When the great Jewish-American art expert Bernard Berenson died in 1959, he had acquired the status of a sort of sage. He was the relic of a prewar culture that had vanished. He was an embodiment of the idea of connoisseurship that had at once given birth to a great boom in art collecting and
There is one last James Bond book from the late 1950s that remains unpublished. We will not find the typescript lurking in the archives, nor hidden amongst the papers held by Ian Fleming’s estate, for this book is not about James Bond but written by Bond himself. It is from Fleming’s 1959 novel Goldfinger that
A building bearing testimony to the power of eternal Russia; a timeless symbol of the Russian state; a monument to Russian sovereignty. To the modern eye, the Kremlin fortress seems as if it had always been there, as if it had never changed and never will. All of which is utter nonsense, as Catherine Merridale’s
How many writers would give their eye teeth to have a book reissued 2,500 years after their death? It certainly beats being pulped after a year or two. And who better to receive the Penguin Hardback Classic treatment than Herodotus, the fifth-century BC ‘Father of History’, he to whom historians today owe so much, whether
Vernon Scannell was a thief, a liar, a deserter, a bigamist, a fraud, an alcoholic, a woman-beater and a coward. Plenty of material for a biography, then, especially given that he was also a novelist, a critic, a memoirist, a boxer, a teacher, a broadcaster, a loyal friend, a passionate lover and ‘a fun grandfather’.
His nearby town wore annual evening-dress, cheap jewellery of lights, white fur and bright drapes of Santa red which might impress late shoppers on this final trading-night, persuading them to spend their all before indifferent time slammed shut the last shop door. He heard hyena voices and he saw splashed vomit on the pavement as
Of a dashing political rival, François Mitterrand once remarked: He was more intelligent than I was, he thought faster than I did, he was more seductive to women. In some ways, he gave me a complex. But he lacked perseverance. The man of whom Mitterrand spoke was a certain Félix Gaillard, whose claim to fame
A couple of years ago, while tracking down paintings for the Public Catalogue Foundation in the far north of Scotland, I had the chance to see a rarely displayed sequence of banners, created in 1993, telling the story of Earl Rognvald’s epic voyage to Jerusalem in 1151. Suspended between the pillars of the shadowy nave
Soon after moving to London at the age of 20, Nina Stibbe wrote to her sister Vic saying, ‘Being a nanny is great. Not like a job really, just like living in someone else’s life.’ She was working for Mary-Kay Wilmers, the editor of the London Review of Books, and her letters home to Lincolnshire
Theodore Roosevelt and the Progressive Era are well-worn subjects for both professional and amateur historians, so it’s pertinent to ask why Doris Kearns Goodwin devoted so many words —and her considerable reputation — to the writing of The Bully Pulpit. Kearns’s thesis seems clear enough: at the close of the 19th century, mythically egalitarian America
1. Cat Honour Hot Tin Roof 2. Frank Hen Stein 3. Ark A Deer 4. Hammer Day S 5. Hiss Tory Boys 6. Comma Tea O Fair Oars 7. Core K Sea N Chalk Circle 8. Tie Man O Fat Hens 9. E D Puss 10. Head R Gar Bleu
Early on in this dazzling new biography, Martin Gayford compares Michelangelo, with his daunting artistic tasks, to Hercules, the subject of an early (and now lost) sculpture. A Michelangelo biographer is likewise faced with an intimidatingly Herculean task. ‘Few other human beings except the founders of religions,’ acknowledges Gayford, ‘have been more intensively studied and
Try not to meet us in the flesh We’ll disappoint you if you do, Our dandruff and our garlic breath Are better tucked away from view. Try not to catch us off the cuff We’ll topple your romantic dreams Not concentrate or smile enough, You’ll see us parting at the seams. You hang our pictures,
‘You have no idea,’ wrote the publisher Ralph Hodder-Williams in 1929 to one of his authors, what terrible offence Journey’s End has given — and terrible pain too, which is a great deal more important. I think you will agree that the chronic alcoholic was extraordinarily rare. He was referring to R.C. Sherriff’s controversial tragedy
Writing about Napoleon is a risky business. It exposes the author to the brickbats of the blind worshippers for whom he is a numinous hero and the equally challenged detractors who see in him only the petty tyrant. By the same token, most historians find themselves negotiating a slippery path between approval and censure of
This book begins with Simon Winchester becoming a US citizen two years ago: ‘I swore a solemn oath before a federal judge on the afterdeck of the warship USS Constitution in Boston Harbor.’ On several occasions during the 450-plus pages that follow, I wondered if becoming a US citizen had driven him a bit mad.
For much of its history the Danube has been a disappointment. It looks so tempting on the map but, far from being a natural motorway for trade and ideas, its sheer awkwardness has thwarted generations of visionaries, engineers, soldiers and dictators. Freezing up, expanding into baffling flood-plains, racing through narrow defiles and randomly scattered with
In January 1976 New York’s late-lamented National Lampoon produced a bicentennial calendar as a contribution to the general rejoicing. For every day of that year a selection of disastrous news events was commemorated. Presidents of the United States were cut down, marine life was wiped out by oil spills, native Indian women and children were
