Diary of a Bad Year by J. M. Coetzee In the last scene of J. M. Coetzee’s Booker Prize-winning novel, Disgrace, the main character, David Lurie, helps to put down homeless dogs. He places their remains in black plastic bags and takes them to the incinerator. Until then, Lurie has not shown himself to be
Singled Out by Virginia Nicholson One day in 1917 the senior mistress of Bournemouth High School for Girls told the assembled sixth form, ‘I have come to tell you a terrible fact. Only one out of ten of you girls can ever hope to marry.’ She was right. Nearly three quarters of a million young
Exit Music by Ian Rankin ‘You … are … history.’ Approx- imately halfway through Ian Rankin’s latest and surely most brilliant thriller Exit Music, these appalling words are spoken to D. I. John Rebus by his superior. What is worse, Chief Constable James Corbyn means it. He’s not simply referring to the fact that Rebus
Giles Wareing, a freelance journalist, is days away from his 40th birthday, pretty sure he has gout and otherwise minding — well, monitoring is perhaps more accurate — his own business, typing ‘Giles Wareing funny/brilliant/clever’ into search engines. When a perverse impulse leads him to try some less flattering adjectives he discovers the Haters: ‘A
The Golden Age of Censorship by Paul Hoffman T. S. Eliot thought it a curiosity of our culture that we use the word ‘taboo’ purely negatively. The word ‘censor’ is surely similar: the notion that any person or society could survive for long without some forms of censorship is fatuous, and yet it is something
Euan Uglow: The Complete Paintings Catalogue raisonné by Catherine Lampert; Essays by Richard Kendall and Catherine Lampert Whether we know it or not ‘we crave the inexpressive in art’, Bernard Berenson wrote, as an antidote to the sensationalism of ‘the representational arts most alive, the cinema and the illustrated press’. He was writing about Euan
A Pembrokeshire Pioneer by Roscoe Howells In 1903, in one tremulous little 12-second hop, just 10 feet off the ground, Orville Wright made the first powered flight by a man. Or was it? In the village of Saundersfoot on the Pembrokeshire coast there is the belief amongst the old who can still remember what their
Zugzwang by Ronan Bennett Zugzwang, from the German Zug (move) and Zwang (obligation), is a term used in chess when the player whose turn it is to move has no move that does not worsen his position. It is not merely a bad position, but the state of being obliged to move when no move
Them and Us: The American Invasion of British High Society by Charles Jennings A dinner-party hosted by Chips Channon at his ostentatious Belgrave Square flat in 1936 frames this book. It is described in the introduction and appears again in the final chapter, for its composition defines what had gradually happened to high society in
The Wild Places by Robert Macfarlane Robert Macfarlane is a Cambridge don, Fellow in English at Emmanuel College, with an artistic eye for wild and lonely places. He was a friend and follower of Roger Deakin, whose last book I reveiwed three weeks ago. Deakin swam in strange waters; Macfarlane sleeps — or spends the
The Confidence Man: His Masquerade by Herman Melville Many years ago in Texas, a movie advertisement urged viewers ‘to thrill to Herman Melville’s immortal story of the sea, Moby-Dick, with Gregory Peck in the title role,’ prompting the New Yorker to comment, ‘A whale of a part.’ And how! I’ve just finished reading the book
Simon Raven’s first novel, The Feathers of Death, was published in 1959 Simon Raven’s first novel, The Feathers of Death, was published in 1959 when I was in my second year at Cambridge. We fell on it with glee, as I remarked, a few weeks after Raven’s death, to a fellow-novelist, somewhat to her amazement.
The Uncommon Reader by Alan Bennett Since The History Boys transferred first to Broadway and then to the cinema, Alan Bennett has made the journey from national treasure to international superstar. The dustwrapper of this droll novella spends two lines on the London gongs that play picked up, and more than five lines on the
Mornings in the Dark: The Graham Greene Reader edited by David Parkinson Arriving at Oxford in 1923, the young Graham Greene made one move he was to regret 30 years later, when applying for a US entry visa — he joined the Communist party for a few weeks. Much less regrettable, he appointed himself the
The Arcadian Friends: Inventing the English Landscape Garden by Tim Richardson The man ‘of Polite Imagination’, according to Joseph Addison, was able to delight in things lesser mortals might fail to appreciate, particularly the landscape. ‘It gives him indeed a kind of Property in everything he sees, and makes the most rude uncultivated Parts of
The Great Big Glorious Book for Girls by Rosemary Davidson and Sarah Vine One of the publishing triumphs of last year, The Dangerous Book for Boys, with immaculate timing tapped into a rich vein that combined nostalgia with exasperation at the seemingly unstoppable advance of Nanny State, with her stifling regime of risk assessment and
Hotel de Dream by Edmund White Seven years before his untimely death from consumption at the age of 28, Stephen Crane published Maggie: A Girl of the Streets. It was 1893 and the time was out of joint for a grimly realistic fictionalisation of the life of a prostitute. Nineteenth-century sensibilities recoiled. Crane enjoyed a
Secrets of the Sea by Nicholas Shakespeare Nicholas Shakespeare’s new novel is set in Wellington Point, an inauspicious fictional Tasmanian town. It is a place offering few prospects: the only jobs are menial, and the only person with any vim is the odious Ray Grogan, an estate agent who seduces local women by comparing them
On Brick Lane by Rachel Lichtenstein Brick Lane, a long and ancient street in London’s East End, casts a spell of fascination on all who go there. To walk down Brick Lane is to take a voyage through the past, where Huguenot weavers of the 18th century meet fellow ghosts of Jewish anarchists, and their
The Several Lives of Joseph Conrad by John Stape Why did he do it? In his late thirties, Joseph Conrad abandoned the modestly successful career as a seaman which he had steadily built up. Though the job involved tiresome exams and increasing responsibilities, it had been his ‘great passion’, he wrote a dozen years later.