The subtitle of Lawrence Wright’s splendid God Save Texas (‘A Journey into the Future of America’) would be alarming if I found it entirely convincing. It’s hard to imagine a future where the Catholic Texan spirit of individualism would seriously overwhelm Yankee Puritanism, however mutated. In New England it’s about hard-earned old money shrewdly invested.
‘If you look at walls soiled with a variety of stains or at stones with variegated patterns,’ Leonardo da Vinci advised fellow painters, ‘you will therein be able to see a resemblance to various landscapes graced with mountains, rivers, rocks, trees, plains, great valleys and hills in many combinations.’ By an irony of history, Leonardo
’68 will do as shorthand. Most of ’68, as it were, didn’t happen in 1968. It was, at most, the centrepoint of a long accumulation of radical protest. It began with duffle-coated marches against nuclear war, a well-mannered and respectful movement whose spirit persisted to the end of the decade. (In October 1968, a rally
In the reign of Constantine, whose conversion to Christianity in AD 310 set the entire Roman world on a course to becoming Christian, a Palestinian scholar named Eusebius pondered the reasons for the triumph of his faith. Naturally, he saw behind it the guiding hand of God; but he did not rest content with that
On a night in Paris in 1914, Gertrude Stein was walking with Picasso when the first camouflaged trucks passed by. ‘We had heard of camouflage,’ Stein recalled, ‘but we had not seen it, and Picasso, amazed, looked at it and then cried out, yes it is we who made it, that is Cubism.’ The art
Sea Shepherd is a radical protest group made famous — or notorious — by the American cable TV series Whale Wars and by the support of numerous Hollywood celebrities and rock stars. Having previously concentrated on obstructing whale-hunting from Japan to the Faroe Islands, it now focuses on other devastating acts of marine plunder. In
On 20 July 1805, just three months before the battle of Trafalgar destroyed a combined French and Spanish fleet, the Emperor Napoleon ordered his chief-of-staff to ‘embark everything’ for the invasion of England that he had been dreaming of for two years. ‘My intention is to land at four different points,’ he explained to Berthier,
I saw a biopic about Morecambe and Wise recently. The actors impersonating the comedians were not a patch on the originals — how could they be? You need a genius to play a genius. I often wonder if my own HBO Peter Sellers movie would have been improved if someone fiery, of the calibre of
At the end of his study of Debussy, Stephen Walsh makes the startling, but probably accurate, claim that musical revolutionaries tend to be popular. We generally think of radicals as being primarily like Schoenberg, Charles Ives and Pierre Boulez, whose works, after decades, still mainly appeal to a small group of sophisticates. But if one
The British diplomat Robert Vansittart had been warning against Nazism for years, so it was a surprise when he and his wife showed up in Berlin for a two-week ‘holiday’ during the 1936 Olympics. ‘Van’ was impressed by German organisation. ‘These tense, intense people are going to make us look like a C nation,’ he
When Westminster Council granted planning permission for a statue of Millicent Fawcett in Parliament Square to mark this year’s centenary of women getting the vote, many people were puzzled. Few had heard of this feminist campaigner, and even fewer knew about the suffragist movement which she led. The suffragette Emmeline Pankhurst seemed a far more
Early every morning through the spring of 2002, US troops at Bagram airfield on the Shomali plains north of Kabul assembled on a makeshift parade ground. After the daily briefing, an officer announced the number of days since 9/11, read a short obituary of a victim of the attack and reminded the troops of their
‘True crime’ is a genre that claims superiority over imagination, speculation and fantasy. It makes a virtue of boredom and detailed accounts of procedure and paperwork, and characteristically narrates two things: the process of investigation and discovery, and the events that set them off. But what happens if those procedures can’t be narrated? What becomes
‘Tell me what you eat and I shall tell you what you are.’ The best known adage in food literature, penned by the French politician and gastronome Jean Anthelme Brillat-Savarin, divides all of us generally: the gourmands from the picky, the greedy from the careful, one nation from another, one culture from the next. Laura
Many believed in Australia for 1,000 years before its discovery. There had to be a commensurate weight — somewhere Down Under — to counter the northern land mass; an ‘unknown Southland’ which was crucial to maintaining the balance of the world. To confuse matters, this theoretical continent was dubbed for a while Austrialia del Espiritu
In 1932, the Daily Plainsman of Huron, South Dakota, ran a feature about a local woman convalescing in hospital. Grace Dow had been visited by her sister, Carrie Swanzey, who read a children’s book to her. What made this mundane story newsworthy was that the book was called Little House in the Big Woods, and
Last year, more than 6,000,000 people visited the Lincoln Memorial in Washington DC. By contrast, barely 80,000 went to General Ulysses S. Grant’s tomb in New York City. Some would argue that the neglect is no better than Grant deserves. But others, notably Ron Chernow, believe it’s time for a rehabilitation. Why do Americans pay
Mrs Thatcher once explained that she adored cleaning the fridge because, in a complicated life, it was one of the few tasks she could begin and end to total satisfaction. In this way are refrigerators evidence of our struggles, our hopes and our fears. Moreover, if you accept that the selection and preparation of food
For many of us, life has become global. Areas which were previously tranquil backwaters are now hives of international activity. Leisure travel has given us the possibility of first-hand exposure to once very remote places. You don’t have to be particularly privileged or adventurous to go on holiday in January to south-east Asia: two weeks
If you’re Jewish, or Jew-ish, or merely subscribe to the view that Jews should be trusted to recognise anti-Semitism rather than be accused of making false allegations to further their own malign agenda, the chances are you could do with a laugh right now. The resurgent far right’s threat feels frightening but expected, whether from
