This is a treasure house of a book, filled with curiosities and evidence of a rare breadth of patient investigation. Anyone who has read one of Graham Robb’s books, from his early biographies of classic French writers, through a wonderfully amusing study of 19th-century homosexuals, to a series of historical and geographical studies of France
Edward FitzGerald had a good story about rowing across Lake Windermere at the end of May 1835 with his old friend Alfred Tennyson. As they rested on their oars and gazed into the clear, still water, Tennyson recited some lines from his work in progress, ‘Morte d’Arthur’, describing how the Lady of the Lake fashioned
Slavery was – and importantly continues to be – a moral abomination. Its existence in the 21st century is a disgrace. Whole communities such as the Uighurs are subject to forced labour; two years ago it was estimated that 5.8 million people were living in slavery in China. And slavery is a problem much closer
‘If Eve had had a spade in paradise, we should not have had all that sad business with the apple,’ claims the narrator of the novel Elizabeth and her German Garden (1898). The author, Mary Annette Beauchamp, eventually adopted the pen name Elizabeth von Arnim, merging her identity with the fictional character she had created.
In October 2018, Andrew Hussey, the convivial and courageous observer and analyst of the political and social travails of modern France, was cycling back to his office after lunch through the rather staid and un-bohemian environs of the Boulevard Raspail on the Left Bank in Paris. To the ‘middle-aged man who already has a heart
Stephen Greenblatt tells the story of being approached in the 1990s by a screenwriter who wanted to make a Shakespeare -biopic. Greenblatt repeatedly told him to forget Shakespeare and look instead at his predecessor Christopher Marlowe. The screenwriter knew what he was about and ignored Greenblatt’s advice – the result was Shakespeare in Love. The
Few among Muriel Spark’s circle of friends would have disputed the judgment of Storm Jameson when recommending Spark to the publisher Blanche Knopf in 1963: ‘I warn you, or remind you, that you are taking on a tartar. She has worn out two Macmillan directors already.’ Even tartars are forgiven, however, when they exhibit a
In 1944, T.S. Eliot is 56 years old. He seems older: ‘I am getting to be a wambling old codger.’ He is war-worn: ‘I have taken, when in London, to sleeping in my teeth.’ As a fire-watcher sharing shifts, his sleep is hampered by understandable pudeur: ‘I haven’t got enough phlegm to undress completely, and
On 22 June this year, seven B2 Stealth bombers flew on a 37-hour round trip from bases in the US to drop 14 30,000lb bombs on two nuclear facilities in Iran. A third was attacked with cruise missiles fired from a submarine, possibly in the Persian Gulf. Few can say with any certainty how much
Plutarch says that Julius Caesar dined with friends the day before he was assassinated. When conversation turned to considering the best way to die, Caesar looked up from the papers he was signing (being in company never stopped him working) and said, without hesitation: ‘Unexpectedly.’ Thanks partly to Shakespeare, Caesar’s has a claim to be
This is a brave and learned book. I would recommend it to anyone interested in the history of Africa; who has taken sides in the recent quarrel about ‘Rhodes Must Fall’, in Oxford or other parts of the world; or who wants to entrench themselves in contrary positions in our apparent ‘culture wars’. It is
Sometime after the Long Parliament met in November 1640, a seamstress living in London called Katherine Chidley decided that she didn’t much like the way that a man was telling her how to do her Puritanism. So, taking advantage of the recent collapse in traditional censorship controls, she published a pamphlet, The Justification of the
Ettore Majorana vanished in March 1938. According to Frank Close in Destroyer of Worlds, the 31-year-old Sicilian physicist ‘probably understood more nuclear physics theory than anyone in the world’, and was hailed by Enrico Fermi as a ‘magician’, in the elevated company of Newton and Galileo. Majorana was also an ardent fascist; yet he was
These legendary lives need the clutter cleared away from them occasionally. Lawrence Durrell and his brother Gerald turned their family’s prewar escape to an untouched Corfu into a myth that supplied millions of fantasies. It still bore retelling and extravagant expansion recently, if the success of ITV’s series The Durrells is any sign. (One indication
In several homilies, the late Pope Francis spoke of the ‘grace of feeling shame’. What a strange idea! Nobody wants to feel shame. Adam and Eve, after all, first felt shame only after being expelled from the Garden of Eden. Shame was God’s punishment: they felt ashamed of what had never troubled them before, namely
‘In 50 years’ time,’ Augustus John gloomily reflected following his sister’s death on 18 September 1939, ‘I will be known as the brother of Gwen John.’ He was right. In 2004, when the Tate mounted a joint retrospective of Augustus and Gwen John, it was Gwen who had become the major artist. The ‘variable strident
It was a journey Bruce Chatwin hankered to make: to Southampton and the grave of General Juan Manuel de Rosas, the exiled Argentine dictator described in the Southampton Times after his funeral in 1877 as ‘one of the most cruel, remorseless and sanguinary tyrants who ever existed on Earth’. Chatwin died before I could accompany
In 1995, Dame Muriel Spark, then one of Britain’s most distinguished living writers, was interviewed for a BBC documentary. During filming, the show’s editor commented that ‘her biographer must be the most depressed man in England’. Three years earlier, Spark had personally anointed Martin Stannard as the writer of what she intended to be the
To most people, the salient qualities of Gertrude Stein are unreadability combined with monumental self-belief. This is the woman who once remarked that ‘the Jews have produced only three original geniuses – Christ, Spinoza and myself’. Of the reading aloud of her works, Harold Acton complained: ‘It was difficult not to fall into a trance.’
In 2014, in the course of his inquiry into shamanism, the anthropologist Manvir Singh spent time with the Mentawai people on the Indonesian island of Siberut. He estimated that among the 265 residents he managed to interview, 24 were male shamans, or sikerei. These ‘specialists’, as he puts it, were uniquely empowered to commune with
