Six months before Vincent van Gogh’s death, the critic Albert Aurier, waxing poetical, wrote an article entitled Les Isolés on the then unknown painter. It raised to sainthood the solitary genius driven to insanity by an uncomprehending world. ‘Is he not one of the noble and immortal race which the common people call madmen but
I’m not altogether a fan of what the writer Sara Wheeler has called the Big Willie school of expeditions. ‘To me,’ I once intoned loftily, ‘exploration is not about conquering nature or planting flags or going where no one’s gone before in order to make a mark. Rather the opposite.’ It’s more about a spirit
Not far into The Life, Old Age, and Death of a Working-Class Woman, Didier Eribon quotes from this balladesque 1980 track by the French singer-songwriter Jean Ferrat: We have to be reasonable You can’t go on living like this Alone if you fell sick We would be so worried You’ll see, you’ll be happy there
‘Allies,’ declared Stalin on 8 February 1945, the fifth day of the Yalta Conference, ‘should not deceive one another.’ In order to defeat Hitler, Mussolini and the Japanese, the British, Americans, Soviets, French and Chinese had indeed all worked closely together. But in his meticulous, scholarly and highly enjoyable history of the second world war,
‘Christianity,’ writes Bijan Omrani in his opening sentence, ‘is dying in England.’ Does it matter? His next sentence makes it clear that, for him at least, it does. ‘In this generation, the religion that has defined the spiritual life, identity and culture of the country since its origins as a unified state in the 10th
Cock’s bones! This is a most wonderly historical novel, the very reverse of a wind-egg. It tells the story of Lambert Simnel, the youthful figurehead of a Plantagenet uprising against Henry VII in 1487. The historical Simnel is an elusive figure, and most of what little we know comes through Tudor propagandists. Jo Harkin fills
I must say that my feelings about the 1980s American rock band the Bangles were – unusually for me – moderate. I loved some of their hits while being left cold by others. They were pleasant. But after reading this book’s press release, I realised how sorely lacking in appreciation of their impact I’d been:
Olivier Messiaen was a French composer steeped in the solitude and ecstasy of Catholic mysticism: everything he wrote was dedicated to the greater glory of God. He was in thrall to the liturgical works of Stravinsky, but also to the percussive cling-clang of Javanese gamelan music and other eastern sonorities. His thirst for ‘un-French’ music
Salvador Dali’s wife Gala was born Elena Ivanova Diakonova in 1894 in Kazan, on the banks of the Volga. Her father was an abusive alcoholic who vanished when she was ten. Her mother, a midwife, moved the family to Moscow where Elena attended an exclusive school. But in 1913 she started coughing, so was sent
Psychosis and thriller writing are never friends. Even when told from the psychotic’s point of view, madness is always hard to portray since it involves a form of chaos irreconcilable with the resolutions we find in any thriller worth its salt. Havoc (The Borough Press, £16.99), by the American writer Christopher Bollen, is a remarkable
