The so-called ‘Robben Island Bible’ is one of the holy relics of Shakespeare criticism. It is a copy of a 1970 edition of Shakespeare’s complete works, kept by a political prisoner on Robben Island, the notorious island jail off Cape Town, during the 1970s and 1980s. The possession of such a book was against the
The Emperor Augustus, ruler of the known world, once spotted a man in the street who looked a bit like himself. ‘Did your mother ever work at the palace?’ he asked him roguishly. ‘No,’ the man replied, ‘but my father did.’ Augustus could have had the man killed for this scurrilous (and slightly surreal) insinuation,
Phyllida Law has a delightfully natural style, a gift for anecdote and the knack of seeing the funny side of pretty much everything. She’s a good actor: she’s obviously a fine cook, too, if the recipes in How Many Camels Are There in Holland? Dementia, Ma and Me (Fourth Estate, £12.99) are anything to go
Raymond Chandler once said that ‘the detective story, even in its most conventional form, is difficult to write well. Good specimens of the art are much rarer than good serious novels.’ This holds true for genre writing generally. Historical fictions, like murder mysteries, can often be dismissed as the thoughtless product of the hack, not
This is an unsettling book. On the face of it a memoir by the opera critic of the Daily Telegraph, it veers from social history to intimate confessional, from objective understanding to subjective contempt, with strong elements of hatefulness. In the summer of 1959 the author’s father, a prominent journalist and son of Arthur Christiansen,
The power of the past, the directive hand of childhood: the themes of The Unknown Bridesmaid are familiar fictional territory. But Margaret Forster has a deft and idiosyncratic touch in this story of child psychologist Julia, whose young clients reflect the trauma of her own early years. Sessions with Camilla, Precious, Janice, Claire and others
Here are some statistics about wartime fruit- and vegetable-growing in England which this book tells us. In 1942-3, there were 1,750,000 allotments, amounting to 100,000 acres, or an area the size of Rutland. But in a 1944 survey, it was discovered that only 34 per cent of urban gardens were growing fruit and vegetables, and
for Michael Donaghy, 1954-2004 Parking near St Pancras long before light, it wouldn’t spook if you peered from a shop front or popped from a grille — remembering the night we arranged a rendezvous at the Elephant, you like a meerkat in-and-out of the subways on the traffic island, head cocked but hesitant when I
One often hears the caterwaul that the harsh new technology of emails has killed the gentle old craft of letter-writing. Joseph Epstein and Frederic Raphael — septuagenarian pen-pals who have never met, the one based in Chicago and the other dividing his year between South Kensington and Périgord — have set out to prove the
Set in the immediate aftermath of 9/11, Nadeem Aslam fourth novel begins with two young Pakistani men slipping over the border into Afghanistan. Jeo is a third-year medical student who has secretly volunteered to treat those wounded in the ‘war against terror’, and he is accompanied by his adopted brother Mikal, who works at a
‘I always know when a novel is going to be a Barbara Vine one,’ Ruth Rendell said to me in 1998. ‘In fact I believe that if I weren’t to write it as Barbara Vine, I wouldn’t be able to write it at all.’ A Barbara Vine — from the first, A Dark-Adapted Eye (1986)
There is a feeling about this publication of the biter bit, or rather, the observer observed. It consists of 16 essays by leading art historians about the most significant books about art published in the 20th century. The illustrations at the start of each section, rather than being of paintings and sculpture, are of scholars
It’s the 50th anniversary this year of the publication of Betty Friedan’s The Feminine Mystique. According to the quote on the cover of my Penguin edition, ‘Feminism … began with the work of a single person: Friedan.’ Quite something, then. In fact any mention of Betty Friedan brings out something like post-traumatic stress symptoms in
Over 80 and almost blind, Diana Vreeland was wheeled around a forthcoming costume exhibition at the Metropolitan Museum, issuing instructions all along the way about hats, shoes, lights and mannequins. She seemed, recalled the writer Andrew Solomon, an impossible old lady who couldn’t let go of her control and who was making everyone’s lives miserable
As the son of the last British artist to be successfully prosecuted for displaying obscene paintings, I have some empathy with David Britton, the last person successfully prosecuted in Britain for publishing obscene literature. Unlike my father, who accidentally strayed into the purview of the police, Britton’s prosecution in 1992 was almost inevitable. His publisher,
We walked the cliff of Portnahaven listening to the grey seals sing on Orsay and Eilean Mhic Coinnich across the little harbour. Were they singing for the love of being here in this place, like us, far from griefs — and were they also singing, as we were, to each other?
James Redding Ware, with his idiosyncratic treatment of slang, plunges the reader straight into the late 19th-century Bartholomew Fair of undeserving paupers, loafers, Ally Slopers, theatrical types and demi-mondaines. He drew on his own Grub Street life for this discursive lexicon, from A.D. (‘a drink’) to Zulu Express (the nickname for a Great Western service),
Glasgow and Edinburgh are so nearby that even in the 18th-century Adam Smith could breakfast in one city and be in the other for early-afternoon dinner. For all that, these two cities cherish a rivalry and have followed different paths. Edinburgh, a royal capital until 1603 and a seat of parliament until 1707, and again
Harrison Hanafan is a plastic surgeon in New York. Every day, he slices and stitches deluded women, reshaping healthy flesh to pander to 21st-century aesthetics. One Christmas Eve, absent-minded Harrison finds himself prostrate on the icy sidewalk of Madison Avenue. ‘Ya can’t sit there all day, buddy, looking up people’s skirts,’ says a plump, sweaty-faced
Stripping down prose is not a risk-free undertaking. The excision of adverbs and the passive voice is sound practice in journalism. However, to make very bare writing a thing of beauty in fiction requires enormous skill. Hemingway’s short stories — those clean, well-lighted places — manage it. Despite its author’s fellow possession of a Nobel