Paul Theroux has produced some of the best travel books of the past 50 years, and some of the lamest. His latest work shrieks swansong, from its title — The Last Train — to the acknowledgement that he has reached ‘the end of this sort of travel, marinated in politics and urban wreckage’, to the
They might almost be bushes, boulders, they sit so still. Night floods the meadow at their shoulders, brims the canal, and renders rod and line invisible. Traffic on the by-pass sighs as if asleep. A mallard claps derisively and flies. Cows rip the grass. Its being chosen makes the silence deep. The rooms that penned
Just before I was sent this huge tour de force of a book to review, I happened to be reading those 17th-century diary accounts by Pepys and John Evelyn which record a remarkable number of what would today be called ‘extreme weather events’. Repeatedly we see them referring to prolonged droughts, horrendous floods, summers and
This book, as the subtitle explains, makes a bold claim: Griffith Pugh was the ‘unsung hero’ of the 1953 ascent of Everest, his achievements neglected and nearly lost to posterity. Harriet Tuckey is Pugh’s daughter, so this assertion might be little more than a kindly attempt to revive her father’s flagging reputation. Yet, Pugh was
The Great Gatsby is one of those great works of literature, like Pride and Prejudice, that appeals as much to the general reader as to the literary bod. It’ll always be around, if not as a movie (there have been five since its publication in 1926) then as an opera or a ballet. Last year
Any writer who embarks on a trilogy is either extremely confident or taking something of a risk. The danger is that the reader will have forgotten the first two volumes and will have lost any memory of the story and the characters who now occupy the foreground of what might be a fairly mystifying account.
I do not have much time for the idea of the redemptive power of the countryside. I am not alone in this. Even theologians tend to dream of the day they enter the City of God rather than 1,000 acres of nowhere. But I will buy into a modern fairytale extolling the virtues of nature
My plans exist in my mind like a jigsaw puzzle … and gradually I shall be able to piece it together(Sir Henry Wellcome, 1853-1936) As though a neolithic arrowhead he’d unearthed at the age of four had entered his bloodstream, its sliver of flint sparking an obsession, the items he acquired over the years ranged
If you are considering adopting — that is, buying — a Chinese baby girl, recycling a television or computer, or buying a Vuiton bag, think again. Ma Jian, author of the startling Beijing Coma, prepared for this evocative and sometimes horrifying novel by travelling through Chinese regions few tourists see. There he encountered some of
Too many Beatles books? In my house there’s always room for one more, and this week’s addition is All Together Now (Matador, £9.99), an ABC of Beatles’ songs by registered Fabs geek David Rowley. This is his third book on the subject, for like many repeat offenders, Rowley has spent more years writing about the
Who would have thought that the idea for a novel about mothers at the school gate would spark a frenzied bidding for world rights? Not a subject to make the heart race, surely, but race publishers did for a first novel by Gill Hornby, whose inspiration it was. Plainly she did her research at a
Half in jest, Evie Wyld has described her highly garlanded first book After the Fire, a Still Small Voice as ‘a romantic thriller about men not talking’. The same description more or less fits this second novel, although here a reticent woman takes the place of three generations of silent men. All the better: we
After the success of Dear Lupin, Roger Mortimer finds himself facing something not normally experienced by former Guards officers who have been dead for more than 20 years — namely Difficult Second Album Syndrome. Lupin, a collection of letters written by Mortimer to his extremely errant son Charles (‘Lupin’) took everyone by surprise when it
In November 1941, Sergeant Jake Wardrop narrowly escaped being killed when his tank was crippled in the midst of a catastrophic battle in the north African desert where the armour and artillery of Rommel’s Afrika Korps destroyed scores of other British tanks. ‘It wasn’t a very healthy position to be in’, he wrote in his
The other day, while shopping in Tesco, I was surprised to find copies of the Inferno for sale by the checkout. ‘Oh dear’, I declared, ‘who would have thought of finding Dante here?’ It was not Dante of course, but Dan ‘Dante’ Brown, whose latest extravaganza, Inferno, tips a nod to the Florentine poet’s medieval
We need more conservationists like Dave Goulson. Cack-handed animal killers, that is. As a child in the 1970s Goulson tried to dry out some ‘bedraggled’ bumblebees which had got caught in a thunderstorm. He put them on the hotplate of the electric cooker and set it to low. Then he went off to feed his
Sonali Deraniyagala’s horrific book Wave, about her experience in and after the 26 December 2004 tsunami that struck the south-east coast of Sri Lanka, is one of the most moving memoirs I have ever read. All year round, day and night, if you looked down that long two-mile line of sea and sand, you would
Although Richard III was five foot eight, his spine was so twisted he stood a foot shorter. Imagine him hacking his way towards Henry Tudor at the battle of Bosworth; a furious human pretzel, ‘small in body and feeble of limb’, as a contemporary noted, he cut his way towards his rival ‘until his last
‘Unabashed luxury, elaborate displays of rich fabrics, gilt, soaring ceilings, glittering chandeliers…’ Thus does Vladimir Alexandrov describe what Moscow’s elite demanded of Maxim, the 1912 nightclub helmed by The Black Russian’s unlikely subject, the American Frederick Bruce Thomas. He was ‘the black man with a broad Russian nature’ who reinvented himself as celebrity nightclub impresario
A hot child sees itself and cries. The kind face kissing through the glass Perhaps half wants the things to come To be the things already done, Like thank-you letters. I was home By eight! I had a lovely time. Can you believe how much he’s grown? ‘Train gone,’ he says. He weighs a ton.