You may never have heard of David Gentleman, because, unlike so many of the over-publicised charlatans who call themselves artists nowadays, he does not believe in personality cults. He is as modest as he is talented, which is saying something. But, even if you do not know his name, you will almost certainly have licked
Forty years ago V. S. Naipaul enraged Indians by describing India as ‘an area of darkness’. He also upset a great many Western liberals who were then discovering in India a land of all-pervading spirituality. Later, he returned to India to write more kindly about ‘a wounded civilisation’ undergoing a liberation of spirit through ‘rage
Books as glossy as this are seldom as good as this. It is a sort of economic miracle in itself: fat, quarto-size, packed with illustrations, maps and plans, wide-margined, legibly typeset, efficiently proof-read, Hong Kong printed and priced under £25 hardback. It would almost be worth buying if it were a politician’s memoirs or a
Finland declared independence from Russia in 1917 during the Bolshevik revolution. The subsequent civil war ended in victory by the White forces under Marshal Baron Gustav Mannerheim, a former officer in the uniform of the Tsar, later to become commander-in-chief of the Finnish army in the Winter War of 1939/40. Mannerheim had been a chevalier
Rumpole is Falstaff on the right side of the law. He is rumbustious, shrewdly distrustful of authority and filled with substantial appetites others find gross. Leo McKern’s television incarnation was unforgettable; his face had been hardened by confronting the world’s absurdities and mangled by the rigorous pursuit of his own pleasure. One was reminded of
After his mountainous Gladstone and Churchill and barely less substantial study of the post-1886 chancellors of the exchequer, Roy Jenkins here enjoys himself in what by his standards is a mere jeu d’esprit. His new book is a collection of essays on 12 cities which he has lived in or often visited and which are
The title is a slight puzzle, a tease. But quickly all becomes clear. Here is a book of painful but fictional recollections recounted by fictional novelist Imogen Bailey, which in turn become a real novel of both power and delicacy. Imogen, a young woman of great sensibility, was traumatised by the loss of her beloved
Ralph Steadman has always employed graphic spatter. The pen jabs, the ink spurts and – yoiks! – how the victims suffer. Eyes popping, they retch, they convulse, they become pinstriped roadkill. The projectile handling has extended from cartoons to illustrations (Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas) to caricature-biographies of Sigmund Freud and Leonardo da Vinci.
The subject of this intelligent biography was among the founders of the Modern movement in British art before the first world war, and a leading formulator of what he considered to be its principles. A philosopher/aesthetician, he was a friend of Epstein, Wyndham Lewis, Pound, Gaudier-Brzeska, and was thought a great poet by the young
On 19 August 1805, two months before his death at Trafalgar, Vice-Admiral Lord Nelson rejoined Emma Hamilton at their home in Merton after an absence of almost two and a half years. During that time, he had been continuously at sea, at first in the Mediterranean watching for Admiral Villeneuve to break out of Toulon
There was a time when our man at the BBC was the most famous foreign correspondent in India, his broadcasts reaching one fifth of the world’s population. Road-blocks and armed insurgents tended to melt when confronted by Tully-sahib, the man to trust, who understood the problems. For 30 years he trawled the sub-continent, covering its
When Ellen Macarthur was nine she saved her pocket money, by eating less, to buy her first little boat and slept on the floor of her bedroom so as to store the boat’s mast and sails. At 18 she decided that sailing round Britain alone ‘seemed to be the most natural thing to do’. At
Hugh Massingberd ‘It is difficult’, writes A. N. Wilson in The Victorians (Hutchinson, £25), ‘for me to conceive of a more agreeable life than that of a Victorian country parson.’ Reading his brilliantly panoramic, constantly stimulating and humanely wise portrait of an age and the characters who created it left me longing to have been
