A monkey puzzle of a family tree
More from BooksMichael Kr
Culture
The good, the bad and the ugly in books, exhibitions, cinema, TV, dance, music, podcasts and theatre.
High prairie, low life
More from BooksAnnie Proulx’s latest work is a strange hybrid. It is more a series of short stories than a novel; and though it is immensely readable, fusing sentiment and bleakness with Proulx’s customary wit and irresistible relish for the quirky, some may find the whole ensemble less than a fully fledged work of fiction. The Shipping
28 December 2002
The making of the Taleban
More from BooksI saw the first tourists arriving in Afghanistan this summer. I saw their incredulity at the graveyard of crumpled aeroplanes at Kabul airport and at the Hazara suburb of the city that looks like Berlin in 1945. The question everyone asked was: how did this happen? How did a country famous for its hospitality and
God’s own country
More from BooksPhotographs by Mark J. Rattenbury Further details are available on the archive website, www.somerset.gov.uk/archives/exmoor This is a puzzlingly titled book. Are we being encouraged to look on the contents as mirrored reflections of a way of life, or reflections on the death of the old Exmoor? Perhaps we, like the Lady of Shalott, are supposed
The higher the fewer
More from BooksWhat to do if you plan a book whose essence is a single parachute drop? And what to do if, apparently, that particular parachutist was not deeply committed to the book? Similarly, if your two previous books have been Soup and Mushroom, and if your career has involved theology, minicab-driving, obituary writing, and founding a
A congregation of clergymen
More from BooksThis highly readable selection of obituaries is based on the original more general collections of Hugh Massingberd. His object was to celebrate life rather than death; and indeed the persons here described, though from a specialised category, come vividly alive in the capable hands of Canon Trevor Beeson. The period covered is the quarter century
Off the straight and narrow
More from BooksThe picture of a maverick which emerges from this book is ever more strongly drawn. In this sequel to his auto- biographical No Voice from the Hall, published in 1998, John Harris takes us forwards, backwards and sideways around his earlier account. There is less fishing, and the kindly figure of ‘Snozzle’, his Uncle Sid,
Mr Nice and Mr Nasty
More from BooksQuentin Crisp was, among other delightful things, a human paradox. He loathed the Gay Liberation Movement as bitterly as he despised Oscar Wilde, yet he did more than anyone else to change people’s attitudes towards homosexuality. He was unashamedly flamboyant, yet spinsterish and celibate; the sex act, he explained, was like ‘undergoing a colostomy operation
Browsing for escape
More from BooksThe fine, rusty-gold building of the University Press presides over Walton Street in Oxford with its more monumental than collegiate presence. The touchstone of literacy in homes all over the world will be an Oxford dictionary, compact, shorter or the full, distinguished thing. The livery of the press is recognisable everywhere, ultramarine and gold. Reliably
14 December 2002
Tony at the Travellers: Anthony Powell as clubman
More from Books‘We might go straight into lunch
Out of the commonplace
More from BooksThe following extracts are taken from George Lyttelton’s Commonplace Book Zeuxis was said to have painted grapes on a boy’s head so well that the birds came and pecked them. Sir G. Kneller said that if the boy too had been well painted the birds wouldn’t have dared approach.An accurate daguerrotype portrait of a commonplace
Home is where the snow is
Some songs are hits – Number One for a couple of weeks. Some songs are standards – they endure decade after decade. And a few very rare songs reach way beyond either category, to embed themselves so deeply in the collective consciousness they become part of the soundtrack of society. They start off the same
Grand, ritzy and splendid
More from BooksA consolation of being an international foot-in-the-door man in the 1970s, albeit one selling Monets and Moores, not Hoovers, was arriving from JFK at the Hotel Carlyle in Manhattan. You reached the superlative place at about 10 in the evening, and even though flesh complained that it was the middle of the night, spirit insisted
A choice of children’s books
More from BooksThis year my village school, like hundreds of others, is scrimping and saving to afford that Holy Grail of modern education – the Computer Suite. Of course computers are an essential part of every child’s world, and will presumably be even more so in the future. Yet there is something rather soulless about the rows
Uncle to the nation
More from BooksIt was only when David Attenborough’s autobiography arrived for review that I realised I had been dodging his television programmes for years. Nothing personal; it was just that a pigeon on the pavement is more interesting to me than a bird of paradise on a television screen, a peep-show, that seems to push me further
