Think about your knickers. Your bra, shoes, socks, running shoes, anorak, television, towels, light bulbs, computer, and, sooner rather than later, your car or its parts. If they were made here they would be far more expensive. But they’re made in China, so that’s all right then. OK, workers here lose their jobs, but that’s
Karl Marx wrote that history repeats itself, the first time as tragedy, the second as farce. It’s tempting to adapt that and say that historians also often repeat themselves, first as biographers, second as novelists. Having written a book about Stalin’s court, and then a biography of Stalin himself, Simon Montefiore now publishes Sashenka, a
In 1969, the Slovak writer Jan Kalina published 1001 Jokes, a collection of (mainly) anti-Communist stories which sold out within a couple of days. This was during the permafrost that descended on Czechoslovakia following the Russian suppression a year earlier of the Prague Spring. The ruling regime’s retribution was predictable. Listening devices were placed in
Molly Guinness on Allan Mallinson’s latest novel Allan Mallinson’s hero, Lieutenant-Colonel Matthew Hervey, returns in Warrior with his usual mixture of courage and kindness, his talent for friendship and a military instinct that is second to none. The first scene shows us, with some high quality gore, that there is trouble in the Cape Colony:
Magic and fantasy seem to occupy an odd tract of land in the world of the novel. Despite an honourable lineage that includes William Morris, Lord Dunsany and J. R. R. Tolkien, there persists a feeling that fantasy is really for children and geeks; it is not a serious art. Perhaps this is why publishers
Michael Bourdeaux on Owen Matthews’s family biography. Reconstruction of one’s parents’ love story is a rare enough undertaking; success to this extent puts Owen Matthews’s family biography into a special category. Mervyn Matthews and Lyudmila Bibikova fell in love in Moscow in 1963, when he was studying there and she was a brilliant graduate of
In the spring of 1865 Washington was celebrating victory in a bitterly fought civil war. It had begun in 1861 when six southern states had seceded from the Union, setting up the separate Confederate state with its capital in Richmond. For Southerners, the Union threatened to abolish the ‘peculiar institution’ of slavery without which, they
Olivia Cole on Victoria Hislop’s second novel Married to a permanently well-lunched Englishman, Sonia Cameron, the half-Spanish heroine of Victoria Hislop’s second novel The Return, seeks escapism — first in a local dance class (to which she becomes unexpectedly addicted) and, more compellingly, in a chapter of her family history by which she becomes distracted
No disrespect to Jeremy Lewis, this third amiable volume of autobiography or his hopeful sponsors at the Harper Press, but it is extraordinary that books like this still get written. Here we are, after all, in the age of the Waterstone’s three-for-two, the novels of Miss Keri Katona and the cheery philistinism of the man
As we now know, the unimaginably awful Third Reich did not spring fully formed from Hitler’s mind. Its antecedents can be traced to the predominantly upper-class and reactionary parties of the late 19th century, to Bismarck’s Slavic preoccupation, to a long history of racial and mythical obsessions with Deutschtum or German-ness, and on into Weimar
‘To enclose the collected works of Cocteau one would need not a bookshelf, but a warehouse,’ W. H. Auden wrote in 1950. The same isn’t quite true of Auden — a warehouse wouldn’t be necessary — but it has to be said that only a bookshelf of substantial proportions would be capable of accommodating the
The last time all five James children were in the same room was at their mother’s funeral, in 1882. It must have been a strange gathering. Even by then, their lives had followed such extraordinarily different paths that, to the reader of their collective biography, they seem to have become randomly assembled strangers. Henry James,
William Cecil, Lord Burghley, would be delighted that in his historical afterlife he remains the old man he died as, after 40 years of power. The frail flesh and white beard projects the image of the dull bureaucrat we remember: ideal cover for an ideologue who makes Donald Rumsfeld appear warm and fuzzy, and a
There is a moment in the introduction to this book, when, after the grand statement of its aim ‘to encapsulate a country’s material, natural and cultural essence’, you come on this, amongst the usual thanks being extended to archivists and professors: ‘To Roy Morgan of Mertec Evesham Ltd., Swansea, who kindly loaned the project a
On 29 May 1989 Brigadier Tariq Mehmood, formerly head of Pakistan’s Special Forces, was taking part in a freefall demonstration in Gujranwala. His parachute failed and he crashed to his death in front of a large crowd that included his wife. TM (as he was always known) was the arche- typal Special Forces officer, almost
Douglas Hurd on James Fergusson’s new book Des Browne, our Defence Secretary, has recently returned from another visit to the British Army in Afghanistan. Once again he issued an optimistic statement on military progress. He should read the devastating account in James Fergusson’s book of his previous visits. The purpose of this excellently written book is to
You may have caught Jonathan Dimbleby on television recently travelling across Russia, picking potatoes with doughty Russian women, baring all for a steam bath in Moscow, looking alarmed as a white witch from Karelia promised to heal his bad back with a breadknife, etc. Here is the book of the series, in which Dimbleby, drawing
Mary Lefkowitz is a distinguished (i.e. no longer young) classicist who taught for over 30 years at Wellesley College. She has been particularly bold and articulate in promoting the role of women in antiquity. Married to Hugh Lloyd-Jones, a famously rigorous ex-Regius Professor of Greek, she can be presumed not to advance lazy arguments or
Jane Ridley on a history and a fiction of Leningrad The siege of Leningrad is the ultimate nightmare: what happens when you push humanity to its utmost limits. The German armies advanced on Leningrad and besieged it in September, 1941. The siege lasted for almost 900 days, but the first winter was the worst. Bread,
In 1939, the six-year-old Eva Figes escaped Nazi Berlin for London. Her family were secular Jews and her father, who had been arrested after Kristallnacht, had spent some months in Dachau. Left behind were grandparents and two maids, Edith and Schwester Eva, both Jewish: by 1939, it was forbidden for Jews to employ Aryans. Schwester