Robert Service has set himself a formidable task. He has to explain how the son of a wife- beating, dirt-poor Georgian cobbler, brutalised by drink, became a Russian despot as ruthless as Ivan the Terrible. A master of his sources, which include the partially opened Soviet official archives, Service triumphs in portraying Stalin’s personality in
The Wolof call it a goui, the Tswana a moana, the French the calabash tree and all Australia the boab. Welcome to the strange world of the baobab tree, the subject of Thomas Pakenham’s excellent new book. The tree was discovered for Europe in 1749 by a 21-year-old Frenchman, Michel Adanson, after whom it has,
This beguiling little book, nostalgically illustrated with faded family snapshots, describes the long and arduous life of a tortoise who died earlier this year at Powderham Castle near Exeter, aged 160. According to the blurb, Timothy survived six monarchs, two world wars and many generations of the family who looked after him. The story that
Jeremy Bernstein is extraordinarily, perhaps uniquely, well qualified to write a biography of Robert Oppenheimer that is both authoritative and extremely readable. In the first place, he is himself an eminent physicist, a professor for nearly 40 years and the author of some 50 technical papers. In the second place, he is an exceptionally gifted
Millions, perhaps even billions of words have been written about al-Qaida over the past three years. We know of the group’s origins as an Office of Services in Afghanistan in the 1980s, when Osama bin Laden used CIA cash to recruit and train foreign fighters for that last gasp of the Cold War, the jihad
Nicola Lacey wanted to write an ‘intellectual biography’ of Herbert Hart, on the model of Hermione Lee’s Virginia Woolf. It’s a tall order. How to cope with the fact that the philosophy of law is even harder to understand than Virginia Woolf’s novels? And though an academic lawyer like Lacey is the best person to
Miles Fitzalan-Howard was one of eight children of a fairly distant cousin of the previous two Dukes of Norfolk, and so grew up in the give and take of life in a large family. Up until the age of about 30, he had no great expectation that he would succeed his predecessor, who was married,
A question posed early on in Mark Cousins’s book is bound to spur a reviewer’s pride: ‘Who are Griffith, Dovzhenko, Keaton, Ozu, Riefenstahl, Ford, Toland, Welles, Bergman, Truffaut, Ouedraogo, Cissé, Dulac, Chahine, Imamura, Fassbinder, Akerman, Scorsese, Almod
During the mid-17th century the idea gained ground in various parts of Europe that the world was about to come to an end. Bewildered by the effects of widespread war and revolution, bad harvests and a miniature Ice Age taking the form of savage winters, people made ready for the sounding of the Last Trumpet,
It is 50 years since Peter Porter arrived in ‘rain-veiled Tilbury’ from his native Australia. ‘I came, I saw, I conjured,’ is how he summarises his career. Death haunts this collection from first to last. The opening poem uses the sea as a metaphor for existence. Its initial line, ‘The engine dies,’ is both a
This book, like so much of the modern western population, is obese. It weighs three pounds one and a half ounces (1.4 kg) and runs to 1,148 pages. I read it in a series of closely connected long sessions, hoping thereby to retain the thread, but unfortunately there is not much of a thread to
The major challenge faced by biographers of artists is the almost impossible one of dealing with equal authority with their lives and works. It is tempting to wonder whether this is not one of the reasons why so few of them are written by art historians, although there are of course heroic exceptions, of which
This is a strange and wonderful novel that deserves the most serious attention. Whenever Ron- ald Blythe’s name comes up in conversation the next sentence is always going to be, ‘Didn’t he write Akenfield?’ Akenfield is the unclassifiable classic of over 30 years ago, the portrait of Blythe’s birthplace in rural Suffolk and the memories
The late Paul Getty has left gardeners a surprising legacy. Gardens of the Roman World by Patrick Bowe was published in America last year by Getty publications and the copyright belongs to the J. Paul Getty Trust. Did our run-of-the-mill publishers miss a trick here? I imagine the proposal for a book about Roman gardens
