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Beautiful thoughts for all occasions

Kahlil Gibran was 40 years old, a short — he was just 5’3” — dapper man with doleful eyes and a Charlie Chaplin moustache, and in the first throes of the alcoholism that would result in his early death, when in 1923 he published The Prophet. A collection of 26 prose-poems, written in quasi-Biblical language,

Changing lanes

It’s fair to say Sonja Hansen’s life has stalled. Forties, tall and ungainly, veteran of failed relationships, she’s an uncomfortable fit for modern life in bustling Copenhagen. Geographical, spiritual and emotional immobility is expressed in her physical lack of ease, including ‘positional vertigo’ which renders the manoeuvre of the title difficult. Not without a certain

Bear essentials

In Yoko Tawada’s surreal and beguiling novel we meet three bears: mother, daughter and grandson. But there will be no porridge or bed-testing here: these are bears with a difference. Tawada has form in animal-linked fiction: The Bridegroom Was a Dog won a major Japanese award. Writing in Japanese and German, she is a prizewinner

Charming old fox

Talleyrand was 76 when he took up the post of French ambassador in London in 1830. Linda Kelly deals only with the last phase of Talleyrand’s long and tumultuous career, but this short book brings him marvellously to life. He was not an impressive figure. Little over 5’3” in height, he walked with a limp

An epic for our times

Trailing rave US reviews, fan letters from Yann Martel and Khaled Hosseini and a reputation as ‘Doctor Zhivago for the 21st century’, comes this outstanding historical saga from debut novelist Sana Krasikov. It’s a dazzling and addictive piece of work from an author born in the Soviet Republic of Georgia whose family emigrated to New

Mach the Knife

The business of banking (from the Italian word banco, meaning ‘counter’) was essentially Italian in origin. The Medici bank, founded in Florence in 1397, operated like a prototype mafia consortium: it rubbed out rivals and spread tentacles into what Niccolò Machiavelli called the alti luoghi (‘high places’) of local power interests. Undoubtedly, Medici money was

The road to independence

Alone with her father’s dead body, Olive Piper says, ‘I don’t know anything, except what I feel, and how can anyone know more?’ In Susan Hill’s new novel, Olive’s acceptance of the primacy of feeling represents a coming of age. Her maturity is achieved at a cost. As in a number of her recent novels

Prophesying doom

Boualem Sansal’s prophetic novel very clearly derives its lineage from George Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four. A totalitarian surveillance state, a fundamentalist religious autocracy, is portrayed as being totally intolerant of free-thinkers. This is a powerful satire on an Islamist dictatorship. It is unsurprising that Sansal’s writings are censored in his native Algeria. The religious structure of

A genial green guide to 2000 AD

I can recall exactly where I was 40 years ago when I didn’t buy the first issue — or ‘prog’ —of 2000 AD. The just-launched sci-fi comic, featuring ‘space-age dinosaurs’, ‘the new Dan Dare’ and a ‘FREE SPACE SPINNER’, i.e. a mini frisbee, looked quite exciting and, at 8p, good value for pocket money; but,

Forbidden love and the beautiful game

Nowadays, most of us living in the liberal West agree that there can never be anything morally wrong with love between consenting adults. This is good for society but bad for novelists. The tale of the grand passion that runs foul of societal mores is a staple of literature. What is Madame Bovary if Emma

The mysteries of colour

When Australia imposed generic packaging in its war on cigarettes, there was consumer research into the most deterrent colour. Pantone 448 was chosen, a sort of sludgy green-brown. When it was described as ‘olive’, Oz’s federation of olive growers formally complained. Certainly, colours move us. Interior designers know that yellow makes people angry, while in

Melanie McDonagh

Reason and faith

Roy Hattersley would never have been born had it not been that his mother ran away with the parish priest who instructed her in the Catholic faith before her marriage to a collier — the priest conducted the wedding; a fortnight later they eloped. This deplorable episode had one happy consequence: the birth of Roy,

Secrets of the secretaries

The minister’s private secretary wrote to another cabinet minister about the previous day’s cabinet meeting: They cannot agree about what occurred. There must have been some decision, as Bright’s resignation shows. My chief has told me to ask you what the devil was decided, for he be damned if he knows. Will you ask Mr

Descent into hell

In my work as a reviewer, a small, steady proportion of all the books publishers send me concern the Holocaust. With middle age has come a curious foreshortening of my perspective on modern history so that, paradoxically, the Nazis’ inhumanity has begun to seem less distant in time and, therefore, more horrible still. Fortunately I

Night of the living dead

On 5 February 1862, the night Abraham Lincoln and his wife gave a lavish reception in the White House, with the civil war swelling outside and their 11-year-old son Willie dying of typhoid fever upstairs, what was the state of the moon? Was it a ‘fat green crescent’? Or was it ‘yellow-red, as if reflecting

Father, son and holy ghost

No disrespect to any of the present incumbents, but Karl Miller (1931–2014) was a literary editor in an age when such jobs mattered. Between the late 1950s and the early 1970s he not only ran the books pages of two weekly magazines — The Spectator, and the Paul Johnson-era New Statesman — before moving on

Carve their names with pride

‘Women,’ Captain Selwyn Jepson, SOE’s senior recruiting officer, once wrote, ‘have a far greater capacity for cool and lonely courage than men.’ This questionable assumption is not actually the reason why the women were recruited. That was down to their ability to move around enemy-occupied territory carrying messages, arms or heavy wireless sets without arousing