That land is their land
More from BooksIn 1961 the anthropologist Richard Mason was exploring a river in southern Amazonia when he was ambushed by a hitherto unknown tribe of Indians, later identified as the Panar
Culture
The good, the bad and the ugly in books, exhibitions, cinema, TV, dance, music, podcasts and theatre.
Aches and aphorisms
More from BooksIt is difficult to demonstrate why the Lees-Milne diaries, of which this is the tenth volume, are among the best of the 20th century. Easy to feel why, for you race through the pages with addictive passion, not wishing to miss a word, but awkward to justify the excitement. These are not records of momentous
Youth, I do adore thee
More from BooksAt the risk of being vulgar, I can’t help thinking that Dr Greer’s (‘At least she’s got an “ology!”’, I always say in her defence, when callow acquaintances mock her) attitude to matters sexual goes up and down like a bride’s nightie. Whereas most of us, thanks to our helpful male classmates, learn whether we
The play’s the thing
More from BooksThe early life of Arthur Miller reads a bit like the first chapters of The Adventures of Augie March by Saul Bellow: a precocious Jewish boy during the Great Depression, an influential older brother, an adolescent sexual awakening with a prostitute. Indeed, his life as a whole — in which he was to marry and
When physicists don’t see eye to eye
More from BooksWhen Michael Frayn wrote Copenhagen, he could surely scarcely have imagined the interest it would generate and the furore it would cause. A play that consists almost entirely of erudite conversations between two eminent physicists (Niels Bohr and Werner Heisenberg) about the development of quantum theory and the moral responsibilities of nuclear scientists is not
A regiment to reckon with
More from BooksIn the spring of 1990, at the age of 21, I found myself sitting on an English hillside in the sun as one member of a brand-new training platoon of British squaddies. Having been marched up hill and down dale for a couple of hours that afternoon, we were handed large cans of beer by
Ideas received or rejected
More from BooksUntil I read his enthralling account of what it’s like to be a middle-class sixtysomething crack addict, I’d never quite appreciated the genius of William Donaldson. I know his Henry Root letters are supposed to be very satirical but I found them a bit hard going myself — like a complex in-joke that you really
A great painter’s likeness perfectly caught
More from BooksRobert Hughes has suffered no shortage of appalling things over the past five years. He has experienced deep depression and a second divorce; he suffered atrocious injuries in a car crash which came within inches of killing him, and has had to undergo 12 operations to piece his body back together again; a feeble attempt
11 October 2003
Speaking of God
More from BooksWhere is England’s smallest church? The question must have preoccupied nerdish retired vicars for centuries and is probably best answered then forgotten. Despite the title of this survey, John Kinross fails to give a clear answer. ‘Smaller’ churches would have been fine, but smallest raises expectations. The apparent shortlist is Culbone (Somerset), Dale (Derbyshire), Wide-
The other island
More from BooksThis massive volume weighs in at seven pounds on the bathroom scales and cost The Spectator £14.50 in stamps to send out for review. If it is difficult to write about, this is not because of its size and weight but because the eye is constantly caught and distracted by fascinating pieces of information, so
Rebellion in the suburbs
More from BooksFirst published in 1914, two years after he had married Virginia, Leonard Woolf’s second novel The Wise Virgins must have shocked its readers with its tale of an unfortunate coupling and hasty marriage. Now the romance/sex all seems rather tame, and this fiction startles for a very different reason: its harsh caricature of Jewishness (Woolf
The beauty of signal-boxes
More from BooksThe Duke of Bedford insisted that railway stations built on his estate had to be picturesque. He chose a half-timbered design based on Loudon’s Encyclopaedia of Cottage, Farm and Railway Architecture. His stations can still be seen from that improbable survival, the slow train from Bletchley to Ridgmont, Millbrook, Fenny Stratford and Woburn Sands. Future
Northward and upward
More from BooksThis first volume of Bill Clinton’s biography, taking the story as far as his presidential election victory in 1992, comes at a peculiar time. Unlike many of the hasty invectives pronounced upon the 42nd president, Nigel Hamilton’s study is written on the grand scale, drawing on much of the published record and delving further with
All knickers and knockers
More from BooksWhatever else this is, an intimate portrait of Mrs Parker Bowles it is not, or at least not one written by the author. This is a scissors-and-paste job, the bones of earlier would-be biographers whitening in every chapter, which gives it an air of California or Bust. Clearly done at speed, there are many errors
Sounding the last post
More from BooksThe work of the obituarist is not unlike that of the book reviewer. Both have to tell their reader what the subject of their piece is all about; both have to pass judgment on its merits and demerits; both have to provide something which will be entertaining as well as informative. Under the direction of
Hobbling the sacred cows
More from BooksHere’s a real cure for anyone with a bad case of things-are-getting-worse-itis. Written in 1962 principally for the American market, London Perceived has now been republished over here for the first time in 40 years, which seems staggering. I’ve never read a better summary of London or Londoners. And it has hardly dated at all.
