A giant was born in 1914, an African giant. The same year European powers set about each other in the trenches a framework was laid out for a nation that over the next century would grow into Africa’s mightiest economy, one with a population so prodigious it will soon overtake every other barring China and
Ruth Rendell’s final novel, Dark Corners, is about how psychological necessity can drive perfectly ordinary people either to terrible deeds or to unwitting acts of great courage — and extraordinary things can happen quite by chance to anyone. Carl, the central character, is a young man pleased with his life. He has written a novel
Ten years ago, a philosophy professor at Princeton wrote a book with a provocative, slightly indecent title. It was a surprise bestseller, reaching number one on the New York Times’s list, and university book shops in America still do a roaring trade in copies of Harry Frankfurt’s On Bullshit, along with the usual Vonnegut and
When I applied to medical school, an experienced doctor offered me some advice: ‘Don’t give them reason to think you’re a “wounded healer”. They’re suspicious of that.’ The term is Carl Jung’s, by which he meant that personal difficulty is a powerful spur for joining a caring profession, but the results of such motivations are
According to this wonderfully thought-provoking book, human attachment to plants was much more evident in the 19th century than it is now. In those days people showed genuine wonder at their ‘strange existences and unquantifiable powers’, especially the British, who fashioned the most ambitious glass building of the age —the Crystal Palace in Hyde Park
When the novelist David Vann was 13, his father — a difficult, unhappy dreamer in his thirties, constantly in dread, as Vann puts it, ‘of becoming something other than what he had always imagined himself to be’, and who had failed first as a dentist and then as a commercial fisherman in Alaska — blew
Should you wish to have a good copy of the 1916 edition of Wisden, cricket’s annual bible, you should be prepared to part with at least £5,000 and, quite possibly, much more than that. This reflects its rarity — the Great War ensured that the almanac had a limited print run — but also the
In a recent book review, the historian Norman Stone wrote: ‘Maybe the second world war can now be left to novelists.’ Perhaps he was thinking of Allan Massie’s 1989 masterpiece A Question of Loyalties, an utterly convincing portrayal of a man making all the wrong choices for the noblest reasons in Vichy France. It’s such
The last time I cried was September 1989. That was my first week at public school. The reason I cried was that my allocated room-mate, a malevolent pixie named Toby Cox who later became one of my closest friends, had informed me that he ‘knew a lot of people’ at Harrow and he was going
weeding alongside beans in the same rush as them 6 a.m. scrabbling at the earth beans synchronised in rows soft fanatical irresponsible beans behind my back breaking out of their mass grave at first, just a rolled up flag then a bayonet a pair of gloved hands then a shocked corpse hurrying up in prayer
The front cover of this book describes the Hermitage as ‘the Greatest Museum in the World’. That sobriquet must go to the Louvre. The Hermitage is perhaps the second greatest, one which its current director Mikhail Piotrovsky calls an ‘encyclopaedic’ museum, housing ‘the culture of humanity, which is represented in all its variety…’ Not quite.
Up the stairs with flying feet, You would burst upon us, cheering Wellington’s funereal street. Fresh as paint, though you’d been ’railing Up from Scotland all the night, Or had just returned from scaling Some appalling Dolomite… Pundit, publicist and jurist: Statistician and divine; Mystic, mountaineer and purist In the high financial line; Prince of
I don’t like boxing. If I ever get into a boxing ring, I’ll be in the corner with the governor of California, Edmund ‘Pat’ Brown, who in 1963 called for ‘the abolition of this barbaric spectacle’ because another man had just been beaten to death in the ring. That man was Davey Moore, who had
It is fair to say that Jeanette Winterson is not Shakespeare, though I cannot imagine why any authors would accept these commissions to retell the plays — Margaret Atwood is lined up for The Tempest, Howard Jacobson for The Merchant of Venice — since the only certainty is that the texts will not be as
Patrick deWitt is a Canadian writer whose second novel, a picaresque and darkly comic western called The Sisters Brothers, was much praised and shortlisted for the Man Booker prize in 2011. For the follow-up, deWitt has produced a picaresque and darkly comic middle-European fairy tale called Undermajordomo Minor. Instead of brothers named Sisters, it features
Marcus Tullius Cicero was the ancient master of the ‘save’ key. He composed more letters, speeches and philosophy books than most writers of any epoch; but more important than any particular work was that so much survived to define his time. He had a secretary, Tiro, who can reasonably be given the credit for researching,
Forecasts have been fundamental to mankind’s journey from a small tribe on the African savannah to a species that can sling objects across the solar system with extreme precision. In physics we have developed models that are extremely accurate across vastly different scales from the sub-atomic to the visible universe. In politics we have bumbled
Reacquaintance with Germany is long overdue for most English people. Before 1914 it was at least as familiar as France and Italy. Tim Blanning, former professor of Modern European History at Cambridge, has already written brilliantly about Germany in books such as The Culture of Power and The Triumph of Music. His latest is a
‘You understand, Lenú, what happens to people: we have too much stuff inside and it swells us, breaks us.’ The line comes from the third of Elena Ferrante’s Neapolitan novels, but it offers a fair summary of a sequence that concludes in this fourth volume. Set in Italy between the 1950s and the present, and
I have never written much about the one-acre shaw of native trees I planted in 1994, even though it is the delight of my heart, especially when the wild cherries flame in autumn. That’s because I am well aware that en masse tree-planting is a niche activity, open only to the fortunate few. But no
