In chess, the king is never taken. When defeat is inevitable, the losing player resigns. And so it is in war. Defeated leaders sue for terms. Or they are toppled and replaced by fresh leaders who sue for terms, like Napoleon in 1814 and 1815, Reynaud in 1940 and Mussolini in 1943. ‘Wars are finally
Since I began to watch films on video and not so much in cinemas, I have found that I sometimes get the itch to rewind reality itself, in order to check on what I have seen. There must be many oddities in my way of seeing of which I am less aware. Julian Rothenstein,
E. L. Doctorow became an American household name with the publication of Ragtime in 1975. It was a jaunty book (later a successful movie) which lightened an American mood darkened by the lingering war in Vietnam. It benefited from having authentic historical figures — Harry Houdini and J. P. Morgan among them — interspersed with
Bees are news. The advent of a sinister condition dubbed Colony Collapse Disorder has concentrated many minds on the future of the honey bee, not least in the US where the disorder is prevalent and pollination by bees accounts for billions of dollars’ worth of agricultural produce. Bees are news. The advent of a sinister
It is 60 years since Nikolaus Pevsner published Middlesex, the first in ‘The Buildings of England’ series. It is 60 years since Nikolaus Pevsner published Middlesex, the first in ‘The Buildings of England’ series. The small, southern county was chosen for the prosaic reason that it didn’t need much rationed fuel for research. His achievement
The looming centenary of the world’s most notorious shipping calamity, when the Titanic ruptured its starboard flank as it scraped the side of an iceberg on its maiden voyage in April 1912, presents publishers with a tactical challenge. The looming centenary of the world’s most notorious shipping calamity, when the Titanic ruptured its starboard flank
What grabbed me about Newman and His Contemporaries was a puff from an Australian writer quoted on the back. This book, it said, ‘is like a Victorian Dance to the Music of Time’. Sounded like my kind of thing, especially since the central figure interlocking the characters is in this case not Widmerpool but that
‘The two great gifts of the Greeks to humanity, said the poet Hölderlin, were Orpheus-Love and Homer-Song.’ ‘The two great gifts of the Greeks to humanity, said the poet Hölderlin, were Orpheus-Love and Homer-Song.’ The great German poet’s statement shows him as belonging to our own phase of Western civilisation. For us Orpheus — born
This novel frightened me several times. Here is how Chan Koonchung, brought up in Hong Kong but now living in Beijing, does it. He sets the story in a very near future, 2013, that closely resembles China today, but with two creepy additional elements: an entire month, during 2011, has vanished from most written records,
Alexis de Tocqueville is a prophet for all seasons, continually reinterpreted as the zeitgeist shifts. He sailed to Jacksonian America to compile a report on the prison system, and ended up writing a meditation on the nature of democracy that remains in print after 160 years. In this latest addition to the fertile field of
She was born Kathleen Annie Pannonica Rothschild. Her father, Nathaniel Charles Rothschild, an ardent lepidopterist, named her Pannonica, Nica for short, as a tribute to the region in Hungary where he met her mother and captured a particularly interesting moth. Nica married a French aristocrat and became the Baroness de Koenigswarter. When he divorced her
