They lived in barrels, they camped on top of columns, or in caves: the lives of the sages are often inconceivable to the modern reader. Seneca, however, that rich, compromised sophisticate of the first century AD, is instantly kin, his voice weary with consumerism, his problems definitively first-world. ‘Being poor is not having too little,’
My father was always arguing and falling out with people in the neighbourhood, but when he clashed with Mister Jones, our friendly, cheerful greengrocer, I remember my brother shouting in dismay, ‘Oh not Mister Jones as well!’
Early in the second section of Aatish Taseer’s The Way Things Were we are presented with a striking description of Delhi. The city’s bright bazaars and bald communal gardens, among them ‘the occasional tomb of a forgotten medieval official’, are ‘stitched together with the radial sprawl of Lutyens’s city’. Taseer acknowledges the landscape’s beauty, but
In a 2008 essay Zadie Smith held up Tom McCarthy’s austere debut Remainder as a bold exemplar of avant-garde fiction, comparing it favourably to Joseph O’Neill’s lush Netherland, which she deprecated as incarnating the worst delusions of realism. Funny how rapidly Smith’s distinction has disintegrated: McCarthy’s latest, Satin Island, bears an uncanny similarity to O’Neill’s
In recent years there has been a fashion for so-called ‘new nature writing’, where the works are invariably heavy with emotion, while the descriptions of place and wildlife often serve as a hazy green backcloth against which the author depicts the main subject —their own personalities. It comes as something of a shock, therefore, to
With the odd exception — I think principally of Charles Moore’s life of Margaret Thatcher — the genre of political biography has known hard times lately. There are few faster routes to the remainder shop, other, of course, than the political memoir, most of which I presume are now written to create a tax loss
Jeremy Clarkson has been getting it in the neck from Twitter’s (I was going to say) tricoteuses — but social media is both thicko mob and gleeful, literal-minded public executioner. A couple of weeks ago it was George Galloway; and the week before that — oh, I can’t remember. I had a theory about 21st-century
Los Angeles ghetto life — thrashed, twisted and black — is not a world that most Americans care to visit. Black Angelinos can be — and for a period in the 1980s and early 1990s, were — murdered for a trifle. The slightest act of ‘disrespect’ may call for a tit-for-tat killing, where an entire
My father was handed over a shop counter when he was a day old. His aunt had tried to pass him off to a hospital and couldn’t find any takers so she brought him into a draper’s shop, put him down on the counter and declared she didn’t know what she was going to do
In 2011, Anders Breivik murdered 69 teenagers in a socialist summer camp outside the Norwegian capital of Oslo, and eight adults with a bomb attack. His hatred was directed at the children of Norwegian politicians who had allowed immigration to contaminate the sturdy bond (as he saw it) of Nordic race and nationhood. ‘You will
Anthony Quinn’s fourth novel, set in London’s artistic and theatrical circles in 1936, is not the kind in which an anguished protagonist sits in lonely contemplation for 80 pages at a stretch. It moves along at a clippy pace, introducing us to a succession of appealing characters and throwing in a lurid murder for extra
I’m not sure I know what the mark of merit is in a first novel, any more than in a fourth or a 14th. If nothing else, though, it’s surely an opportunity to make a new friend, to lock eyes with a stranger across a crowded room. So it was, one enchanted evening in February,
John Aubrey investigated everything from the workings of the brain, the causation of winds and the origins of Stonehenge to how to cure the fungal infection thrush by jamming a live frog into a child’s mouth (you hold it there until it — the frog — suffocates, then replace it with a fresh frog). He
A few months ago I went to a lunch at Univ, my old college in Oxford, to celebrate the 95th birthday of my Ancient History tutor George Cawkwell. There were toasts and speeches, including one from George himself and my fellow student Robin (now Lord) Butler, who did a brilliant imitation of George getting all
Although the young women of the 1950s hovered on the cusp of change, many did not know it. Valerie Gisborn was the exuberant 15-year-old daughter of ‘a sharp-tempered, anti-social’ mother riddled with ‘neurotic restrictiveness’. But Valerie had fallen in love. She had met Brian in 1949 at the local ballroom in Leicester, her sole permissible
In this autobiography, Mary Portas doesn’t dip into the fabled store of her talents by giving an account of her countrywide progress as monarch and oracle of retail, but conjures a nostalgic cornucopia of the mid- 20th-century brands and frankly cheesy TV personalities (she often dressed up as Jimmy Savile) that dazzled her youthful Hertfordshire
Books ought to be able to stand on their own, but perhaps it is important to know this about David Vann: a year after his stepmother’s mother had shot her husband and herself, his father also shot himself. Vann was 13 years old. The reason it’s important to know this is that what might seem
Thomas R. Flynn has written an avowedly ‘intellectual biography’ of Jean-Paul Sartre, which might seem fitting. Sartre was nothing if not an intellectual — so much so that one struggles to think of him as anything but an intellectual. Albert Camus, Sartre’s great rival for the title of the 20th century’s most famous thinker, was
You can’t accuse John Gray of dodging the big questions, or indeed the big answers. His new book The Soul of the Marionette: A Short Enquiry into Human Freedom isn’t really that short and certainly isn’t confined to a reflection on human freedom. As a reviewer you’re often faced with books that are so bereft
The title of A.D. Miller’s follow-up to his Man Booker shortlisted debut Snowdrops refers not to lovers but to two British men who befriend each other in their early twenties in 1993 when in the US. Among the sights they see on a tour of Yosemite is a pair of old trees with a conjoined