Blood, Toil, Tears and Sweat: The Dire Warning by John Lukacs Nine years ago the American historian, John Lukacs, published an excellent little book, Five Days in London: May 1940. In this he analysed in detail that critical moment in the history of the Second World War — perhaps indeed in the history of Western
This fitfully involving, but for the most part irritating, melodrama is Tim Parks’s 14th novel, and not one of his best. Set almost entirely in India, it begins with the funeral of one Albert James, a trailblazing anthropologist whose elliptical, wide-ranging theories never really took root, and it ends with the death of his widow,
Bits of Me are Falling Apart by William Leith Some years ago, a young scribbler named William Leith began a column for the Independent on Sunday that divided opinion among readers and, indeed, other young scribblers like me. Instead of writing about the world outside, as columnists had previously felt obliged to, he wrote about
Ten, eleven weeks ago I had an email from Simon Gray to say that the tumour on his lung hadn’t grown; so he was all right till his next scan in four months time. Now he is dead and I wonder if they didn’t tell him the truth then, or if the thing took a
St Petersburg and the British: The City Through the Eyes of British Visitors and Residents by Anthony Cross To early English visitors St Petersburg seemed an ‘abstract’, artificial city with no roots in the past. It was the creation of one man, Peter the Great, determined to replace Moscow as the capital of his empire
Ever Dirk: The Bogarde Letters by John Coldstream (editor) The art of letter-writing being in terminal decline and with precious little romance in emails or mobile-phone texts, this fascinating collection of Dirk Bogarde’s letters is a rare gift to those who think nostalgically of a less mechanical way of life. Puffing on 60 cigarettes a
Out of Mao’s Shadow: The Struggle for the Soul of New China by Philip Pan In 1952 the 20-year-old Maoist fanatic, Lin Zhao, ordered that a Chinese landlord be immersed in a vat of icy water overnight. She said this filled her with ‘cruel happiness’. Later she wrote to a friend about how she had
Handel: The Man and His Music by Jonathan Keates Since 1985, when Jonathan Keates first published this exhilarating critical biography of Handel, there have been enormous advances in the study of the composer and his oeuvre — not least the publication of two major volumes by the doyen of Handel scholars Winton Dean — and
So I Have Thought of You: The Letters of Penelope Fitzgerald, edited by Terence Dooley ‘I can’t remember whether you said you liked Barbara Pym,’ Penelope Fitzgerald wrote to an old school friend around 1980, ‘but am sending Quartet in Autumn in case you haven’t got it, otherwise it can go to the Mothers’ Union
I asked Henry Kissinger recently whether he had been to see the hit play Frost/Nixon. He told me that he made it a rule never to see plays that included characters he knew in real life, which I guess must mean that he hasn’t seen much post-war political theatre. He also said that he doubted
Dreaming Iris by John de Falbe Love, whether originally mental or glandular, a coup de foudre or a gradual smouldering incandescence, fulfilled or not, constitutes the basis for most readable fiction. In Dreaming Iris, John de Falbe, abiding by this tradition, examines the effects of imaginary love on two real but fragile relationships. He has
Maurice Yacowar, Emeritus Professor of English and Film Studies at the University of Calgary, begins his ‘portrait’ thus: ‘John Bratby was an overachiever who fell short of his potential.’ Rather like this book really. Instead of a balanced assessment of one of the most interesting postwar figures in the British art world, we are offered
Sir Thomas More was the most dedicated of Henry VIII’s Chancellors before becoming the most famous of his victims. Sir Thomas More was the most dedicated of Henry VIII’s Chancellors before becoming the most famous of his victims. Nearly 30 years ago, John Guy wrote what is still the best biography of this fascinating and
This short novel was first published in a tiny edition at the end of last year. Since then it has won the McKitterick Prize (for the best first novel by an author over forty), and now it is reissued with a glossy picture on the cover and a quote by Mick Jagger saying that he
Andrew Taylor reviews a selection of recent crime novels The Murder Farm (Quercus, £8.99) is Andrea Schenkel’s first novel and has been hugely successful in her native Germany and elsewhere. Based on a real case, it is set in the 1950s and deals with murder of a farmer, his wife, daughter, grandchildren and maid. It
Late one night many years ago I was in a bar round the corner from the Roman offices of the newspaper La Stampa. After a few grappas I gave my friend Anthony something I had written that day. He read it without evident appreciation, and, handing it back, said, ‘Can’t you write anything that isn’t
It’s pretty seldom that, only a few pages into a novel, you know you’re in the hands of a writer who does what he does as well as anyone else alive. Lush Life is that sort of book: entirely imagined, dense with life, and written sentence by sentence without a false note or a moment
Was it Wordsworth who discovered the ‘real’ rural? Later, the Georgian poets celebrated its passing, giving rise to what Edward Thomas called ‘the Norfolk Jacket school of writing’. The poets of the 1930s took up politics instead, and nowadays poets are mostly urban. These scatter-shot generalisations, riddled with exceptions, are only meant as an introduction
Simon Baker reviews a collection of short stories by Tobias Wolff This book contains ten new stories from Tobias Wolff, plus a selection from the three volumes of short stories he published between 1981 and 1997. It affords the reader a fascinating panorama of Wolff’s entire career, and shows that, like Bach’s variations, Wolff’s stories move
A wide gap has opened up between British military historians who work on the world war of 1914-18 and the mass of British schoolteachers who take it in school history classes. The teachers, impressed by the poetry of Sassoon and Owen, follow what may be called the ‘Lions led by Donkeys’ school of Alan Clark,