Christopher Shrimpton

One day Frederic Prokosch wrote a novel. He was 27 years old, living with his parents in New Haven, Connecticut, and desperate to be published. Leafing through an old atlas, he had visions of Lebanon and Syria, of the apricot trees of Damascus, the pilgrims travelling from Transcaucasia, and the Orontes River flowing among the

Sir Thomas Malory is not much of a knight. He lies; he is lecherous; he is bested in tourneys; he misses battles due to a dicky stomach; he inadvertently causes the deaths of his friends. He is no Sir Lancelot. But he has his talents, chief among them being his ability to spin a yarn,

‘It is shocking to read about. But once you are used to it, it is a little like reading about Ireland, or socialism.’ This is the accepting, if unfeeling, response of John Addington’s undergraduate daughter after reading his recently completed book on homosexuality. ‘It is a very rational argument, Papa.’ The New Life, Tom Crewe’s

During his brief stage career Master Betty, or the Young Roscius, was no stranger to superlatives: genius, unparalleled, superior, Albion’s glory, a Child of Nature, the Wonder of the Age. He was a child prodigy who, in the early 19th century, took British theatre by storm. Aged just 11 William Betty made his debut and

At a village train station in deepest Kent two men and their pet mongoose are setting off on their honeymoon. The men are Otto and Xavier Shin and the mongoose is Árpád Montague XXX; the train is the Lucky Day — a former tea-smuggler’s transportation, now home to a mysterious woman named Ava Kapoor. They

Dr Benzion Netanyahu’s reputation precedes him. ‘A true genius, who also happens to be a major statesman and political hero,’ writes one former colleague in a letter of recommendation. Unhelpfully, another letter follows where a different former colleague describes him as a ‘prolific rabble-rouser’, with ‘a history of inciting terrorist violence’. These letters land in