The penis mightier than the sword
More from BooksNext time you’re stuck for conversation at a dinner party, why not use one of these fascinating facts to break the ice? 1. In mammalian terms the male of Homo sapiens is spectacularly endowed – his penis, when erect, being roughly three times larger than a 400lb gorilla’s. 2. In Pharaonic Egypt, Egyptian men were
A fine solo performance
More from BooksThe sort of young person who once drifted into publishing now fiddles about with computers instead. The trade has been transformed both by its wretched economics and by the wretched spirit of the times. Solo publishing in particular, an eccentric business or a business for eccentrics, should have died out many years ago. Michael Russell
Valuable second opinions
More from BooksProfessor Roger Louis’s own expertise is in British imperial history; he edited the three-volume Oxford History of the British Empire. For years past, he has run seminars at the Harry Ransome Humanities Research Center at Austin, Texas, which holds ample stores of British literary and historical manuscripts; he invites leading dons and critics from Great
The doubting priest
More from BooksAs Schindler’s Ark shows, Thomas Keneally is at his best bringing the past to life undaunted either by the importance of the events or by the famous names at the centre of them. Two of his other novels that lie to hand, A Family Madness and Gossip from the Forest, confirm that he wastes no
The last brick put in place
More from BooksThe publication of this volume marks the completion of Joseph Frank’s enormous biography of Fyodor Dostoevsky, a work which he has spent half a lifetime in writing. ‘Monumental’ is the standard clichZ for such an enterprise, and Frank’s is certainly that. The scale of the work is due mainly to the fact that it sets
Dogs in Greece, a nuisance
More from BooksIn ‘The Sussex Vampires’, Watson takes down from the shelf the great index volume for V; Holmes balances it on his knee and reads: Voyage of the Gloria Scott. Victor Lynch, the forger. Venomous lizard or gila … Vittoria, the circus belle. Vanderbilt and the Yeggman … Vipers. Vigor, the Hammersmith wonder… And then he
Opportunists and tacticians, but poor strategists
More from BooksOn the back of the dust cover there proudly appears the following quote from the Sunday Times towards the end of last year: ‘Ed Moloney’s authoritative and devastating Penguin History of the IRA is just around the corner.’ Well, up to a point. Ed Moloney is a well respected journalist writing for a Dublin newspaper
The music of the language
More from BooksWodehouse, all in all, is lasting astonishingly well. His world is dated, but then it was always dated; it is basically Edwardian, and went on, barely changed, into the 1960s and 1970s. But his appeal is not the period charm of a Diary of a Nobody or a Saki; it is much more alive than
7 December 2002
Pure and impure genius
More from BooksAs Hamlet said, ‘Look here upon this picture and on this.’ Early this year Garry O’Connor produced a book about Paul Scofield. The actor’s personal life being famously uneventful, there is little there for lovers of theatre gossip. It is, despite a few pretentious notions about Scofield’s psyche, an admirably thoughtful book on the player’s
A choice of funny books
More from Books‘I don’t know if it is a sign of old age,’ wrote P. G. Wodehouse in the mid-1950s, ‘but I find I hate Christmas more every year.’ Another marked change that the Master noticed in ‘the senile Wodehouse’ was that he no longer had the party spirit and preferred to stay at home with a
The price of admission
More from BooksI first met Tim Slessor when we were contemporary undergraduates at Cambridge, half a century ago. Etched into my memory are Slessor’s pride in and sadness about his naval officer dad, whom he had adored, and whom he had lost as an eight-year-old. Becoming a successful TV producer and journalist, Slessor worked in the United
Not rushing to judgment
More from BooksIt is hard to overpraise this admirable – indeed one would have thought impossible – account of the history of England, Scotland and Ireland from the accession of Charles I to the restoration of his son Charles II. The great masters of English 17th-century historiography, S. R. Gardiner and Sir Charles Firth, between them took
Smoothing the rough edges
More from BooksMuch is made by writers these days of the need for ‘getting distance’, for putting frontiers, oceans, whole continents between themselves and the sources of their inspiration. A spell on a Mediterranean island, a prolonged residence in some foreign capital or a creative writing fellowship at an American university are all supposed to do the
A selection of art books
More from BooksI cannot think of many less festive offerings than Richard Avedon Portraits (Abrams, £24.95), but it has to be admitted that his merciless exposure of such grotesques as a blood-and-guts-spattered rattlesnake-skinner and a Duncan Goodhew-lookalike beekeeper, whose naked body is swarming with the six-legged tools of his trade, makes one sit up and take note.