Byron Rogers Rhys Davies by Meic Stephens (Parthian, £20). This is the first full-length biography of the grocer’s son from the Valleys who, in the course of a long and industrious life spent mainly in London (where guardsmen were), wrote over 100 short stories and 20 novels and was hailed as the Welsh Chekhov. Helpfully,
Mark Mason JFK’s Last Hundred Days by Thurston Clarke (Allen Lane, £20) brilliantly captures Kennedy’s entire life through the prism of his final months. Deliberately thrusting his crotch for an official portrait, musing about assassination (he even acts it out in a game of charades, covered in ketchup), folding his monogrammed handkerchiefs to hide the
Before ‘nationalism’ became a dirty word, it was the inspiration for all sorts of idealistic and reform-minded people. This was never more true than in the history of music. Clearly, subsequent events have discredited some of those 19th-century ideals. It is striking, however, that we have become uncomfortable with Wagner’s German nationalism while continuing to
It feels the height of ingratitude to blame Jane Austen for anything, but it probably is her fault that most people seem to think that the only impact that the Napoleonic War had on British life was to bring Mr Wickham and the militia into the lives of the Bennet girls. It is certainly true
This is the most sensible and systematic interpretation of George Orwell’s books that I have ever read. It generously acknowledges the true stature of the great works — most notably, Animal Farm, Down and Out in Paris and London and The Road to Wigan Pier. It rightly sees the second world war as having brought
In the vast Benedictine monastery of Monte Oliveto Maggiore between Siena and Rome, the cycle of frescoes depicting the life of St Benedict by Giovanni Anionio Bazzi includes a charming self-portrait of the artist standing with a couple of pets at his feet, for all the world a 16th-century Italian Dorothy with a brace of
The centenary of August 1914 is still almost a year away, but the tsunami of first-world-war books has already begun. The government tells us that 1914 must be commemorated, not celebrated, and ministers worry about British triumphalism upsetting the Germans. But the debate about Germany’s responsibility for the outbreak of war in 1914 won’t go
I couldn’t decide on starting England’s 100 Best Views whether it was a batty idea for a book or a perfectly sensible one. Why write about something that begs to be seen? Would this not be better as a collection of photographs, with helpful accompanying maps and perhaps a checklist that, once filled in, entitled
Monstrous innocence’ was the ruling quality that Colette claimed in both her life and books. Protesting her artless authenticity, she was sly in devising her newspaper celebrity and ruthless in imposing her personal myths. She posed as provincial ingénue, wide-eyed young wife of the Paris belle époque, scandalous lesbian, risqué music-hall performer, novelist of prodigious
There is a fine old tradition of distinguished literary men addressing their loved ones by animal-world pet names. Evelyn Waugh saluted Laura Herbert, the woman who became his second wife, as ‘Whiskers’. Philip Larkin’s letters to his long-term girlfriend Monica Jones are full of Beatrix Potter-style references to the scrumptious carrots that his ‘darling bun’
One of the great problems for any historian writing of 1914 and the slide into conflict is that everyone knows the causes of the first world war and those of us who don’t still imagine that we do. It is clear that no historian can simply ignore the causes and get straight down to the
Why do we know so little about the Habsburg empire, given that it is the prime formative influence on modern Europe? Its pomp gave us the art, music, literature and pageantry of our high culture; its relationship with the Ottoman East and burgeoning European protestantism drew our religious and our political maps; its collapse fomented
This is a book about the clash of faith and reason over the truth or otherwise of a catastrophic, world-shaping flood — and it doesn’t once mention climate change. The debate here is much less stale. David Montgomery is a prize-winning geology professor at the University of Washington, Seattle, and he recounts the history of
Once upon a time, there was an art scholar called John. He spent his days admiring marble statues, his nights in praying that he might be allowed a real-life statue as his wife. And in due course, he met a beautiful girl. She was a bit younger than him, but that was OK, because it
France’s early 21st-century Protestants are eco-friendly, gender-sensitised and respectful of the Fifth Republic’s laïcité. But their ancestors were a less accommodating lot. La réforme in the France of the 16th century was well-educated, predominantly urban and organised as part of a pan-European Protestant movement which set out to subvert the territorial sovereignty of Catholic princes.
Willa Cather is an American novelist without name-recognition in Europe, yet she had a wider range of subject and deeper penetration of character than other compatriot novelist of her century. Hemingway, Fitzgerald, Faulkner, Bellow and Roth vie with, but never beat, her emotional force and the beauty of her prose. The great obstacle is that
As parvenus, the Tudors were unsurpassed. In the early 15th century no one would have predicted that within a couple of generations these minor Welsh land-owners would mount the English throne and rule the kingdom for more than 100 years. Notwithstanding their ‘vile and barbarous’ origins, their name would become synonymous with historical glamour and
So: Russia’s imperial possessions on the Pacific North West of America. Remember those? No. Me neither. Something vague about the Russians flogging a bit of Alaska to the United States in the middle of the 19th century perhaps. But until I’d read this book I didn’t know that at one point Continental Russian America, not
She sits there on the cover exuding sex and wealth and a certain knowingness. Mrs Lionel Phillips, who came from a modest background in South Africa, had the good sense to marry one of the ‘Rand Lords’ who made their piles in the new gold and diamond fields. She and her husband bought their way
A fraught subject, this, and one which makes it difficult to sustain undiluted admiration for Churchill. Lawrence James is the doyen of empire historians, and has traced the great man’s engagement with the enormous fact of the British empire. What emerges is a sense of the individual nations being dealt with at the end of
