Given the outcome of recent military campaigns in Iraq and Afghanistan, it is pertinent to look for one particular quality in our senior commander: honesty. In other words, after blaming vainglorious politicians for precipitating us into war without adequate preparation or resources, it is reasonable to ask, how capable are our generals of admitting their
Every fashion era has its monster and in ours it’s Karl Lagerfeld, a man who has so emptied himself on to the outside that there is no longer any membrane between what he is, what he does and what he looks like: a macabre dandy for the electronic age, a Zen businessman as effective as
There is a hoary Cold War joke about a newly invented translating machine. On a test run, the CIA scientists feed in ‘The spirit is willing, but the flesh is weak’, press the button to translate it into Russian, and then re-translate it into English. It emerges as ‘The vodka is passable, but the meat
The historian of China Frank Dikötter has taken a sledgehammer to demolish perhaps the last remaining shibboleth of modern Chinese history. This is the notion, propagated in countless books and documentaries, that Mao’s regime started off well, deservedly coming to power on a wave of popular support and successfully tackling the evils left behind by
It is by now surely beyond doubt that those governments committed to fighting the war on drugs — and on paper that’s all of them — face a total rout. To understand the scale of the defeat, all you need to know is that Barack Obama and David Cameron have both been unable to deny
Like Miranda Seymour, the author of this considerable work on Anglo-German relations, I was raised in a Germanophile home. I spent summer holidays on the Bodensee and, after graduating from university, lived for a year in Munich and then another in Berlin. It seems to me a pity that my children and most of my
I didn’t even have to say: No need to explain, I understand. It was in his look — Look after your mother — it said. A bridge of light between our eyes, fainter than glass. And I thought, it’s taken forty years to build this bridge, how it had to be invisible to cross over
In both his novels and non-fiction, D. J. Taylor has long been fascinated by the period between the wars. Now in The Windsor Faction, he brings us a counterfactual version. What would have happened in 1939 if Mrs Simpson had conveniently died three years earlier, leaving Edward VIII free to stay on the throne? Would
In the first draft of the screenplay for the film Gladiator, the character to be played by Russell Crowe (‘father to a murdered son, husband to a murdered wife’, etc) was named not Maximus, but Narcissus. Which might have made for a slightly different movie. One can imagine the emperor Marcus Aurelius (Richard Harris) telling
Philip Ziegler is best known for his biographies, often official, of politicians, royalty and soldiers. They include Harold Wilson, Edward VIII and Louis Mountbatten, whose correspondence he also edited. What has driven him to write about an actor — and one whose life has been fully covered in so many biographies, the most recent being
The term ‘419’ is drawn from the article in the Nigerian penal code that addresses fraud. However, it has transcended its origins in statute and become shorthand for trickery across West Africa. When I worked as a correspondent in Sierra Leone, 1,400 miles from Nigeria’s capital Abuja, the phrase was in widespread use. Deception is
Novels about growing up have two great themes: loss of innocence and the forging of identity. With this sparky, sharp-eyed and often painfully funny novel, her fourth, Charlotte Mendelson (winner of the Somerset Maugham and John Llewellyn Rhys prizes and now on the Man Booker longlist) explores both through the story of a girl and
In Germany in 1923 money was losing its value so fast that the state printing works could not keep up. The work had to be contracted out to 130 different printing firms, all churning out marks with the lifespan of mayflies. Only ten years earlier, the mark had been as good as gold. Then Germany
His publishers describe this ‘ground-breaking book on evolution’ by ‘the most celebrated living heir to Darwin’ as ‘the summa work of Edward O. Wilson’s legendary career’. As emeritus professor of biology at Harvard, Wilson, now 84, is revered across the world as the doyen of Darwinists. And in announcing that he will offer a new
This biography has somewhat more news value than most literary biographies. Its subject worked hard to ensure that. After 1965, J.D. Salinger, having published one novel, a volume of short stories and two pairs of novellas, withdrew permanently from public life. His last publication, a long story entitled ‘Hapworth 16, 1924’, was never printed in
Sound the trumpets. Let rip the Byzantine chorus of clattering bells and gongs, the thunder of cannons, drums and flashing Greek fire. Raid cellars and let champagne corks fly. Eighty years after Patrick Leigh Fermor’s epic trudge across Europe, 20 years after the death of his long-suffering publisher Jock Murray, ten years after the passing
The unlikely heroine of Mave Fellowes’s Chaplin & Company (Cape, £16.99) is a highly-strung, posh-speaking, buttoned-up 18-year-old with the unhelpful name Odeline Milk. Utterly friendless, she dislikes both humans and animals, but she has one huge, far-reaching private passion. She wants to be a mime artist — like the great Marcel Marceau. To launch her
Almost 30 years after his death, François Truffaut remains a vital presence in the cinema. Terrence Malick and Wes Anderson are among maverick directors who have acknowledged their debt to him, while Noah Baumbach’s recent Frances Ha is in part an hommage à Truffaut in a way the French director would have appreciated: for example,
This is an unusual book: a Spanish historian writes the life of an English historian of Spain. In doing so, as the historian in question is the extraordinary Raymond Carr, still with us at 94, María Jesús González also writes about the rural West Country of his childhood, the English class system, educational opportunities in
Thick, sentimental and with a narrative bestriding four decades, Meg Wolitzer’s The Interestings feels above all like a Victorian novel, one which finds itself as comfortable in our time as it would have been 150 years ago. It’s an American story ruled by classic English themes. Fate, coincidence, class and envy are what bind —