Antony Beevor In Captives and Companions (Allen Lane, £35), Justin Marozzi has brought together a scholarly yet vivid history of slavery in the Islamic world in all its varied forms. Everything is covered, from the former slaves recruited by the Prophet, who achieved immense influence, to agricultural slavery, military conscription with Mamluks and Janissaries, the
Katherine Mansfield refused to be pinned down. Aged 17, she told a friend she planned to lead ‘all sorts of lives’, already chafing at the limitations of her parents’ bourgeois world. She warned her first lover that she liked ‘always to have a great grip of life, so that I intensify the so-called small things
You wait ages for an intelligent, literate children’s book, then two come along at once. There’s Philip Pullman’s The Rose Field and Katherine Rundell’s The Poisoned King. Of the two, Rundell’s is easier on the wrist: 336 pages to Pullman’s 621. She is an accomplished writer, the author of a study of John Donne. A
Such was Paul Poiret’s influence that he is the only couturier whose clothes are known to have caused several fatal accidents. At a time (1910-11) when fashion was loosening up he persuaded chic women into the hobble skirt, a garment so narrow round the ankles that only tiny, mincing steps were possible, with the result
Essentially this is a book of two halves –before and after Cat’s conversion to Islam in 1977 – and the first half is immeasurably the more engaging. He was born Steven Georgiou in 1948, the youngest of three children, to a Greek-Cypriot father and a Swedish mother, with a much older brother and sister. His
Zadie Smith was born in 1975 in the UK to a Jamaican mother and a British father, and grew up in the ethnically multi-shaded London borough of Brent. Her novels and essays often conjure the polyglot confusion and vibrant streetscapes of Willesden in north-west London where she went to school. Dead and Alive takes us
Even if you’ve never seen Adrian Lyne’s 1987 thriller Fatal Attraction, you’ll know what a ‘bunny boiler’ is. When Alex (Glenn Close) slaughters her lover Dan’s family pet and leaves it simmering on the stove, she invented a universal shorthand for the obsessive, unstable woman who can’t take romantic rejection. In the film, Alex is
‘It happened, therefore it can happen again,’ warned the Holocaust survivor Primo Levi, explaining why witnesses to the horrors of Nazism and genocide must be listened to, and why it is important for future generations to stay vigilant against a repeat of such atrocities. The underlying assumption is that the Nazis’ rise to power and
Film noir was the term coined by the French in the late 1940s to describe the genre of Hollywood crime movies which probed the darkness that lay in the shadows cast by all that bright Californian sunlight. The Beach Boys, who broke through in the early 1960s with a repertoire that hymned, in five-part harmonies,
At the end of the 1970s, the Illustrated London News printed a special edition to commemorate the decade. What did it focus on? Music, from David Bowie to Bob Marley? Some of the best films Hollywood has ever produced, from The Godfather on? Political crises, such as Watergate and the end of the war in
Few readers can claim to be what Samuel Taylor Coleridge called ‘Mogul diamonds’ – those who not only ‘profit by what they read’, but ‘enable others to profit by it also’. If such people were rare in Coleridge’s time, then today, when reading is in dramatic decline, they are scarce enough that even the white
We are familiar with the myths and realities of French resistance and German occupation, but less so with the story of Belgian resistance. It was highly creditable, spanning both world wars, and has long deserved to be better known. This book should help ensure that it is. The title refers to the legend of the
With his three-piece suits, poodle hairdo and bizarrely bendy physique, Tom Gilbey looks like he was created in a secret laboratory beneath the streets of Turnham Green by the Wine Marketing Board. But I have it on good authority that he is a real person. Gilbey came to prominence last year as the self-styled ‘wine
