In the early 1950s Kurt Vonnegut became the manager of a Saab dealership in Cape Cod, a job which often involved him taking prospective clients out on test drives. Keen to demonstrate the Saab’s front-wheel drive, Vonnegut would take corners at a tremendous lick, leaving his often elderly passengers ‘sickly and green’ afterwards. Vonnegut’s early
For the English-speaking world, the book that more than any other defines the magic — or fairy — tale is Children’s and Household Tales by Jakob and Wilhelm Grimm, first published in Germany in 1812, and translated (or adapted: it was seriously toned down) into English by Edgar Taylor in 1823. For the Grimms, as
David Sedaris writes principally for The New Yorker. Urbane, then, American, smart. But is he a memoirist, a fabulist or an essayist? He is most often described as a humorist, but he’s not funny like, say, Woody Allen. He’s no Stephen Leacock. The aim of his writing is not to make the reader laugh. Which
There is a much reproduced image of the great Welsh poet R.S. Thomas towards the end of his life. A gaunt and angular figure leans defiantly out over the half-gate of his cottage on the Llyn peninsula, wild of hair, curmudgeonly and altogether unwelcoming. The photograph, taken after Thomas’s retirement as vicar of the fishing
for Stuart Henson So Petrarch lived here? First saw Laura here, invented the sonnet and began a craze that turned to ‘tyranny’ (your word). These days they’re hardly de rigueur, but there’s the fear that if you can’t balance seven hundred years on fourteen lines and five rhymes, then the Muse will leave for Tony Harrison.
At the start of 2004 Howard Leedham, a former British special forces officer who had taken up US citizenship, addressed the raw Pashtun recruits he had made into a US-backed militia capable of operating on the Pakistan-Afghan border, surely one of the world’s most hostile environments. He told them about Lawrence of Arabia’s famous cross-desert
A year before he died from emphysema in 1990, the composer-conductor Leonard Bernstein agreed to be interviewed by the music journalist Jonathan Cott for Rolling Stone. Dinner with Lenny (OUP, £16.99) is the transcription of their 12-hour conversation, in which Bernstein’s frenetic energy — ‘Byronic intensity’ is how Cott puts it — is as vividly
In this memoir Julia O’Faolain, author of seven distinguished novels and many short stories, asserts that she has nothing to say about the ‘inner Julia’, because being a writer she is more interested in observing other people. And, importantly, ‘I write because Seán and Eileen did.’ Some women stop identifying themselves as their parents’ daughter
We care because our name’s on it. This was the slogan used by Warburtons, the family-owned bakery company, to set itself apart from its rivals, most of which had impersonal names like Premier Foods or Allied Bakeries. Is this just a marketing ploy, or do people actually prefer to buy from a company that has
The literary magazine Granta had the bright idea, in 1983, of promoting 20 British novelists under 40 by announcing that they were the ‘best’ around. The first list was a resounding success, taking Granta well out of its habitual mode by featuring some very un-Granta names, like Adam Mars-Jones and A.N.Wilson. Of course, there were
The last time I heard Kipling read aloud was last week at a Scout Gang Show. It was the grand finale. Centre stage on a dais stood a serving soldier and noble looking ancient veteran. On either side, a group of Scouts, an organisation dear to Kipling’s heart, stood with outflung arms indicating these heroes,
Back in the 1960s, England was a bad disappointment to many West Indians. In the grey city streets with their scruffy, bay-fronted houses they looked for somewhere to live. Many were surprised to find themselves categorised as ‘coloured’. (ROOM TO LET: REGRET NO KOLORED.) In the Anglophone Caribbean, the term ‘coloured’ applied to people of
C.S. Lewis became a celebrity but remains a mysterious figure. Several biographies have been written, not to much avail, and now Alister McGrath, a professor of historical theology, has compiled a painstaking, systematic and ungrudging examination of his life and works. Despite all the trouble he has taken, his book lacks charm and does not
If you mixed Lionel Shriver’s chilling We Need to Talk About Kevin with a Joycean stream of consciousness from a female Ulysses in contemporary Athens, you’d be approaching the spirit of Ioanna Karystiani’s Back to Delphi. Viv is the mother of a notorious rapist and murderer, now locked up in Korydallos prison. Granted five days
Once all our basic human needs have been met, and we can eat and we can sleep and we can live in comfort, what is next? The urge to express yourself in hardcovers might not be top of everybody’s list, but I suspect it’s near the top of Charles Saatchi’s. During a career of extraordinary
The spy George Blake, doyen of traitors, turned 90 last year. Almost blind, he lives with his Russian wife outside Moscow on an SVR (KGB in old money) reservation. Much has changed since 1961 when he was sentenced to 42 years in British jails — the ideology he believed in discredited, the empire he spied
Most of us associate ecclesiastical libraries with dusty accumulations of sermons, providing nourishment for bookworms but of no other real use. But surprising treasures — some decidedly secular — can be found in our churches, cathedrals and episcopal residences. The library at Lambeth Palace, bequeathed in 1610 by Archbishop Richard Bancroft as a clerical equivalent
I shall be radioactive For eight hours afterwards And must be careful To avoid intimate contact. The prospect of this Alarms me, but what now Suddenly comes to mind Is just how alone I felt Standing in Hereford Cathedral October 1962 Beside the Mappa Mundi With Krushchev banging on As nuclear war seemed Unavoidable, that
Some years back I volunteered to help with an experiment at the Warneford Hospital in Oxford which involved having my brain scanned while I watched a series of seemingly random images flashed up on a screen. Some were clearly meant to be neutral, others highly stimulating in one way or another. I remember a bath
The property pages of Country Life invariably feature an old rectory or two, probably graceful 18th-century, of honeyed Cotswold stone, and if you plan to move in you will need a deep pocket. This is Aga Saga country, Joanna Trollope territory. Old vicarages, old rectories, all the defrocked plant of the Church of England, are
