Barry Miles came to London in the Sixties to escape the horsey torpor of the Cotswolds in which he grew up. Known at first only as ‘Miles’, he worked at Indica and Better Books and was soon helping to organise the Albert Hall reading of 1965 which is supposed to have changed British poetry for
‘I never knew peaceful times’, Irène Némirovsky once said, ‘I’ve always lived in anxiety and often in danger’. ‘I never knew peaceful times’, Irène Némirovsky once said, ‘I’ve always lived in anxiety and often in danger’. This comment was made during a radio interview in 1934, when the novelist, who would later write Suite Française,
For thousands of years, no one knew what lay in the ice around the North Pole. The blanks on the maps fuelled the imaginations of classical writers, who crafted stories of Hyperboreans living in a gaudy paradise, dancing with Apollo and generally misbehaving. As explorers from southern Europe travelled further north — revealing intransigent and
There ought to be more mileage than there is in stories of diplomacy. Publishers long ago got wise to the memoirs of ex-ambassadors, which in a more servile age used to clog up their catalogues just as the ghosted anguish of reality starlets does now. I am a sucker for the autobiographies of politicians, however
Felipe Fernández-Armesto has a grand idea. Felipe Fernández-Armesto has a grand idea. After the formation of separate continents about 150 million years ago, the world’s ‘cultures’ became progressively more ‘sundered’ and its ecosystems more divergent. Then, ‘with extraordinary suddenness’, in 1492 this long-standing pattern ‘went into reverse’: divergence ceased and ‘a new convergent era of
This is a very short book with large type. DeLillo has said that he no longer feels a compulsion to write long, compendious books. In his later years Saul Bellow said something similar. DeLillo, of course, has written very long in the past, notably with the 850-page Underworld (1997), and his story has been America.
When school-children are asked to draw a scientist, says Trevor Nelson, nine out of ten of them draw a mad scientist. My first thought on reading this was: why is there no photograph of Nelson on the dustcover of this book? Might he look particularly bonkers? After seconds of exhaustive research I found a picture
When Wordsworth and Coleridge were in their collaborative youth, walking one evening in 1797 on the Quantock Hills and contemplating something Gothic, Wordsworth suggested to Coleridge that the Ancient Mariner could be haunted by what he had just been reading about in Shelvocke’s Voyage Round the World — the killing of an albatross by a
The characters in Rose Tremain’s deft new novel are almost all remarkably unpleasant. The characters in Rose Tremain’s deft new novel are almost all remarkably unpleasant. Not just wicked or selfish, but strangely pathetic, too. In fact, their nastiness is so ingrained and so unignorable that one begins to suspect a degree of authorial malice.
More than 20 years ago I wrote an admiring article about Dick Francis. I made, if I recall, only one mild criticism: that he sometimes piled a bit too much misfortune on his damaged heroes. There was, for instance, the novel in which the narrator’s wife was in an iron lung and the villains put
I know a British couple with a Chinese daughter, pretty and fluent in English. Of course the little girl was adopted. It is necessary to steel one’s self against three agonising thoughts: how did such children come to be here, why does one never meet an adopted Chinese boy, and what does one reply when
For once, I felt sorry for Bill Clinton. It was January 1998, and the press reported that the President had had an intimate relationship with one Monica Lewinsky. In Independent Counsel Kenneth W. Starr’s office, where I worked, we had evidence that Clinton had sought to hide his dalliance through perjury and obstruction of justice.
Lance Price is better placed than most to write about ‘spin’ in politics, having worked as a BBC political reporter and as Alastair Campbell’s deputy in Downing Street. Lance Price is better placed than most to write about ‘spin’ in politics, having worked as a BBC political reporter and as Alastair Campbell’s deputy in Downing
It is more than ten years since Natasha Walter published The New Feminism, a can-do look at the ‘uniquely happy story’ of the women’s movement. It is more than ten years since Natasha Walter published The New Feminism, a can-do look at the ‘uniquely happy story’ of the women’s movement. Then she urged the sisterhood
By the middle of the second world war, May-ling Soong was the world’s most powerful woman, at the centre of events in China’s history and its relationship with the USA. By the middle of the second world war, May-ling Soong was the world’s most powerful woman, at the centre of events in China’s history and
The car manufacturer Henry Ford dominates this remarkable book, managing, like Falstaff, to be its tragic hero, villain, and comic relief all at the same time. A gaunt, pacing figure, he conducted interviews while standing, believed in the values of small Main Street America (though his methods of industrial mass production destroyed these), and in
In a sense, as this interesting collection of his writings makes clear, Rudyard Kipling was always abroad. His first vivid memories were of an early childhood in Bombay, ‘light and colour and golden and purple fruits’ in the market with his ayah, or visits with his bearer to little Hindu temples where ‘I held his
When I was about half way through Little Hands Clapping, Dan Rhodes’s fifth published book, I started a list of the innocent characters on whom fate and their author play nasty tricks. When I was about half way through Little Hands Clapping, Dan Rhodes’s fifth published book, I started a list of the innocent characters
Angela Thirlwell’s previous book was a double biography of William Rossetti (brother to the more famous Dante Gabriel) and his wife Lucy (daughter of the more famous Ford Madox Brown). Angela Thirlwell’s previous book was a double biography of William Rossetti (brother to the more famous Dante Gabriel) and his wife Lucy (daughter of the
A great deal of time in Neel Mukherjee’s A Life Apart and Max Schaefer’s Children of the Sun is spent in gents’ public toilets — cottaging being a key feature of both debuts — and yet such is the elegance and intelligence of their prose, the reader comes away feeling educated rather than soiled. A