The subtitle of Deirdre David’s life of Olivia Manning, ‘A Woman at War’, has a resonant double meaning. She was, as we are repeatedly informed, a unique example of a woman novelist who wrote as well about war and battles as a man. But she was also at war with herself, with her colleagues, and,
My favourite joke of all time concerns Diana Dors, whose real name was Diana Fluck. She was invited back to Swindon, her birthplace, to open a fete. The vicar, terrified he’d mispronounce her name, mispronounced her name. ‘We have with us today Diana Dors, whom many of you here in Swindon will remember as Doris
Margaret Evison spent Easter 2009 with her 26-year-old son Mark, who was about to go to Afghanistan as a lieutenant in the Welsh Guards. They walked around her garden talking about death in a general sort of way; Mark was worried that he might make a mistake which would lead to someone else dying. ‘He
Ronald ‘Trader’ Faulkner is that relative rarity: an unassuming actor. In their memoirs most actors, after the obligatory two or three chapters describing the hardships at the outset of their careers, indulge in a paean of self-glorification — mentioning their failures, certainly, but only so as to highlight their far more considerable successes. Faulkner is
Michael Gorra’s Portrait of a Novel is a lucid critique of how Henry James came to write a book that would permanently change the art of literary fiction. The Portrait of a Lady was first published in 1881, with a second revised version appearing in 1908. James’s heroine is the spirited Isabel Archer — a
When Ellen Fein and Sherrie Schneider read this review, they’ll exchange a pitying smile and quietly start waiting for my distress call. For woe betide any woman who thinks she can live without the Rules: they are hard and fast and apparently foolproof: ‘You can truly do the Rules on any guy, in any situation,
Stephen Grosz is a psychoanalyst who has worked in the United States and Britain. Over his career he has been ‘sitting with patients for thousands of hours,’ he writes. Occasionally he has used his notes and observations for addresses at clinical seminars or for contributions to psycho-analytical journals. But this is the first time he
Reading this new edition of W.G. Sebald’s discursive meditation upon the blanket bombing of German civilians during the second world war took me back to Berlin in the early 1960s when German writers from the Gruppe 47 were in the ascendant, and no self-respecting avant-garde author wrote novels with stories or plots. They did not
As the first British winner of the Tour de France and a gold medalist at London 2012, Bradley Wiggins is a national hero, and though he insists he is an ordinary Kilburn lad he keeps dropping hints about a knighthood. So it is only fitting that, at the age of 32 and with the help
On 1 September 1978, the then prime minister Jim Callaghan invited six leading trade unionists to dinner at his Elizabethan farmhouse in Sussex. By all accounts it was a very jolly affair with Callaghan’s wife Audrey doing the cooking and their granddaughter Tamsin Jay handing round the dishes. The trade union grandees went away convinced
In 1471 Galeazzo Maria Sforza, Duke of Milan, led a brash entourage of wine-swilling, jewel-bedecked courtiers into Florence. It was Lent. This was not the most auspicious way to begin a diplomatic mission to settle the dispute over Imola, the tiny Romagna fiefdom that Galeazzo had offered to sell to Lorenzo de’Medici. Even Lorenzo, epitome
A flock of bells takes the air and you come to me, out of nowehere and I smile, knowing you’ll visit me always, that this is how it will be till the last thread of an island slips through a bell-ringer’s hands and they put me in the listening earth.
The fascination with the last of the cavalry is enduring, perhaps partly because of the horseman’s apocalyptic links: one of the contenders for the last cavalry charge, about which there is still no consensus, is the battle of Megiddo in 1918, on the Plain of Armageddon. Now we have another question: who was the last
Donald Greig’s first novel is a fluent knitting together of three distinct worlds: American musical academia, London professional singing and the life of a 15th-century composer. It is also something of a whodunnit, involving secret codes in combustible medieval manuscripts alongside skullduggery between some very famous historical characters. If this sounds like a remake of
Rod Stewart once tried to convince his mother that he had made a lot of money, and wanted to buy her a really big Christmas present. After much thought, she chose a new bread bin. Feet that stay on the ground are obviously a family trait. Rod: The Autobiography (Century, £20) is excellent, like listening
This book shouldn’t work. A memoir written by a 40-year-old, who has never written a book before, hardly sounds promising. The topic, education, moreover is death to good literature: barely has a book been written about the subject that is not dull beyond belief. Yet, against all the odds, this book turns out to be
Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs (or ‘Seven Little Men’, as Walt Disney called them — he didn’t want to ‘disrespect’ dwarfs) first previewed in 1937 at the Carthay Circle Theater in Hollywood. Stars of stage, screen and radio turned up, including Douglas Fairbanks Jr, Marlene Dietrich and Frank Capra. Most were sceptical about an
Twice in my career, in very remote places, I encountered lunatics who had been chained for many years to the wall or to posts in the ground. The reasons why they were so enchained had been lost in the sands of time, but their keepers were convinced that they were far too dangerous to be
emerge from the orchard. There now Aunt Kit says, pouring us lemonade. It’ll be another scorcher. The bronze birds drop wing, shake caruncle and snood engorged with purple blood, and rattle in full barding. My prize cock’s gone lame! He lifts each ringed foot singly, slowly — to shoot the short film frame by frame.
As fewer people write by hand, some of us who do venture to squeak a thin call of alarm, like mice behind the frescoes during the last days of Pompeii. Philip Hensher (novelist and university teacher) voices dismay more manfully in this eloquent account of what has been and will be lost by the ending