The old order changeth
More from BooksAs a historical novel Thomas Gage is more Hardy than Tolstoy. The classic historical novel — as concocted by Walter Scott and perfected by Tolstoy — gives the reader an unexpected viewpoint from which to witness a great historical moment. Fictional characters with fictional relationships are the centre of attention, but they weave in and
Native wood-notes wild
More from BooksThis is an exceptional biography, which is just as well, since I don’t think one could bear to have the heartbreaking story it tells recounted carelessly. John Clare is one of the great Romantic poets, but his history and origins have always meant that he was either treated with neglect or used by his admirers
4 October 2003
Spillikins of wisdom
More from BooksThis is not exactly an autobiography — John Mortimer has written three already, one about old age — but more like a collection of reminiscences designed to inspire and warn his grandchildren of the delights and pitfalls of life. It is a testament, the ‘Will’ of his title, in which he bequeaths to them the
For ever taking leave
More from BooksMartha Gellhorn, an American who lost faith in America, was one of the most important war-reporters of the 20th century. She was not interested in briefings from the top brass, though she sometimes used her blonde charm to get the top brass to fly her where she needed to go. What she did, in her
Not such a low and dishonest decade
More from BooksIf it is to be interesting, contemporary history has to be a battle between good guys and bad guys. In his The Roaring Nineties Professor Joseph Stiglitz lets the reader know at an early stage in the proceedings that he is a good guy. As he says in the preface, when he first fell in
The making of a professional
More from BooksAll the clichés are true: travel refreshes the taste for living; it brightens the jaded mind, it stimulates and deludes. The border that is crossed in leaving the familiar behind is the same one whether the journey is travel at its most serious — on perhaps the Terra Nova or the Endurance — or a
The love that dared to speak its name
More from BooksAs you went into the tower door of the church at Marsh Baldon (Oxon), there used to be two wall-tablets. One was to the relations of Sir Christopher Willoughby, who died in 1808, and the other was To the Memory of Friends, listed as John Lane, Elizabeth Lane, Phanuel Bacon, Margaret Bacon and Ann Barton.
Zimmerman bound or unbound?
More from BooksWhat is going on here? What on earth is going on here? Christopher Ricks, the world’s leading critic of poetry in English, Frank Kermode and the American Helen Vendler his only rivals, has devoted, has lavished 500 pages of hard-core, hardback, exegetical analysis to the words which propel Bob Dylan’s songs. The issue is not
Battle versus work
More from BooksThe great popular success of Forster’s Howards End, published in 1910, meant that he was under pressure to set to work on a new novel, and in the following year he did so, but in a mood of self-doubt. He told himself it was wrong to force oneself to write; that before attempting a new
The run-up to a giant leap
More from BooksWorld history is pitted with world wars. Last century was conceited enough to call its pair the First and Second. One of the turning-points of that Second was the Anglo-American landing in Normandy on 6 June 1944, of which the 60th anniversary falls next year. David Stafford, a leading 20th-century historian (once a professor at
Happy band of brothers
More from BooksVery occasionally one comes across a book which, in its unexpected delights, inspires one to leap about wild with praise, and rush out to buy copies for friends. This first work by William Newton, retired doctor, will surely have this effect on many readers. It is, simply, the story of remarkable teenage years in the
He’s the top
More from BooksThe perfect anthology, like the perfect hors d’
Slogging to Byzantium
More from BooksYeats was a great poet who was also the industrious adept of a batso mystical philosophy. Do we have to absorb the philosophy before we can appreciate the poetry? If we are lucky enough to be in a state of ignorance, the question won’t come up. The poetry will get to us first. Suppose you’ve