Although there have been many architectural books featuring the works of Geoffrey Bawa, the Sri Lankan born architect, most notably a first monograph authored by David Robson a year before Bawa died in 2003, a second book, Beyond Bawa, also by Robson, is a biographical and artistic revelation. What is surprising and different about this
It is questionable whether psychiatry as a whole does, or has done throughout its history, more good than harm. Certainly there are some patients who benefit from its ministrations; but there are many others who have been harmed by the wrongful administration of noxious drugs or other therapies. A less tangible, but nevertheless potentially serious,
It was the achievement of Sir Robert Shirley ‘to have done the best things in ye worst times And hoped them in the most callamitous.’ So at least reads the inscription over the west door of Holy Trinity, the chapel he founded at Staunton Harold in Leicestershire. The most notable things Shirley did were to
The subtitle of this account of the genesis and fate of the five movies in competition for the title Best Film at the 1967 Academy Awards is ‘the birth of the New Hollywood’. Hyperbole being the most reliable trope known to publicity, we are promised that 1967 was ‘the year that changed film’ and that
Who would think that a battle as decisive as Marathon or Waterloo took place at the gates of Warsaw in August 1920? Such is the question that Adam Zamoyski poses at the beginning of his account of the war between Lenin’s Soviet Russia and Pilsudski’s Catholic Poland, fought in the twilight between the first and
In one of the stories in this collection, a woman whose sister has died of anorexia remembers ‘an incident when she was maybe eight and I was twelve’ when the little girls encountered a flasher: . . . it sort of jumped out and curled up, in a way that I now might recognise. At
In some moods, I would rather read George Gissing than any other 19th-century English novelist. In the 1890s he was ranked with Hardy and Meredith, at a time when they had finished writing novels and he was only just getting into his tortured stride. Orwell called The Odd Women ‘one of the best novels in
Albania is small and little known, its history sufficiently confusing and its names sufficiently unpronounceable for us to be funny about it or, worse, to romanticise it. But humour and romance were in short supply for Albanians during the second world war (and after), and there wasn’t much left over for those sent to help
As life-expectancy seems to grow longer by the minute, as it were — at least in our part of the globe — it was predictable that some writers would retain their marbles long enough to report ruefully back from the ageing-battlefield. At least two poets have done so very well: Roy Fuller and D. J.
The publisher Gerard Noel pays tribute to his friend and author who died last week at the age of 79 One Friday evening in the early 1980s two brand-new, bright red cars roared up to my house in Gloucestershire. The drivers were Laura and Anthony Blond, my guests for a bank holiday weekend, who had
Did you know that the first person to cage a budgerigar was John Gould, the 19th-century English artist/naturalist? Or that the word ‘penguin’ is derived from the Welsh words ‘pen’ (white) and ‘gwyn’ (head)? Or that there is no scientific (in other words fossil) evidence that the dodo ever existed? These are just three informative
‘Avoiding both the pigeon hole and the blackboard I have tried to trace a connecting line between the apparently diverse and contradictory manifestations of contemporary music,’ wrote the composer and conductor Constant Lambert in the preface to Music ho!, his marvellously breezy survey of modern music published in 1934. Some 70 years later, the New
Anthony Powell always maintained that readers who disliked his early books did so on essentially non-literary grounds. Conservative reviewers of the 1930s, irked by the party-going degenerates of a novel like Afternoon Men (1931) did not believe that such people existed. If, on the other hand, they did exist then novels ought not to be
This book is a metaphor: a book about a museum that is itself a museum, crammed with cabinets and curiosities; a natural history of the Natural History Museum. It contains collections, of objects and of people; it educates and entertains; it helps you to see the world, and the NHM, with new eyes. Richard Fortey
In the forthcoming volume of his Smoking Diaries (not out till April, but I’ve been reading a proof copy) my old friend Simon Gray makes a brave admission. Well, he makes a number of these, but this particular one struck me. ‘I haven’t read him [Henry James] for years. I don’t believe I have the
This is a lively contribution to that mound of books — now approximately the height of Skiddaw — about Wordsworth and Coleridge and their ladies in the Lake District. Frances Wilson has found a niche, basing her book on Dorothy Wordsworth’s Grasmere Journals, written during the two and a half years at the opening of
In July, 1642, as the English House of Commons debated whether to raise an army against the king, a dismayed MP, Bulstrode Whitelocke, wondered how parliament had ‘insensibly slipped into this beginning of a civil war by one unexpected accident after another [so that] we scarce know how, but from paper combats, by declarations, remonstrances,
In 1988 I arrived in Pakistan a few hours after the assassination of Zia ul-Huq, the military dictator whose aircraft had been blown to pieces by a bomb. In most countries the violent death of a leader, who had dominated politics for more than a decade, would trigger soul-searching, or at the very least a
The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo (MacLehose Press, £14.99, translated from the Swedish by Stephen Murray) is the first volume of Stieg Larsson’s Millennium Trilogy. Larsson was a journalist who sadly died of a heart attack before publication. But the books are selling in their millions across Europe and, once you read the first of
The first world war seemed like a good idea at the time. Cheering crowds thronged deliriously through the capitals of Europe as war was declared. In England the prospect of being paid to kill foreigners started a stampede to join up. Within five weeks almost 480,000 men had volunteered, many lying about their age. An