When Humphrey Carpenter published the first major biography of Benjamin Britten in 1992, many of the composer’s associates were still alive and breathing down his neck. Carpenter’s knowledge of the music wasn’t intimate, nor did he have available to him the primary source of the superb edition of Britten’s correspondence, now completed with a sixth
On an impulse, you could eat these flowers up the way they’re floating, stemlessly, side by side like scoops of ice cream in a crystal cup. White and softly drizzled with syrup (almost creeping down from the top) and shyly turning inward still, each closed bud leaks red along the seams and gleams like a
‘This Machine Kills Fascists’ was the ambitious slogan that Woody Guthrie (1912-1967) painted on his guitars. By fascists he meant the entire American capitalist establishment during the Great Depression and after. A self-taught socialist, Woody wrote more than 3,000 songs, mostly in angry protest on behalf of millions of underdogs. As the ‘Dust Bowl Balladeer’,
Many novels deal with unhappy families. But happy families are relatively rare, especially in crime fiction, which is one of the many interesting features of Erin Kelly’s third book, The Burning Air (Hodder & Stoughton, £14.99). The MacBrides have always been close. Rowan has recently retired from the headmastership of a major public school. He
According to his mother, Neville Heath was ‘prone to be excitable’. He was that all right — and then some. In the space of two weeks in the summer of 1946, Heath murdered two women with such brutality that, as Sean O’Connor puts it with shuddering relish, ‘war-hardened police officers vomited on seeing them’. The
Unfortunately for the reading public, most of Bernadine Bishop’s working life has been spent as a psychotherapist. Having published a couple of early novels, she put aside her pen, first to become a teacher, and then a shrink: it was only after cancer forced her retirement in 2010 that she turned again to writing. I
I have no experience of small boys, I tell my son, driving him home. Well only you. He sits there pertly. They lose things, he chirrups. You must know that. Encouraged by this opening, I warm-up a mother’s inside info. So why did Jago kick Beastly? I quiz and, why did Ant fix his key-fob
A 465-page volume of short stories by a Native American author — it’s not, perhaps, the kind of thing everyone would automatically reach for, if they hadn’t already heard about it. Well, now you’ve heard about it, so you don’t have that excuse. Reach for it. Read it. Because the stories it contains (15 new,
A stomping bestseller is a hard thing to recover from. The author is doomed to see all future works compared and found wanting. Is his new book vivid? Certainly. Funny? Yep. Insightful? Sure — but not as good as that first, cherished work. Readers are loyal creatures. So it will always be for Rian Malan,
The Anfa Hotel in Casablanca has seen better days. Seventy years ago it was the grandest hotel in Morocco, good enough to house Winston Churchill and Franklin D. Roosevelt when they met in January 1943 to devise a strategy that would win the second world war. The views remain as fine and the bedrooms as
