In the autumn of 1995 Jessica Mitford, the youngest of the sisters, known to one and all since childhood as Decca, sat down at her desk in Oakland, California to answer a list of questions put to her by a journalist. ‘Yes, still consider myself a communist!’ she wrote, adding, ‘So do the undertakers, I’m
In the 1960s I lived in Hampstead, though all these years I have managed not to write a novel about Hampstead dinner-parties. The area was, and still is, rich in second-hand bookshops. There was one bookseller, long since dead, whose shop I used to visit, not to buy books, but to listen to his talk.
The story of Dr John Snow’s investigations into the causes of the cholera epidemics in mid-Victorian London has been written up several times, most recently in a book by Sandra Hempel which I reviewed in these pages six months ago. So do we need yet another account of them? Perhaps not, except that Steven Johnson
My one contact with Conrad Black was an exchange of letters following his review in the Daily Telegraph of a book about the 1798 Irish rising. In this he had described the French landing as their most successful military intervention in Britain since Hastings. Helpfully I wrote to remind him of their landing in 1216,
This sensationWe say is the nationActing its destiny.How like is itTo the smaller act which here we see,The incomplete Devil paying a visit? We know it is our Fate to lack power —Is this our excuseThat we are very smallAmong demagogues whose job is to chooseThe Few’s good or the Good of All? Perhaps at homeThought might
Aspiration. Aspiration. Aspir- ation is still the watchword for publishers of gardening books. How many heavy, glossy productions filled with Get-the- Look pictures does the average gardener need? Especially when what is always peddled and praised tends to emphasise the haute couture of horticulture. There is a fashionable tendency to over-intellectualise about design. This is
This is the second time The Fortnight in September has been reviewed in The Spectator. On its first appearance, my predecessor applauded ‘more simple human goodness and understanding … than in anything I have read for years’. The year was 1931. Three-quarters of a century has passed, and what to that earlier reviewer was a
In 1958, half way through the century here recorded, the late and much lamented National Book League put on the first ever antiquarian book fair, with 24 members of the Antiquarian Booksellers’ Association exhibiting. ‘We hope,’ wrote The Book Collector, ‘that the ABA will be encouraged to make this an annual event.’ It did, and
The seemingly unstoppable rise of the exhibition catalogue happily does not mean that nothing else gets published, and my selection of glossy delights to drive away the Boxing Day blues has more than its fair share of goodies that were not born in museums. The Royal Tombs of Egypt by Zahi Hawass (Thames & Hudson,
The Prix Goncourt was awarded, as of right, to Jonathan Littell for Les Bienveillantes (Galli- mard). Les Bienveillantes, the Kindly Ones, is the name usually given to the Furies. The narrator of this masterly novel, Max Aue, the director of a lace factory, is writing his account of the second world war, in which he
Writing here (18 November), Anita Brookner described Joseph Roth’s reports from France 1925-39, The White Cities, as ‘her best read of the year’. I’ve had a copy for several months now, and I keep dipping into it and always finding something new, surprising and delightful. The rediscovery of Roth has been one of the happiest
