful
Saint George has spent years in denial.His image has had a bad press.There’s been, as shrinks say, for some whileA problem he needs to address. I suppose it’s not really surprisingHe’s pining for something to clout,For even with wide advertisingThere aren’t many dragons about. And where is the Maiden Worth Saving?(To find any maiden is
This wonderful small book brings to an end much journalistic nonsense that followed 11 September 2001 in its definitive treatment of its causes and repercussions. To the Palestinian journalist Abdel Bari Atwan, what happened on that day was a natural conclusion to decades of Arab frustration and Western neglect. Honourably, but not totally successfully, he
When Princess Sophie of Anhalt-Zerbst arrived at the Russian court in 1744, one of the many daughters of minor German royal houses who came to St Petersburg in the hope of an advantageous marriage, she was just 15 and ‘as ugly as a scarecrow’ after a severe illness. Her future husband, the heir to the
This is a ghastly story, powerfully well told. Lives of criminals form an accepted part of biography; within it, lives of con men are more difficult, because conmen cover and confuse their tracks so carefully. Carmen Callil triumphs over innumerable difficulties to make clear the career of Louis Darquier, one of the villains of the
Were I swimming for my life with these four books between my teeth and were I to be tried more sorely, the first to go would be Parrot. It has three gems: that Warren Hastings, who died (from starvation) in 1818, owned a parrot that was still alive in Swindon in the 1920s; that Charlotte,
At the centre of Rachel Billington’s new novel is love, but this is not in any conventional sense a romantic novel. Claudia, a schoolgirl, falls in love with a man 24 years her senior. He is not a romantic man, though given on occasion to the poetic flights of fancy associated with his chosen occupation,
It is easy to get misty-eyed about Renaissance Florence. How gorgeous it was, we tell ourselves, this City of the Lily, with its lissom youths and comely maidens, each one a Gozzoli ephebe or a Botticelli Venus, its humanist scholars poring over the latest haul of Greek manuscripts, Donatello and Cellini fashioning flawless marble and
For three years Moazzam Begg, former DHSS officer, one-time Birmingham estate agent and top al-Qaida suspect, survived at the sharp end of America’s war on terror. Seized in the middle of the night from his home in Pakistan, Begg was taken through grim makeshift prisons, endured hundreds of hours of interrogation and ended up one
This is Donna Leon’s 15th Commissario Guido Brunetti novel set in Venice and once again the author succeeds in capturing the light and shade of a city that has plenty of both. As in this edition she even provides maps, including the island of Murano, so that the reader can follow the detective’s various per-
In my ignorance, before reading this most instructive, entertaining and beautifully produced book, I had idly regarded sundials as agreeable garden ornaments with little or no practical purpose. To quote Hilaire Belloc, ‘I am a sundial and I make a botch / Of what is done much better by a watch’. Yet our expert guide
Wavell was a great soldier and a great man: wise, courageous, clear-headed, an inspired and inspiring leader, a pattern of integrity. It is peculiarly unfair that the three greatest tasks he undertook all ended in near total failure. He made his name between the wars as a thoughtful, forward-looking soldier who did as much to
In 1975, a few months after the two Turkish invasions of Cyprus that had stormed across the northern tier of the island in the preceding summer, I stood in the square of Lawrence Durrell’s old village of Bellapaix and watched the Greek villagers being rounded up for deportation to the south. Within a short space
Professor Fukuyama is famous for having told us at the end of the Cold War that history was at an end. By this he meant that the slow advance of liberal democracy was inevitable. As he explains in his latest book he did not mean that we should try to accelerate the process by killing