‘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
‘If ‘justice were done’, writes Norman Davies in this fascinating and infuriating work, ‘all books on the second world war in Europe would devote perhaps three quarters of their contents to the Eastern Front.’ In the real world, of course, the victors dispense the justice and write the history afterwards. So it is gratifying that there is a scholar around with the
First, the necessary declaration of interest. The author and I were, at the age of five, at nursery school in New York together for a couple of terms. But as in the intervening 60 years I have seen him barely half a dozen times, in crowded rooms, I feel free to say that he is
Pennant should have been a publishing sensation, yet how many of you have heard of a book of which within weeks of its appearance all but 12 copies were sold? Not only that, its de luxe version in inlaid leather (at £2,750 a copy) had been sold before it even came out. There will, of
Vic Gatrell’s investigation into rude old-fashioned laughter almost bursts out of its covers, with 700 pages and 289 illustrations showing political caricatures and prints ridiculing the fashionable and the badly behaved. Much of the mockery is aimed at the libertine sons of George III and their friends, male and female, but there are also even-handed
Hannibal Lecter is, surely, a fictional character who needs no introduction. It’s one of the grosser stupidities of this almost limitlessly stupid novel to think that those readers who have enjoyed the grand guignol of Thomas Harris’s other Lecter novels, Red Dragon, The Silence of the Lambs, and Hannibal would welcome an account, even an
Long ago (so I have forgotten the precise details) I read one of those books by a British soldier who escaped from a German prisoner-of-war camp in the second world war. He had managed to pinch a German uniform and was making his way across the Fatherland disguised as an Oberleutnant or something. Suddenly he
I’m at Washington airport on a book tour. My escort, an agreeable man whom I have encountered on several previous occasions, says farewell and then asks, ‘Are you still writing?’ I smile nervously. ‘A few more years left?’ he ventures, either in hope or dread, it doesn’t matter. Still. The ‘still’ word. ‘Are you still
If you tell people there was no ox or ass in the stable where Jesus was born, they sometimes become quite irate, especially if they are convinced Christians. They believe in the marvellous Christmas story, and to deny the ox and ass seems tantamount to denying the Babe of Bethlehem. Of course, the ox and
‘Those who can, write. Those who can’t, quote.’ Well, I’m sure someone has said it, although I have just looked it up in these two vast, baggy new books of quotations and it’s not there. Truth is, the great English tradition of hurling quotations at other people to show how clever you are seems to
As any good poem is always ending,The fence looks best when it first needs mending.Weathered, it hints it will fall to pieces —One day, not yet, but the chance increasesWith each nail rusting and grey plank bending.It’s not a wonder if it never ceases. In beauty’s bloom you can see time burning:A lesson learned while
First, I’d like to put a curse on most editors of ‘Selected Writings’ who, sometimes under the devious word ‘Collected’, serve us cold cuts instead of the whole hog; second, I’d like to congratulate the University of ChicagoPress for allowing us once again to read Friedrich Dürrenmatt in English, thereby restoring to the English-speaking public
There is something unedifying in politicians apologising, without cost to themselves, for the sins of their predecessors while deploying all the black arts of their trade to suppress criticism of their own performance. The same goes for society at large. It would be more admirable for 21st-century Britain to be trying to imagine what our
There is a drawing by Sempé of the Tour de France which is so brilliant that when Geoffrey Wheatcroft first saw it, he just knew he had to have it on the front of his history of the Tour de France. It is an aerial view of a gloomy, grimy French town round the streets
Gladstone and Disraeli were the Punch and Judy of Victorian politics, and reams have been published about them, but no one has written a book which centres on their relationship. Richard Aldous has had the clever wheeze of charting their rivalry, retelling the story in what he calls a ‘modern way’ for a generation who
Norman Rockwell’s the name. You’ll know it of course. Rockwell the byword. It wasn’t simply the perpetual air of impending Thanks- giving that gave his Saturday Evening Post covers such appeal. Rockwell covers were cover stories really; that was their distinction. Others, John Falter for example or Steve Dohano, delivered similar eyefuls of graphic cheer