This is not exactly an autobiography — John Mortimer has written three already, one about old age — but more like a collection of reminiscences designed to inspire and warn his grandchildren of the delights and pitfalls of life. It is a testament, the ‘Will’ of his title, in which he bequeaths to them the
Martha Gellhorn, an American who lost faith in America, was one of the most important war-reporters of the 20th century. She was not interested in briefings from the top brass, though she sometimes used her blonde charm to get the top brass to fly her where she needed to go. What she did, in her
If it is to be interesting, contemporary history has to be a battle between good guys and bad guys. In his The Roaring Nineties Professor Joseph Stiglitz lets the reader know at an early stage in the proceedings that he is a good guy. As he says in the preface, when he first fell in
All the clichés are true: travel refreshes the taste for living; it brightens the jaded mind, it stimulates and deludes. The border that is crossed in leaving the familiar behind is the same one whether the journey is travel at its most serious — on perhaps the Terra Nova or the Endurance — or a
As you went into the tower door of the church at Marsh Baldon (Oxon), there used to be two wall-tablets. One was to the relations of Sir Christopher Willoughby, who died in 1808, and the other was To the Memory of Friends, listed as John Lane, Elizabeth Lane, Phanuel Bacon, Margaret Bacon and Ann Barton.
What is going on here? What on earth is going on here? Christopher Ricks, the world’s leading critic of poetry in English, Frank Kermode and the American Helen Vendler his only rivals, has devoted, has lavished 500 pages of hard-core, hardback, exegetical analysis to the words which propel Bob Dylan’s songs. The issue is not
The great popular success of Forster’s Howards End, published in 1910, meant that he was under pressure to set to work on a new novel, and in the following year he did so, but in a mood of self-doubt. He told himself it was wrong to force oneself to write; that before attempting a new
World history is pitted with world wars. Last century was conceited enough to call its pair the First and Second. One of the turning-points of that Second was the Anglo-American landing in Normandy on 6 June 1944, of which the 60th anniversary falls next year. David Stafford, a leading 20th-century historian (once a professor at
Very occasionally one comes across a book which, in its unexpected delights, inspires one to leap about wild with praise, and rush out to buy copies for friends. This first work by William Newton, retired doctor, will surely have this effect on many readers. It is, simply, the story of remarkable teenage years in the
The perfect anthology, like the perfect hors d’
Yeats was a great poet who was also the industrious adept of a batso mystical philosophy. Do we have to absorb the philosophy before we can appreciate the poetry? If we are lucky enough to be in a state of ignorance, the question won’t come up. The poetry will get to us first. Suppose you’ve
