On 28 August 2005 — Sheri Fink’s Day One — Hurricane Katrina reached New Orleans. The National Weather Service warned that ‘human suffering will be incrdible by modern standards’. Fink’s enormous book chronicles that suffering as experienced inside the Memorial Medical Centre, one of the city’s biggest hospitals. Traditionally, staff had sheltered from hurricanes in
Modern Architecture, capitalised thus, is now securely and uncontroversially compartmentalised into art history, its bombast muted, its hard-edge revolutions blurred by debased familiarity. You have been to Catford? You have seen a heroic vision compromised. Modern Architecture is no more threatening than abstract art, although the Swiss-French Le Corbusier retains a heady whiff of the
If this waiting is hellish, then the sick are limbo dancing; only those who are bent double, or on the floor, puddles of their former selves, have a hope of getting under the bar, progressively lowered as more contorted squeeze through. If the woman in a white coat is god, then the boy with bleeding
Once below a time (to quote the man himself) the bloated poet Dylan Thomas slouched back to New York’s Chelsea Hotel in the dead of night and informed his mistress that he had just drunk 18 straight whiskies, which he suspected was a record. He then dropped to his knees, lowered his head onto her
Tom Bower’s first biography of Sir Richard Branson, in 2000, was memorable for its hilarious account of the Virgin tycoon’s accident-prone ballooning exploits — and for its trenchant thesis that he had ‘toppled from his perch onto a slippery, downward path’, both in business and personal reputation. But what Bower depicted as ‘the beginning of
William S. Burroughs lived his life in the grand transgressive tradition of Lord Byron and Oscar Wilde and, like all dandies, he had a nose for hedonistic hot spots which he could mythologise along with himself. On the occasion of his centenary, Barry Miles takes us through these gorgeous, macabre scenarios with an attention to
On 15 September 1885, the world’s most famous elephant, Jumbo, was killed by a train. Jumbo, the star attraction at P.T. Barnum’s travelling circus, was crossing the track at a station in Ontario, Canada. His handler, Matthew Scott, saw the danger. But ‘the elephant, fatally confused, trumpeted wildly and ran towards the oncoming train’. The
Owls have more associations for us than perhaps any other family of birds, suggested Jeremy Mynott in Birdscapes, so it is puzzling that it has taken Collins 70 years to add this ‘Natural History of the British and Irish Species’ to its famous New Naturalist Series. It is of course primarily a zoological work, with
Like an old woman in a fairy story, Germaine Greer, now in her late seventies, has taken to lurking in a forest. Always inclined to reinterpret the world through her own changing needs and perceptions, and to instruct the rest of us accordingly, she has now written a book of passionate didactic energy about her
We critics seldom write our memoirs, perhaps because we skulk away our lives in dark corners, avoiding the public gaze, plying our shameful trade like streetwalkers or pushers of hard drugs. We might occasionally, in desperation, recycle our ephemera between hard covers. Edward Greenfield, the former record and music critic of the Guardian, has daringly
In 2004, ten days after I moved my family to a new life in India, I gave a reading at a small palace on the edge of the ‘pink city’ of Jaipur. Fourteen people turned up, of whom ten were Japanese tourists who had got lost. The next year, I helped organise a modest literary
London, 1794. It’s a different world from that portrayed by the Mrs Radcliffes and Anons of the time: rich young women are not all naïve and swoony in Katharine Grant’s first novel for adults. In Sedition, five girls (two of them sisters, the others unrelated) are more or less put up for sale by their
On his deathbed in Dublin in the spring of 1966, Flann O’Brien must have been squiffy from tots of Paddy. A bottle of the amber distillate was smuggled in to the hospital on April Fool’s Day by a couple of well-wishers. O’Brien rang the bell to summon a nurse. ‘Sister,’ he told her solemnly, ‘I
If a time traveller were to arrive in our world from, say, 1514 — a neat half-millennium away — what single feature would strike them most? What could they use on their return to try and explain the sheer weirdness of the future? A crowded mega-city? A hospital? An international airport? A computer? What about
The ‘dollar princesses’, those American heiresses who crossed the Atlantic in search of a titled husband, are familiar figures from the 19th and early 20th century. Less well known are the young ladies who made the much longer journey from Australia, and who, like their transatlantic counterparts, arrived in England with large fortunes, ready to
Sex, spies, aristocrats and atom bombs — the Profumo affair is in the news again, thanks to the recent Andrew Lloyd Webber musical about Stephen Ward. William Nicholson has chosen to hang his seventh novel around it in Reckless, which takes place between the end of the second world war and the Cuban missile crisis.
In Never Mind Miss Fox, Olivia Glazebrook’s second novel, the revelation of a long buried secret releases a Pandora’s Box of disasters. At the heart of the book is a disturbing sex scene between a 16-year-old girl and an older, soon-to-be-married man. With intelligent restraint, Glazebrook gives only a partial description of the event itself.
No one alive now has any adult experience of the first world war, but still it shows no sign of respectable ossification; no armistice of opposing historians seems in prospect. It maintains a terrible, vivid, constantly mutable life. Like the French Revolution, its meaning shifts from generation to generation and according to which politician happens
‘The Wood Thrush can sing a duet by itself, using Two separate voices,’ as opposed To the whip-bird, one cry, two creatures And nothing between them no, not even if you listen On Point Sublime we are one, we are one
John Keay’s excellent new book on the modern history of South Asia plunges the reader head first into some wildly swirling currents. Here are India, Pakistan, Bangladesh, not to mention Sri Lanka and Nepal, and a supporting cast of mini-states present and past that you may not even have heard of, all tumbling, overlapping, in
