As a teenager, like many of his class and generation, Adam Nicolson encountered Homer in Greek lessons. The subject matter seemed remote and uninteresting — ‘like someone else’s lunchtime account of a dream from the night before’ — and the words dead on the page — ‘as if the poems were written in maths’. But
Jean Trumpington’s memoir, published as she closes in on her 92nd birthday, is an absolute blast from the opening page. She was born in 1922 to a posh but poor English father and a loaded but nouveau American mother. ‘The paint business’ filled the coffers. They lived in a Georgian townhouse with ten servants, just
I faltered during the preface to this account of the rise of the female (British) diplomat. Helen McCarthy, a historian at London University’s Queen Mary college, describes herself as being drawn to this subject by meeting diplomats (male) who were ‘bloody brilliant’. I feared a breathlessly deferential narrative. Then, as I started reading the text
Think haiku, netsuke, moss gardens… Small is beautiful. Japanese art, a scholar of the culture once commented, is great in small things. Pushkin Press has a track record for bringing foreign language works, classic and contemporary, to a British readership, and with this pocket-sized, elegant duo they celebrate a modern Japanese master virtually unknown here.
Personally, I have always been sensitive about a credibility gap, a difference in prestige, between literary and visual cultures. More than 30 years ago, Frederic Raphael wrote a teasing piece in the TLS mentioning an Italian designer with a funny name, as if to disparage design as a whole. I boldly wrote in defence and,
For all would-be novelists whose stumbling block is that they can’t resist describing every single sensation in depth — the smell of a bedroom, the sound of a door closing, the feel of a sofa, the experience of getting in and out of a bath — and who therefore find it hard to push a
Rachel Kelly, a respected former journalist on the Times, might seem the most blessed of women: five children, marriage to the banker Sebastian Grigg and a large house in Notting Hill. However, soon after her second child was born she suffered a breakdown of a most acute kind. Terrified, and in such distress that all
