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A question of judgment

A Whispered Name, by William Brodrick This is the third of William Brodrick’s sensitively wrought novels featuring his contemplative monk, Anselm, an attractive and credible Every- man who has occasionally to leave his monastery to investigate ambiguous problems of evil, forgiveness and, in this case, sacrifice. Brodrick’s hero is aptly named since Saint Anselm, an

Live and let die

The Collected Letters of Katherine Mansfield, Volume 5, 1922-1923, edited by Vincent O’Sullivan and Margaret Scott; Death & the Author: How D.H. Lawrence Died and Was Remembered, by David Ellis The story of a life is also the story of a death, and one of the values of biography is that it enables us to

In the footsteps of Herodotus

The Man who Invented History, by Justin Marozzi When Kristin Scott Thomas told a saucy tale out of Herodotus in the film of The English Patient, sales of The Histories shot up 450 per cent, according to Justin Marozzi, who has taken the seemingly inevitable step of travelling around the Herodotean world in the footsteps

Hero to a continent

Gabriel García Márquez, by Gerald Martin In July 1965, or so the story goes, a Colombian writer in early middle age, living in Mexico City, decided to take his wife and two young sons on a short and much needed holiday to Acapulco. He had had some small successes, and was respected in the small

Ancient and modern unite

Once, when Adam Nicolson was asked the question ‘will you be writing a family memoir?’, he answered, ‘I think my family is the most memoired family in the history of the universe. It’s like a disease. “No” is definitely the answer to that.’ But Sissinghurst: An Unfinished History is at least a quarter family memoir.

Hungry for love

Love All, by Elizabeth Jane Howard Love All is a dreadful title — sounds like the memoirs of a lesbian tennis player — for an elegantly old-fashioned novel. It is set in the late 1960s; but there is little to anchor it to this period: the occasional references to the Beatles, or to Mary Quant,

A mystic and an administrator

Florence Nightingale, by Mark Bostridge No eminent Victorian has shaped our daily lives in more ways than Florence Nightingale. Her influence continued far beyond her 20 months of bloodsoaked toil in Scutari and the Crimea. Her vision of a public health-care system was the foundation of the National Health Service. Disassociating nursing from religious vocation

The yellow star of courage

Journal, by Hélène Berr, translated from the French by David Bellos ‘What must be rescued,’ wrote Hélène Berr in her diary on 27 October 1943, ‘is the soul and the memory it contains.’ The need to see and understand and later to remember is the theme that runs through Berr’s remarkable diary of Jewish persecution

Surprising literary ventures | 22 October 2008

The Crows of Pearblossom is a rare children’s book by Aldous Huxley, written in 1944 and published posthumously. It originated as a present for his five-year-old niece Olivia de Haulleville, who often visited Huxley and his wife, Maria, at their ranch in Llano in the Mojave Desert (Olivia later moved to the Greek island of

For old times’ sake

A hundred chorus girls sashaying through a Busby Berkeley musical. Bugs Bunny munching nonchalantly on a carrot. Errol Flynn and Basil Rathbone in Hollywood’s greatest swordfight (‘The Adventures of Robin Hood’ or ‘Captain Blood’ — take your pick). Bette Davis pulling the trigger in ‘Deception’. James Cagney smashing a grapefruit into a moll’s face. Alex

Life & Letters

Allan Massies dips into Brideshead Revisited Having just read something about the new film of Brideshead Revisited, I picked up the novel, opened it at random, and then, some two hours later, a good part of my working evening was gone. I suppose it is now Waugh’s most popular novel — his Pride and Prejudice

The romance of science

The Age of Wonder, by Richard Holmes Just what some- one who studied science should be called was mooted at the 1833 meeting of the British Association for the Advancement of Science. ‘Formerly the “learned” embraced in their wide grasp all the branches of the tree of knowledge, mathematicians as well as philologers, physical as

The spectre of Spielberg

Searching for Schindler, by Thomas Keneally Which would you rather read, The Great Gatsby or F. Scott Fitzgerald’s day-by-day account of the whisky he drank and the cigarettes he smoked while writing it? La Comédie humaine or a list of the cups of coffee Balzac downed, between midnight and sunrise, while putting all of those

First knight and his lady

A Strange, Eventful History: The Dramatic Lives of Ellen Terry, Henry Irving and Their Remarkable Families, by Michael Holroyd It is rare today to come across a non-fiction book that does not include in its title or subtitle the assertion that the tale it tells is ‘remarkable’, ‘extraordinary’, or ‘fas- cinating’, publishers presumably having decided

Faith in the Founding Fathers

The American Future, by Simon Schama This is the most exhilarating book that has been written about America for at least eight years, although it depends on the premise that the influence of George W. Bush is over and that Barack Obama will be the next president. Simon Schama is fortunate that this outcome looks

The Best of Punch Cartoons

In 1956 I joined other new kids on the block at Punch magazine: Quentin Blake, Ed McLachlan, Mike Williams, Honeysett, Ray Lowry, Ken Pyne, Bill Tidy, Pav, Petty, plus Gerald Scarfe and Ralph Steadman who were going to blow the world apart with their blood-and-guts drawings. While Punch’s pages were curling at the edges, up

On stage from the start

Henry: Virtuous Prince, by David Starkey Among the glories of Flanders and Swann is a long, erudite and silly shaggy-dog story about the Tudor theatre. It culminates in the appearance as from nowhere of a score for the tune known as ‘Greensleeves’ — or ‘Greenfleeves’ as Flanders and Swann have it. Someone wonders aloud who

The man with the Midas touch

The perfect timing of this book rivals the brilliance of Warren Buffett’s many invest- ment coups. For years, this true ‘master of the universe’ has highlighted the dangers posed by derivatives — or ‘financial weapons of mass destruction’ in Buffett-speak. Losses from these highly complex instruments, based on sub-prime US mortgage debt, precipitated the credit