Book Reviews

In Keep Talking, David Dimbleby takes us through a gentle romp of a stellar, unrivalled broadcasting career spanning, incredibly, 70 years. There are no great revelations (even the name of the BBC boss who tried to fire him from Question Time is withheld), no dramatic insights to make us rethink well-known events, no ponderous thoughts on broadcasting for media studies students to pore over (andthe book is all the better for that). As the face of the BBC’s coverage of our most important national events over the decades, from general election nights to every major royal ceremony, Dimbleby has been authoritative, well-informed, impartial and appealing. These middling memoirs – more

In 2000, the author Stefan Hertmans was disturbed to discover that the house in Ghent he had lived in for more than 20 years and restored from dilapidation had once been home to a Flemish collaborator with the SS, Willem Verhulst. On the pink and brown marble mantelpiece which Hertmans had become so fond of Verhulst had kept a bust of Hitler. The fact that Hertmans would use this as a springboard to write a work of auto-fiction seems inevitable, given that his International Man Booker longlisted novel War and Turpentine (2016) and his later novel The Convert (2019), have their roots respectively in notebooks belonging to his grandfather and

Shirley Hazzard’s ‘untimeliness’ is a recurrent aspect in most descriptions of her, both the writing and the person. She came to represent ‘a vanished age of civility’: there is something Victorian about her novels, despite the last of them, The Great Fire, being published in 2003, by which time she was starting to resemble ‘an exotic bird blown off course’. This first biography, by Brigitta Olubas, an academic who has already written a monograph on Hazzard and edited her collected short stories, gives us a portrait of the self-created artist throwing off the ‘suffocating gentility’ of postwar life in her native Australia, its ‘tyranny of distance’ from what she saw

One recent estimate claims there are 4.732 billion buildings on Earth, but it’s difficult to establish a credible methodology to count them. Is Manhattan’s Rockefeller Center, created out of swaggering pride and ambition, in the same category as a shanty hut in an Algerian bidonville? Unless you live in a desert, buildings are unavoidable, making architecture not just a necessity for survival but the art form most pregnant with meaning. When I was a boy I wanted to be an architect. Not because I was interested in drain schedules, load paths, wrangling with local authorities or designing kitchen extensions but because architecture seemed the most powerful expression of style. We

I’ve never met John Barton. But reading his books on the Bible I keep thinking of him as an early church father, perhaps St Jerome. Barton has the obligatory beard, he’s an ordained minister in the Church of England, and his writing is sage and measured, scholarly but accessible. Jerome was of course the translator of the Bible into Latin. In the fourth century his Latin Vulgate caused a riot in Tripoli, then part of the Roman empire, because Jonah was portrayed sheltering in the shade of a fast-growing ivy rather than under a gourd, as in the traditional rendering. (This accounts for the ugly spherical fruit dangling from the