The Delft painter Johannes Vermeer, now probably the most beloved artist of the Dutch Golden Age, had an unusual career. His reputation in his lifetime was small. For some reason he painted almost exclusively for the van Ruijvens, so only those who knew the family would have been able to view much of the work.
When Winston Churchill dined with the crème de la crème of American finance in New York on 28 October 1929, a facetious toast was made to ‘friends and former millionaires’. Despite a 13 per cent drop in the Dow after another day of market turmoil, the assembled banking titans felt they wouldn’t just survive the
‘I have had more direct clinical experience than almost any other forensic psychiatrist of assessing and managing lone-actor perpetrators of massacres,’ writes Paul Mullen, professor emeritus at Monash University in Australia, in his introduction to Running Amok. He’s got non-clinical experience, too. In 1990, when he lived near Aramoana in New Zealand, he was disturbed
By the late 1980s, the war against pornography was lost. Feminists, as well as Christian moralists, mainly in the UK and US, had been raging against the industry since the early 1970s. In 1980, the American feminist author Robin Morgan coined the phrase: ‘Pornography is the theory, rape is the practice.’ In 1983, alongside the
For a newly independent Georgia, the 1990s were a dark time literally and figuratively, as civil war raged, criminality flourished and the power stayed off. The Lack of Light, Nino Haratischwili’s fourth novel to be translated into English, turns that darkness into a gripping story about the power and pitfalls of female friendship that seeks
In 1951, the American author Peter Matthiessen moved to Paris. The scion of a wealthy Wasp family, he had studied at Yale and served in the navy, narrowly missing the second world war. He was then recruited to the CIA by James Jesus Angleton and sent to Paris, where he kept tabs on left-wing French
In the middle of The Rose Field, the third volume of Philip Pullman’s The Book of Dust trilogy, Lyra has a conversation with an angel about storytelling. What matters most in a dream, says Lyra, is not information but emotion. It reads like Pullman’s own manifesto: the power of the His Dark Materials and Book
December 1917. For years the Ottoman Turks have been trying to spark a jihad of the world’s Sunni Muslims, hoping that Muslim subjects of the British Empire in India will rise in revolt. Now that Tsarist power in Russia has collapsed, the roads through central Asia are open and the war-weary British have virtually no
When I interviewed Andrew O’Hagan ten years ago about his Booker longlisted novel The Illuminations, the most striking thing that he said was: Friendship is more important than almost anything. I always thought it was a sort of deliverance, having a good friend, that they would bring a generosity and an unprejudiced eye to your
