Like the Dombeys, Pitts, Amises et al, les Dumas are famously père et fils, but there was of course also a grand-père, Thomas-Alexandre, or ‘Alex’ the first, who was a wildly romantic figure, a gallant and tragic hero, and the defining influence on his son’s life and work. In his memoirs, of which he devotes
Deborah Levy’s Booker-shortlisted novel has, at first sight, all the ingredients of a standard villa holiday-from-Hell story, or indeed film. But this creepy and unsettling tale has more layers to it than most. Two couples, famous poet Joe Jacobs and his foreign correspondent wife Isabel and their friends, fat Mitchell and tall Laura, share a
Here is the melancholy story of Mary Todd Lincoln, widow of President Abraham Lincoln, who was shot next to her on 12 April 1865 as they were watching a play. He died three days later. The book has a single theme with two strands: was Mrs. Lincoln insane before as well as after her husband’s
when the two-footed Mammal, being someways one of the nobler animals, regains The dignity of room, the value of rareness Robinson Jeffers Spengler was wrong: the world has become the West. Japan has bowed out now; in China they buy art, drink wine, play late Rachmaninov, groom themselves for decline in Prada or Bulgari, wonder
‘That terrible place known as Westminster’: many readers might well agree with this, the first mention of our political capital in a charter dated 735 AD. However, as Robert Shepherd, journalist and political biographer, explains in his new book, all is not what it seems. The charter is a fake, cooked up by a 12th-century
It seems like only hours since they ended, but people have already written and published books about the Olympics, and I have already read one. Nicholas Lezard’s The Nolympics (Penguin, £7.99) was originally planned as a counterblast, a fusillade of righteous rage against what we all expected to be an administrative and sporting catastrophe that
They were in the Greek Orthodox cathedral in London on Valentine’s Day 1989 for Bruce Chatwin’s memorial service — all of London’s literary elite, Martin Amis, Salman Rushdie, Antonia Fraser and the rest. Outside the cathedral the journalists and snappers had gathered, but they were not there for Chatwin. Halfway through the service Rushdie felt
In February 1966, in the first flush of his fame, an interviewer asked Bob Dylan what his songs were about. ‘Oh, some are about four minutes,’ he responded. ‘Some are about five. And some, believe it or not, are about 11 or 12.’ The joke was justified, in a sense. Why should any artist be
Some years ago, I was included in a round- robin from a group of African writers trying to whip up support for an anti-Ryszard Kapuscinski campaign. The plan, as I recall it, was that members of the African intelligentsia should loudly denounce the legendary Polish reporter’s depiction of their continent at the readings he was
When I was in the sixth form, I thought Anthony Burgess the greatest writer imaginable. The outlandish vocabulary, the fireworks, the bravura, the glorious showmanship — surely this was what literature was all about? Then I grew up and realised he was absolutely terrible — a cackling and grim caricaturist, pseudo-forceful and very dead. Whilst
It is not a criticism of Philip Almond that The Lancashire Witches, published to mark the 400th anniversary of the Pendle witch trials, is a depressing read. On the contrary, Almond has produced a fine and lively study of the events in 1612 when eight women and two men were tried for witchcraft. What is
Shiva Naipaul died unexpectedly in the summer of 1985, six months after his 40th birthday. In his decade and a half on Grub Street, he published three novels, a brace of polemical travelogues and the scintillating miscellany of stories and occasional pieces collected in Beyond the Dragon’s Mouth (1984). An Unfinished Journey, an account of
Self-adhesive suns they glow fluorescent on grey monitors wanting for a world ess misremembered. Oh, how biddable! Our paper geisha girls, dancing in an open window breeze, only to die the deaths of petals curling, ips unpeeling from a disappearing love.
This is a slight book containing short stories about minor characters. And it is about to receive some fairly faint praise. A Possible Life, Sebastian Faulks’ 12th novel, does little to confirm exactly where he sits in the modern British canon. It probably does not matter greatly; on this showing, he is a competent creator
Fifty years on since the publication of Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring, this is indeed an excellent time to assess its cumulative historical impact. After all, it is still cited as one of the most important environmental books of the 20th century, and seen by many as the publishing phenomenon that launched the modern environment movement.
I had never come across commonplace books until I met up with my school friend Paul Foot in Oxford in 1958. The idea, he explained, was that you kept a notebook in which you transcribed anything interesting you came across in the course of your reading. I started doing it the following year. The first
What a pleasure it was to be reminded in a ‘Life and Letters’ column by Allan Massie (28 July) of Desmond MacCarthy. He was an old friend of my parents’ and, in the immediate postwar years, a fairly frequent visitor to their house in Chantilly, outside Paris. One Friday afternoon — it must I think
Charles Dickens remains in his bicentennial year as much a national treasure as Shakespeare, and just as deeply embedded in the English psyche as the Bard, declares Michael Slater, an Emeritus Professor of Victorian Literature at the University of London. Among the innumerable Victorians who sanctified domesticity, sentimentalised hearth and home and idealised family love,
By any measure the small town of Lalibela, hidden away amongst the gorges and plateaux of Ethiopia’s central highlands, is one of the most remarkable religious sites on earth. A dozen or so churches have been carved out of the rock and connected by a labyrinth of trenches, tunnels, culverts and crypts. The churches are
Tough job being a disused prime minister. John Major has resisted the temptation to flounce off in a sulk, or to play the international peacemaker, or (as Harold Macmillan was said to do during the 1970s) to fantasise about a glorious comeback urged on him by a despairing populace eager to rediscover its lost greatness.