Even as a boy Charles knew there was something false about his father Adrian Mainguard. Why? Nobody else did. An internationally famed pianist and composer, blessed with Dionysian looks and a forehead Virginia Woolf described as ‘like a bow window revealing his soul … there was something god-like about him’. Benjamin Britten, Auden, Sackville-Wests and Bloomsburys, all
Had there been a poll of the nation’s favourite painting 100 years ago, the front runner would almost certainly have been William Holman Hunt’s ‘The Light of the World’. Its representation of a crowned and bearded figure, knocking at a door that is obstructed by thorns and dead flowers, was a sermon in paint. Viewers
Monarchy, monarchy, monarchy. Are we so addicted to it that we want to read the life of a boy who came to the throne at the age of nine and died six years later? Chris Skidmore seems to think so. His purpose, he says, is to rescue the ‘lost’ Edward VI from the obscurity to
Contemporary Australian fiction, like Australian film, is known more for its exuberance and antic energy than its reticence and restraint. Deborah Robertson’s Careless, a first novel that has already won her acclaim in her own country, is a marvellous correction to the stereotype. Robertson’s ingredients are simple, but disparate: right to the end, one is
The best personal account of tank warfare in the Western Desert is generally reckoned to be Alamein to Zem Zem by Keith Douglas. It is indeed a great book, telling in spare, sensitive, limpid prose how it feels to turn from being a young man with romantic illusions about the nobility of war into a
Raymond Chandler once praised Dashiell Hammett for having given murder back to the sort of people who committed it. One knows what he meant; away with murders at the vicarage or on the Orient Express (where, however, a good few have doubtless taken place). Yet it wasn’t really a very intelligent observation because all sorts
‘Gott for damn, Rhoades, vos you drunk?’ was the indignant outcry of Captain Berndt, as he rowed alongside the Guendolen. Captaining the Guendolen was Berndt’s British friend and drinking partner Captain Rhoades, a man noted for his ‘Rabelaisian wit’ and ‘unprintable songs’, but who had just steamed up to the German end of Lake Nyasa
Between the revolution and the firing squad, a Russian aristocrat once observed, there is always time for a bottle of champagne. Between the demographic disaster and the collapse of Western civilisation, Mark Steyn appears to believe, there’s always time for a rip-roaring op-ed and a series of blistering jokes. No writer I can think of
‘Why is no one talking about what is happening in our country?’ demands the splash across the front cover of the latest book by George Walden. It is therefore something of a surprise in the pages that follow to find the former Conservative minister discoursing at length on the problems of immigration, terrorism, crime and
Stand in the Corinthian portico of the National Gallery’s main building and look due south beyond Nelson’s Column into Whitehall. Your gaze lights upon Hubert Le Sueur’s Baroque equestrian statue of King Charles I, and if your eyesight is especially keen, you might just glimpse a projecting corner of Inigo Jones’s Banqueting Hall. In this
Asked by a journalist whether he went to the opera, John Cage replied, ‘No, I listen to the traffic.’ The remark, often quoted, was less sententious than this abbreviated form would imply. Typically Cage, more interested in communicating than teasing despite his reputation as one of the funniest conversationalists, continued with an explanation: ‘I live
The classical scholar T. P. Wiseman decided that, once he had passed his 42nd birthday, his middle-aged hands were no longer apt for writing about the erotic Catullus. In his 90th year, Leo Abse manifests no such squeamishness in this psychoanalytic study of Daniel Defoe. Neither embarrassed nor embarrassing, he sees no reason to abate
Tove Jansson’s The Summer Book had been published before in this country, but when, two years ago, the enterprising Sort of Books reissued it for the first time in many years, it seemed that its moment had come. I pressed it on a lot of people, often to find that they, too, had discovered this
This is the fourth of Fred Vargas’s crime thrillers to be published in English — the third, The Three Evangelists, won last year’s inaugural Duncan Lawrie Dagger for translated crime fiction. Vargas is the pseudonym of a French archaeologist and historian. Don’t let the ‘Fred’ mislead you about her gender. Wash This Blood Clean From
J. B. Morton, a bluff Old Harrovian survivor of the Somme, succeeded his fellow Bellocian Roman Catholic convert D. B. Wyndham Lewis (‘the wrong Wyndham Lewis’, according to the tiresome Sitwells) as ‘Beachcomber’ in 1924 and wrote the ‘By the Way’ column in the Daily Express for more than 50 years. He eventually signed off
‘Walter Scott is unjust towards love; there is no force or colour in his account of it, no energy. One can see that he has studied it in books and not in his own heart.’ That was Stendhal’s opinion, and many even of Scott’s most devoted readers would not dissent from it. Dialogues between his
‘The bride is a successful exhibitor at local agricultural shows of short-horn cattle and her name is known now all over the country for those charming books for children …’ Thus the Westmorland Gazette announced the marriage of Beatrix Potter and William Heelis in 1913. Beatrix would have concurred with the Gazette’s sense of priorities.
No 007, the hero of Richard Powers’ suspenseful new novel is a cognitive neurologist. The young man who urgently needs help is a mechanic in an abattoir in a small town in Nebraska. It is a welcome relief to read fiction so interestingly unpredictable, humane and educative. Instead of the consumerism, sex and violence of
In Alan Furst’s nine novels, it always seems to be twilight. The second world war is being fought off-stage, or, as in The Foreign Correspondent, approaching with grim inevitability. Furst’s world is one of railway stations filled with steam, dark cafés filled with smoke, lonely hotel rooms filled with apprehension. It is populated by exiles and
Who is the greatest male film star of all time? Marlon Brando, Cary Grant, Hum- phrey Bogart, Clark Gable and Al Pacino are all contenders and each in his time has topped at least one poll. But my vote would go to James Stewart (or the more familiar ‘Jimmy’, as his biographer, Marc Eliot insists