‘Who was she?’, a browser might ask on finding three re-issued novels by Ivy Compton-Burnett, and ‘Why should I read them?’ Dame Ivy Compton-Burnett (1884-1969) was one of 13 children of a Victorian physician. After his death, his widow wrapped herself in anger and subjected her children to cruel, neurotic tyranny. Their verbal laceration continued
The most remarkable thing about this book is that it should have been published at all. No one could have imagined in 1961 that Private Eye — a blotchy reproduction stapled together on what looked like yellow scrap paper — would still be going 50 years later, selling hundreds of thousand of copies every fortnight
Though this book is published by Oxford University Press and the author teaches at the University of Southern California, it is really only semi-demi-academic. Steven J. Ross has conducted interviews and trawled through archives, but his instincts are for the flat vividness of journalism rather than anything more scholarly or searching. In a footnote he
The glorious monuments built in India by the Mughal emperors, from Babur in the early 16th century to Bahadur Shah Zafar II in the mid-19th century, have long deserved a comprehensive illustrated survey in one volume. George Michell is the ideal author. He is both a great scholar and a fervent communicator on many aspect
It has become increasingly obvious that something went terribly wrong with British intelligence-gathering, both its methods and morality, after the destruction of the Twin Towers on 11 September 2001. Earlier prime ministers had displayed scruples about the use of intelligence gained from torture. But during the Blair premiership this changed. Britain became part of a
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On 12 February 1952 the novelist Anthony Powell received a letter from a bookseller in New York. Robert Vanderbilt Jr was the proprietor of a couple of Manhattan bookstores and a great admirer of Powell’s. He wrote to ask if he might himself publish a couple of the novelist’s out-of-print works. Powell was delighted. The
The son of a grocer, Anton Chekhov was born in 1860 in Taganrog, on the Sea of Azov. While studying medicine at Moscow university, he published hundreds of comic sketches in order to pay his way and support his parents and siblings. After becoming famous in the late 1880s, he practised as a doctor only
Long in the writing, deep in research, heavy to hold, this is the latest of umpteen biographies of Vincent van Gogh (1853-90). But it should be said straightaway that it is extremely readable, contains new material and is freshly, even startlingly re-interpretative of a life whose bare bones are very familiar. The more one reads,
On 31 May 1961 Ian Fleming wrote to Michael Howard at Jonathan Cape, publisher of his James Bond novels: ‘I am now sending you the first two “volumes” of Chitty-Chitty-Bang-Bang. Heaven knows what your children’s book readers will think of them.’ He ended his letter: ‘I am gradually reactivating myself and I hope to be
When I published Maurice Bowra’s scabrous satires on his contemporaries, New Bats in Old Belfries, in 2005 (pseudonymously), I had to leave blank spaces where two of them should have appeared. This was because their subject was still alive, and was unwilling to give his approval for their inclusion in his lifetime. (Ludovic Kennedy’s name
London has always loved its animals. James I kept elephants in St James’s Park (allowed a gallon of wine per day each to get through the English winter), while as recently as Live Aid an urban myth arose that the revolving stage was pulled by horses. The capital’s no different from the rest of the
Stephen King’s latest novel is a time-travel fantasy about the assassination of John F. Kennedy. At almost 750 pages, 11.22.63 is drawn-out even by blockbuster standards. Critics have bemoaned its surfeit of period detail (bobby socks, Hula Hoops, big-finned cars). I rather enjoyed it. King, now an august-looking 64, is a writer of towering cleverness,
On the subject of e-readers, I suspect the world population divides neatly into two halves. On one side of the chasm, hell will freeze over and Accrington Stanley will win the FA Cup before anyone will even touch one. And on the other, that looks like fun, can I have one for Christmas? I was
We should be grateful to families which encourage the culture of writing letters, and equally vital, the keeping of them. Leopold Mozart, for instance, taught his son not only music but correspondence, and as a result we have 1,500 pages of letters which tell us everything we know of interest about the genius. His younger
As a boy, Brian Sewell was unimpressed by opera but enraptured by pantomime which, he reveals in Outsider, sowed in him ‘an undying ambition, never fulfilled, to play the Widow Twanky in Aladdin’. Panto’s loss has been art criticism’s gain for, his tremendous erudition and exquisite prose aside, Sewell is surely the funniest art critic
Jessica Douglas-Home’s aptly titled book is based on the diaries of her grandmother Lilah Wingfield, who attended the Delhi Durbar in 1911 and then spent some weeks touring India. It is a glimpse of Empire from a privileged position since Lilah was the daughter of a viscount and the grand-daughter of an earl, brought up
It wasn’t easy being the daughter of the artist Avigdor Arikha. In this memoir, Alba Arikha mixes teenage fury with glimpses of her godfather Samuel Beckett and a fragmented account of her father’s experiences of the Holocaust. Avigdor Arikha and his wife, the poet Anne Atik, surrounded themselves with the intelligentsia of Paris and drove
Roger Louis is an American professor from the University of Texas at Austin who knows more about the history of the British Empire than any other two academics put together. When the Oxford University Press embarked on its mammoth history of the Empire the general editor they chose —to the chagrin of certain professors from
The half-millennium or so that followed the division of the Carolingian empire in 843 AD was a time of profound social and political change in Europe. Kingdoms were established, new forms of law and theories of power were developed and military technology and tactics were revolutionised. Relations between church and state were transformed. The emerging