When presented with a title of this kind, many readers think they know what to expect: drugged-up child soldiers, wince-inducing brutality, ranting demagogues, rebels in women’s wigs. This, thankfully, is not that book. It is something more nuanced, elliptical and elegant. Ghana is in a different league from Liberia, Guinea or Sierra Leone, its traumatised
Some novels gaze and report and argue: others just sing. There are some writers who love and respect the visual arts, and want to bring them into prose — Henry James is one. A work freezes into an act of contemplation and description, as in the Bronzino set piece in The Wings of the Dove.
James Wyatt was considered by George III to be ‘the first architect of the kingdom’, but he was also the unluckiest, or perhaps most careless, architect of his day. Fonthill Abbey, the Gothic extravaganza he designed for William Beckford, collapsed after just 25 years. He started building a new palace for the king at Kew,
For good or ill, black West Indian culture is synonymous with youth culture in Britain today. Even among white teenagers, a Jamaican inflection (‘buff’, ‘bruv’) is reckoned hip. The ‘Jamaicanisation’ of British cities quickened after Jamaica’s independence in 1962, when more West Indians migrated to Britain, and London was poised to become the most Jamaican
Twenty years ago Pat Barker won acclaim with Regeneration, her novel about shell-shocked army officers undergoing treatment at the Craiglockhart psychiatric hospital for soldiers during the first world war. Her new novel is a close scrutiny of parallel atrocities of 1914–18. As in Regeneration, some characters are based on real-life figures. Several scenes are set
Sitting down to inspect the final volume of Pierre Coustillas’s monumental trilogy, I decided to start by counting the number of titles by or about George Gissing (1857–1903) that gleamed from the bookshelf hard by. There were 45 of them. Next, I decided to count the number of these items with which Professor Coustillas was
This may sound a little orientalist, but Tangier has some claim to being the most foreign city in the world. Back in the day, its position at the northernmost tip of Africa was regarded as the edge of civilisation — more than that, as the edge of what was known, the edge of everything. Here
The title of Alwyn W. Turner’s book could deter readers. Even the Hollywood film The Secret Lives of Dentists promised more excitement. John Major sought the creation of a classless society in the 1990s. He confused this with equality of opportunity and social mobility. Efforts to engineer classlessness always end in tears. George Orwell was
The last time David Peace wrote a novel about football he got his publishers sued for libel, which may help explain why his new one avoids invention wherever it can squeeze interest out of such stony matters of record as team sheets and attendance figures. Red or Dead follows the legendary manager Bill Shankly from
Charles Cullen, an American nurse, murdered several hundred patients by the administration in overdose of restricted drugs. Hospitals should be safe places but they are actually rather dangerous: mistakes are made, accidents happen, medics may be careless or just exhausted. But although many patients die when they should have recovered, very few die at the
Many books have been written about the corruption, venality and incestuousness that characterise Washington DC, but none has been as highly anticipated or amusing as This Town. Written by Mark Leibovich, the senior national correspondent for the New York Times magazine, it has been on the minds of Washington’s chattering classes for at least two
I’ve been occupying myself trying to write a long-ish poem. It’s an odd sensation writing a poem. You’re trying to make something come out of nothing, and you have an idea of what it could be, of stray lines and thoughts, and it takes shape as you do it, and you have to somehow notice
Adrian Tinniswood, so gifted and spirited a communicator of serious history to a wide readership, here brings a number of themes from his previous books together. The Verneys recounted the individual experiences of 17th-century members of a leading Buckinghamshire family. The Rainborowes, set in the same period, applies the same technique to a less substantial
Like Mel Brooks’s character the Two Thousand-Year-Old Man, Peter Lewis has met everyone of consequence. Though he doesn’t mention being an eyewitness at the Crucifixion, he was told by T.S. Eliot that working in a bank was quite nice (‘I never thought about poetry in the day’). Frankie Howerd wanted Lewis to give him a
The Man Booker prize has strong years and weak years. There have been ones when the judges have succeeded in identifying what is most interesting in English-language fiction and others when the task has been comprehensively flunked. With Robert Macfarlane as chairman, 2013 promises to be very good; 2011, which was in fact a strong
The Coronation Chair currently stands all spruced up, following last year’s conservation, under a crimson canopy, by the west entrance to Westminster Abbey. The sovereign has used this throne during the actual ceremony almost continuously since the coronation of Henry IV (1399). The oldest dated piece of English furniture (1297-1300) made by a known artist
Consider for a moment the plight of the willow warbler. Russian birds of this species fly between eastern Siberia and southern Africa and back every year of their short lives, a distance of nearly 7,500 miles in each direction. Each weighs roughly as little as two teaspoons-full of sugar. But at least these tiny birds
Verdi’s La Traviata is the story of a courtesan who is redeemed when she gives up the man she loves in order to preserve his family honour, and then dies tragically in his arms. Verdi based his opera on a novel by Alexander Dumas the younger, The Lady of the Camellias (1852). This work was
Vasily Grossman, a Ukranian-born Jew, was a war correspondent for the Soviet army newspaper Red Star. His dispatches from the front between 1941 and 1945 combined emotional engagement with independent-minded commentary. A solitary, questioning spirit, Grossman set out always to document truthfully what he saw and heard. His report on the vile workings of the
What, really, is a literary education for? What’s the point of it? How, precisely, does it help when you’re another day older and deeper in debt? These are questions that after a while begin to present themselves with uncomfortable force and persistence to those of us who have believed from our earliest youth that if