God’s Architect: Pugin and the Building of Romantic Britainby Rosemary Hill Pugin is not unknown in the way he was 50 years ago. Two major exhibitions in the 1990s, in New York and London, the formation of a flourishing Pugin Society and 3,000 people who one weekend last summer crowded in to see his highly
Roger Deakin was a swimmer, old-fashioned socialist, carpenter, broadcaster, tree-planter, chair-bodger, ‘quasi-hippie’, art critic, naturalist, Cambridge graduate, traveller, north-east Suffolk man, champion of local individuality, anti-globaliser and explorer of the links between nature and culture. (Guess how many of these attributes he shared with this reviewer.) He founded Common Ground, the organisation that gave the
Supposedly narrated by the scholar and Aristotelian Michael Scott to his pupil the future Holy Roman Emperor Frederick II, sometime in the early 13th century, Charlemagne and Roland completes the trilogy begun by The Evening of the World and Arthur the King. Although framed as a picturesquely tongue-in-cheek accompaniment to a great deal of Carolingian
Trying to explain the limits of his Parallel Lives, Plutarch compared the work of historians to that of cartographers who must crowd into the edges of their maps parts of the world which they do not know about, adding notes in the margin to the effect that beyond this lies nothing but the sandy deserts
It would be easy to be mean about this book — so here goes. It purports to be David Mamet’s practical guide to movie-making and one of the points he makes repeatedly is that films shouldn’t have any fat on them. The film may, perhaps, be likened to a boxer. He is going to have
The appearance of this volume is an important publishing event. It is the first book in ten years from one of the outstanding historians of our age. Its brevity and unflamboyant presentation are deceptive. Those who have admired Norman Stone’s work in the past will not be disappointed — it is full of surprises and
There’s a theory, no doubt implausible and based on selective evidence, that alone among the peoples of Europe the English are somehow immune from those fits of mass hysteria which break out with murderous effect elsewhere. It must be nonsense, but it’s very easy to find instances in English history where what looks like the
The picture on the dustwrapper of Suffer and Survive shows a genial-looking Victorian gent with a serious moustache — and it does not tell a lie. The physiologist J.S. Haldane was genial, serious, and extremely Victorian. He was an obstinate man of principle. He was a rigorous experimentalist with a philosophical bent. He was loyal
Elizabeth Marsh was an undistinguished member of an unremarkable dynasty. She was neither famous nor infamous and had no conspicuous talent except, perhaps, for survival. Her father’s family was involved in maritime activity but of her mother we know nothing. Elizabeth herself was married to James Crisp, an entrepreneur of uncertain fortunes from whom she
The Slade of the years immediately before the first world war has always been fertile ground for novelists. As Sarah MacDougall pointed out in her engaging biography of Mark Gertler, Gertler himself and his fellow students have provided copy for anyone and everyone from D.H. Lawrence and Virginia Woolf to Katherine Mansfield, V.S. Pritchett and
Last March, after an unexpected illness, Michael Dibdin died at his home in Seattle. His death came as a shock to fans everywhere of crime fiction. Dibdin had just turned 60. His Aurelio Zen mysteries are distinguished by their edgy, convincing police work, mordant dialogue and the picture they give of social unease and mayhem
The current must-see exhibition at the Museum of London, 150 London Wall, London EC2 (The Missing Link? until 8 August) includes a limestone sarcophagus containing a headless male skeleton. Discovered in the foundations of the church of St Martin-in-the-Fields, just off Trafalgar Square, it has been dated by archaeologists to around AD 410, the traditional
Francis King’s new novel was published a few weeks ago. Francis King’s new novel was published a few weeks ago. Nothing, you may say, remarkable about that. He is among the most professional of authors; writing novels is what he does. Well, yes, of course, but it is certainly worth remarking that his first novel
Littlestone Days After the golf, the bridge and the cocktails,after the sets of tenniswith Noël Coward and the Maughamslooking on from the balcony,‘Ah, the dear boys!’ after sherry and theatricals,the dinner-dances and the outings,after charades and canastaand evenings with the gramophone, you alone of them would turn your backand cycle into the wind, then strideyour
We won’t know the Man Booker Prize longlist until 7 August, but Mister Pip had better be on it. It knocks the only New Zealand winner so far, the notorious Bone People, for six. It mightn’t win, because it falls to bits in the last 20 pages, but up to then it joins a fresh
Here is a remarkable novel, one which appears to be about nothing in particular, featuring barely half a dozen characters, several of whom have no names. Hardly anything happens. A boy dies, a man gets shot, another boy is given a new suit, and that, more or less, is that. There is a good deal
This book falls into two parts. The first is a brisk account of Britain’s involvement with India and of the backgrounds of those people who were principally responsible for unscrambling that relationship. It contains most of the facts that matter, if rather too much social trivia that does not, and is generally fair. Where it
In Grand Canal, Great River we enter a world that makes the moon seem familiar. It is also one of the most beautiful books I’ve handled and is a screaming bargain. Philip Watson read Chinese at Oxford and spent most of his working life in the Foreign Office, with postings in Hong Kong and Beijing.
When, ten years ago, you bought for Jack or Chloe a jolly-sounding novel about a schoolboy getting up to all sorts of pranks at an academy for wizards, I don’t suppose you could have predicted the tone of the seventh and last book in the series. It is apocalyptic, redemptive, Wagnerian and quite extraordinarily keen
John Worthen, a D.H. Lawrence specialist, approaches Robert Schumann’s tormented life without any apparent musical or medical expertise. His aim is ambitious: to prove that Schumann was not the quintessential Romantic figure of folklore and that he died of tertiary syphilis. He attempts to argue that Schumann was not manic-depressive, schizophrenic, unbalanced or even unstable.