In my English school our hymns were mostly in Latin which, despite years of instruction, rendered them sufficiently opaque to be appropriate. What few hymns we sang in English seemed rather weepy, which didn’t appeal. Therefore, emerging from that place into a wider England, it was a surprise to discover there was a culture of
John Cage was the composer of 4’33”, the piano performance piece that consists of 4 minutes and 33 seconds of complete silence — except for the mutterings of the audience — and Imaginary Landscape No. 4, in which 12 radios are played at the same time for several hours. He was also the inventor of
The Head would like to see us. Now, Inside: before the day is done. But we are having too much fun Out here. We will not listen now, Now smoke obscures the pot-holed yard. This is going to be hard. The Head cannot believe we’ve gone This far. Have we been fighting? Yes, We have.
Doris Lessing was last week awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature. Philip Hensher traces the career of ‘one of the greatest novelists in English’. Doris Lessing’s Nobel win came as a surprise to everyone, the author apparently included. Despite her enormous, decades-long international reputation, she was less fancied than dozens of patently smaller writers. That
Yard Sale Oh, but it is incalculable — this side yard full of her things laid out on folding tables ranged along a chain link fence. Her Tupperware cake saver takes precedence over egg timers hand mixers, Pyrex, 4-H ribbons, and forty-seven souvenir shot glasses, one from almost every State. The cake saver’s ridged base
First published in 1836, this novella shows Alexander Pushkin’s mastery of almost any form. The following year — after a miraculously productive short period — he died in a duel over the alleged adultery of his wife with the adopted son of the Dutch ambassador. Evocative, swashbuckling, romantic and sentimental, The Captain’s Daughter centres on
John Watkins is Head of English Heritage’s Gardens and Landscape Team. Tom Wright was for 25 years Senior Lecturer in Landscape Management at Wye College. They are two professionals who have made an immense contribution to gardening in this country and abroad. This book makes available their combined lifetimes’ knowledge and experience. The authors begin
Michael Billington is the Val Doonican of theatre criticism. He’s been at it since the days of black and white telly and he shows no sign of giving up. Starting at the Times in 1965, he moved to the Guardian in 1971 and there he remains, rocking, crooning and warbling. He reckons he’s spent 8,000
J. B. Priestley described the forgotten interwar novelist Dorothy Whipple as the Jane Austen of the 20th century. Posterity has balked at this assessment — as indeed, within Whipple’s lifetime, did both publishers and readers. Although in 1932 her third novel, Greenbanks, topped the bestseller lists in the Observer and the Sunday Times, by the
There is a wonderful set of medieval wall tiles from Tring Abbey in the British Museum depicting the legendary infancy of a particularly mutinous and unappealing Jesus. A charitable interpretation of the sequence might suggest that they are the chronicles of a Child Who Did Not Know His Own Strength, but as one wretched little
Sceptical readers will immediately wonder whether 14 years of any composer’s life really deserve over 1,000 pages of biographical examination. The second volume of John Tyrell’s Janacek certainly goes into events in extraordinary detail — I had a definite sense of foreboding of things to come when, on page 361, it is reported that in
Roy Foster’s new book has its origins in the Wiles Lectures delivered at Queen’s University Belfast in May 2004. This is a distinguished lecture series initiated in 1954 by Herbert Butterfield’s Man on his Past with such high points as Alfred Cobban’s The Social Interpretation of the French Revolution (1964) and Eric Hobsbawm’s Nations and
The Cure (After Yannis Ritsos) Although the fever had left him months before, he kept to his bed: the invalid, his room a swelter of sweat and booze and that meaty smell from the hide draped on the floor. The creature had been skinned alive, he said; the underside of the pelt still carried the
If book reviews in The Spectator were, God forbid, ‘starred’, this self-styled biography of James Bond would merit just two stars out of five. The rationale behind so mediocre a score, however, would not be, as you might expect, that Pearson’s book is a curate’s egg, good in parts. Rather, it would reflect the fact
By the time The Shock Doctrine lands on your desk, it’s hard not to feel suspicious. Seven years after her bestselling No Logo, Naomi Klein’s latest book promises to expose how natural disasters and political crises across the globe have been exploited by a cabal of secret operatives seeking fresh slates to introduce draconian financial
Belfast to Edinburgh For Michael and Edna Longley At the beginning of descent I see Wind-turbines cast their giant, spinning arms. The Southern Uplands send out false alarms, Semaphore shadows, all waving to me. Then still descending, as the windows weep Or something out beyond the tilted wing Surrenders to the planet’s suffering, Plural phenomena
There is a brand of Toscano cigars called Garibaldi. Until given a new design recently, the packet proclaimed him as ‘the hero of two worlds’ as well as a devoted smoker of cigars (‘naturalemente Toscani’). The description was fair. Garibaldi was the most famous man of his time, the most famous since Napoleon. His image
Despite its pun, Waterlog is not quite a catalogue of an exhibition; rather it documents, expands — and in some cases might seem to seek to justify — the contents of an exhibition held first in Norwich and now in Lincoln to honour the East Anglian resonances of the writer W. G. Sebald. It clearly
In my intermittent career as an expert witness, I have observed that the most eminent men make the worst witnesses. Speaking from the lonely heights of their professional pre-eminence, they sometimes claim that what undoubtedly happened could not have happened, and what could not have happened undoubtedly did happen. Their intellectual distinction and busy schedules
What a strange, gifted little martinet he was, this celluloid Nixon who demanded that his every word, no matter how trite or banal, was preserved exactly by his ‘field secretary’ while another acolyte, the ‘chair boy’, ensured that wherever he was he could sit down without looking. Surrounded by these perpetual attendants and telling his
