In May 1913 a British delegation visited the United States to discuss plans for celebrating 100 years of Anglo-American peace. At their final meeting in New York’s Plaza Hotel, the representatives of both sides had just agreed on a five-minute silence to be observed across the English-speaking world on 17 February 1915, when Professor Hugo
Below the title of this book, engendering immediate distrust, lies the legend ‘Stories of Missing Works of Art and Literature.’ ‘Story’ is such a weasel word, implying a tale as much as truth; a fiction that when turned into a narrative develops into the fact that every schoolboy knows; or a real event embroidered with
On the morning of 31 January 1945, a private soldier in the United States army, a minor ex-con with a juvenile record for theft, called Eddie Slovik was put to death ‘by musketry’ for desertion at the village of Sainte Marie-aux-Mines in France. There had been no execution of an American soldier for desertion since
Lorna Gibb ends her book on Rebecca West by saying: ‘That she would be remembered because her work would go on being read was her greatest legacy.’ A more measured suggestion might be found in a sentence 20 pages earlier, from a 1973 TLS survey of her writing: ‘Dame Rebecca’s work has not fused in
Like many posthumous books from distinguished thinkers, this isn’t one. A book, I mean. Not really. The problem is that nobody seems to buy cobbled-together collections of previously published essays, talks and book reviews. The thing to do if you’re a publisher, therefore, is to give it a title that makes it sound like a
The first illustration in this absorbing survey of domestic service in 20th-century Britain is a group photograph of the household servants at Erdigg, the Yorke family home in Wales. Each holds an emblematic item; the housekeeper is defined by her bunch of keys, the butler holds a wine bottle and corkscrew, the footman, in full
Jane Dunn is something of a specialist on sisterhood. She has — we learn from the dedication — five sisters of her own; she has already written a book about the sisters Virginia Woolf and Vanessa Bell, and another about the cousins Elizabeth I and Mary, Queen of Scots. Now the du Maurier sisters are
No one could ever accuse Shereen El Feki of lacking in courage. To spend five years travelling around the Arab world in search of dildos, questioning women about foreplay and anal sex, is not a task many writers would relish. Sex and the Citadel is a bold, meticulously researched mini Kinsey Report, rich in anecdote
The Chandan Hotel is not a bit like the Exotic Marigold Hotel. It occupies, not a rambling rundown mansion, but a piece of pavement, about six feet by six feet, on Free School Street in downtown Calcutta. Here under the hotel sign, from time to time men doss down on string beds, shrouded from head
Andrew Solomon’s simple and powerful guiding idea in this book is that there are two sorts of identity that affect your place in the world. Your ‘vertical identity’ is what you share with your parents — and it usually, but not always, includes such things as race, religion, language and social class. Children are born
When Humphrey Carpenter published the first major biography of Benjamin Britten in 1992, many of the composer’s associates were still alive and breathing down his neck. Carpenter’s knowledge of the music wasn’t intimate, nor did he have available to him the primary source of the superb edition of Britten’s correspondence, now completed with a sixth
It is a truth universally acknowledged that secrets are toxic and break up families. Today we look back smugly on the bad old days of the stiff upper lip when skeletons were kept firmly locked in their cupboards. We think we know better. The English, once famous for their secretiveness and reserve, have become addicted
In 1818, an unknown critic in Blackwood’s Edinburgh Magazine went out on something of a limb. One day, he claimed, Jane Austen would be among the most popular of English novelists. By the middle of the century, with George Henry Lewes complaining that she’d been unjustly forgotten, this claim must have seemed even more unlikely
The phrase that gives this book its title is Graham Greene’s: The nightly routine of sirens, barrage, the probing raider, the unmistakable engine (‘Where are you? Where are you? Where are you?’), the bomb-bursts moving nearer and then moving away, hold one like a love-charm. Greene was apparently proud of ‘love-charm’: he used it more
Lots of people have subsequently discovered this important imperial maxim: ‘Don’t invade Afghanistan.’ But the first western power to demonstrate the point of it was the British, in the late 1830s. The First Afghan War is the most famous of Queen Victoria’s ‘little wars’ for its almost perfect catastrophe. The British went in, installed a
There are already two excellent books about the Profumo Affair — An Affair of State (1987) by Phillip Knightley and Caroline Kennedy, and Bringing the House Down (2007) by David Profumo — as well as five not-so-excellent ones by poor old Christine Keeler. Now Richard Davenport-Hines has marked the scandal’s 50th anniversary with An English
A fanciful and doubtless risky parallel between Charles de Gaulle and the Russian emperor Alexander I suggested itself while I read Marie-Pierre Rey’s superb new biography of the latter. Both men came to power through an act of political parricide: Alexander because he was tacitly complicit in the plot to overthrow his father, a plot
The passing of Jonathan Miller’s father Emanuel Miller — a very distinguished psychiatrist — was terrible. ‘His last words, as he reared up on his deathbed, were: “I’m a flop! I’m a flop!” ’ One should be cautious about being Freudian here — Emanuel might approve; his son wouldn’t; his son’s biographer might, slightly —
What does fashion look like? When intellectual or artistic vogues change, how do we know when they have happened? The most popular men’s trousers in the UK at the moment are probably ones in a sort of indeterminate beige colour, if you go by the number of people wearing them. But I don’t think that’s
When, many years ago, I finished reading Cecil Woodham-Smith’s fine and tragic The Great Hunger, I swore never to read another book about the Irish famine of 1845-9. But they continue to be published, and they do not always agree. Tim Pat Coogan’s The Famine Plot: England’s Role in Ireland’s Greatest Tragedy, whose title says
