Book Reviews

The life of Oscar Wilde is so wearily familiar that we assume that there is nothing new to think or say about him. This book proves us wrong. Carlos Blacker – the central figure of  J. Robert Maguire’s research for more than half a century – rates, at best, a bare mention in Wilde’s many biographies. Yet, as Maguire conclusively demonstrates, he is no footnote. Blacker, a handsome man of Latin extraction, knew Wilde in the days of his London pomp, was a witness at the writer’s wedding to the long-suffering Constance Lloyd, and often saw his friend on a daily basis. Wilde’s own testimony after his fall is ample

My editor told me to read this book and write this review. Six hundred words, he said. Just like the psychiatrist Dr. Quinn instructed Charlie, the protagonist of said book, to write one thousand words a day. Therapy apparently. The big reveal is exactly why Charlie needs therapy. The suspense is meant to keep you reading. Charlie is known locally in the village of Ballyronan, Cork where he lives as a ‘gamal’ (‘a bit of God help us’). In medical speak that’s ODD. Oppositional Defiant Disorder. In practical terms it means he can’t resist reminding us how little he wants to be writing what we’re reading and what a waste

Does monotropa hypopithys, or yellow bird’s nest, still grow in Mickleham, Surrey, in the woods once owned by Sir Lucas Pepys the celebrity physician who, in ministering to King George III, ‘found the stool more eloquent than the pulse?’ The question is prompted by the Bodleian’s recent acquisition of a ‘Catalogus Plantarum’ kept in the 1790s by an anonymous Botanist who roamed the south of England looking for specimens and noting them down with meticulous care in an exact italic. The volume, snapped up from the Norfolk dealer Sam Gedge, contains some 75 alphabetically arranged pages, each including the plant’s Linnaean name, English name, the place where it was found

Philip Hensher was one of Granta’s 20 under forty in 2003, so what does he make of the new list? Writing in this week’s Spectator, he says that there are a dozen competent to superb writers on the list but you can keep the rest. ‘When you look at the seven truly regrettable inclusions it is hard to know what the judges were thinking of.’ Philip’s view is that the list ‘seems to have sprung from a list-making corporate machine’ in favour of bland orthodoxy. Philip writes: ‘Previous British lists have had the genuine air of discovery, sometimes uncomfortably so, as the magazine had to feature writers with more comic

The man who christened Wisden ‘The Cricket Bible’ had little religion. Wisden is an unprepossessing sight: a 1,500 page tome surrounded by a flame-yellow dust jacket covered in mud brown lettering. The book’s content often matches its artless appearance; thousands of statistics and scorecards that read like the turgid genealogical passages of Genesis. Abraham begat Isaac; Jack Hobbs scored 61,760 runs. A record of the chosen people is important; but it does not inspire belief. The record tells you nothing of how Abraham raised Isaac; neither do Hobbs’ stats tell you how he scored his runs. Bald facts contain little mystery, and what do those know of God who know