Why do the French call an April Fool a poisson d’avril and a 1 April dupe a victime d’un poisson d’avril? I have always assumed it is because the victimes take the bait and swallow the hook; but Martin Wainwright tells us that the April Fish derives its name from ‘the dim-witted, bulging look of
One point in Robert Mugabe’s favour, despite the Zimbabwean patriarch’s brutally protracted autumn, is that he was never planted in power by a CIA-supported coup d’état. As Larry Devlin’s self-congratulatory yet revealing memoir makes clear, the same cannot be said of Zaire’s esteemed dictator, Joseph Désiré Mobutu, otherwise known as Mobutu Sese Seko. Army chief
Old men with dogs roam the neglected parkWhere they once played as boys. Now take a peepInto the lounge of Number Twenty ThreeThe Meads. Four sturdy youngsters sitBefore a slick computer, playing games.A milky, midget, artifical skyHolds them enraptured. Sterile bullets flashAnd flicker, stuttering across the screen,While Mother whisks around her microwavePreparing instant meals from plastic
The narrative trademark — or gimmick — of Joshua Ferris’s first novel, Then We Came to the End, is contained in the title: the book is told in the first person plural, which gives this story of Chicago office workers its initial powerful, even oracular, thrust. ‘We were fractious and overpaid,’ the book begins. ‘Our
This is a book about the failure of two marriages. One is destroyed by a past that refuses to slacken its grip, though the marriage itself has to limp on; the other is wrecked by a future impossible to avoid. They are seen through the eyes of four different people, two from one family, two from
South of the River is a stadium-sized novel of over 500 pages. It has the scope and ambition of an American McNovel — Don DeLillo’s Underworld, say, or The Corrections by Jonathan Franzen. At first it appears to be in narrative disarray, the plot leaping backwards and forwards in time. A theme soon emerges, however,
The Moghul monarchs’ way of life was an extravaganza of such breathtaking splendour that in comparison the Sun King’s Versailles seems understated. Both Shah Jahan and Louis XIV came to the throne in 1643 and their courts had much in common: architectural grandeur, luxury, a love of jewels and a flair for excess. What was
When David Rose visited Columbus, Georgia, to write a story about capital punishment in the United States, it drew him inexorably into a decade-long battle for justice on behalf of Carlton Gary, a black man on death row, convicted 20 years ago of a series of rape/murders of elderly white women committed some eight years
If you missed the exhibition of Glitter and Doom which ended last month at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York, this handsome hardback catalogue is a good armchair substitute. It contains three very readable essays — by no means typical of exhibition catalogues — and a wealth of colour illustrations. Sabine Rewald, the
‘Popular science’: for some readers this remains a problematic category. I’m sure proper scientists look askance at civilians reading such books on public transport, imagining their own abstruse specialities dumbed down for the hard-of-thinking. And the vast mass of arts graduates, who hate and fear science, remembering the bad trousers and unfortunate hairstyles of science
Auden, discussing Troilus and Cressida, remarked that major writers set themselves new challenges, and so risk failure, while minor ones are content to do the same thing as before and so risk nothing. There’s something in this, though, like many of his pronouncements, it’s too sweeping to be altogether true. (Besides which, the major/minor categorisation is
