Adam Begley

Tuesday

Adam Begley

The blistering experience of writing about Samuel Beckett

From our UK edition

For those of us with nagging doubts about the value of literary biography, books that show the biographer at work — a genre with a solid pedigree — exert a peculiar and not entirely healthy fascination. We traipse through the sausage factory feeling sick to our stomachs yet weirdly hankering for a bite of the finished product. Some eminent biographers — Hermione Lee, for instance, in Body Parts (2008) — have exposed the tricks of the trade with clinical detachment, scarcely mentioning their own practice; others, such as Michael Holroyd in Works on Paper (2002), Richard Holmes in This Long Pursuit (2016) and the late James Atlas in The Shadow in the Garden (2017), mix in a generous measure of self-scrutiny.

Thursday

Adam Begley

Meet Dr Love: the infallibly seductive, pioneering French gynaecologist

From our UK edition

Do not google Samuel Jean Pozzi. If you want to enjoy Julian Barnes’s The Man in the Red Coat — and believe me, it’s teeming with delights — stay away from search engines and trust the author to tell the story in his own way. But just to get you started: Pozzi (1846–1918), the man John Singer Sargent painted, gloriously, in sumptuous red, was a Frenchman, a prominent, pioneering doctor in Belle Epoque Paris, and a charming, ubiquitous, infallibly seductive socialite. (‘Disgustingly handsome’ is how the Princess of Monaco described him.) He was Sarah Bernhardt’s doctor and also her lover; she called him ‘Docteur Dieu’. (His other nickname was ‘L’Amour médecin’, which Barnes translates as Dr Love.

Thursday

Adam Begley

High art

From our UK edition

‘To look at ourselves from afar,’ Julian Barnes wrote in Levels of Life, ‘to make the subjective suddenly objective: this gives us a psychic shock.’ The context of Barnes’s remark is the 100-year span in which aerial photography evolved from its 19th-century birth in the wicker cradle of a gas balloon to the miraculous moment in 1968 when an astronaut aboard Apollo 8 took the photograph known as ‘Earthrise’: the darling blue ball of planet Earth rising up over the arid, inhospitable surface of the moon. And all around our little blue globe, darkness. ‘Earthrise’ administered a psychic shock by providing ocular proof of our true position in the universe: insignificant, precarious, lost in the expanding emptiness of space.