One of the lessons taught in these pages over many years by Christopher Fildes was that, because financial markets are human nature in action, anything that goes wrong in them is almost certain to have happened before and highly likely to happen again. Technology may advance, the language and methods of business may evolve, the
‘Kings, who are the sovereign arbiters of the fortune and the conduct of men, are always themselves the most severely judged and the most curiously observed.’ Louis XIV complained in his memoirs (addressed to his son) about the public gaze in which monarchs lived, and the malicious gossip to which they were always therefore subject:
Over the coming weeks you are sure to hear a good deal about The Thirteenth Tale. The author of this novel, a teacher of French literature living in Harrogate, has already netted 1.5 million pounds in advance royalties from British and US publishers alone. Foreign deals and film rights will surely garner much more. Comparisons
Replace the commas in the subtitle of this book, ‘Thomas Young, the Anonymous Polymath who Proved Newton Wrong, Explained How We See, and Deciphered the Rosetta Stone Among Other Feats of Genius’, with exclamation marks, and it reads like the title of a Gillray cartoon or the patter of a circus huckster. The problem we
My Love Affair with Miami Beach (1991) by Isaac Bashevis Singer Isaac Bashevis Singer, the 1978 Nobel laureate, wrote mainly on the Jewish experience in pre-war Poland, the Holocaust, Israel, and the diaspora to the USA, particularly New York, not an awful lot about Miami Beach. But Miami Beach nevertheless held a special place in
Five years on, and the 9/11 books begin to mount up: we’ve had Philip Roth doing it as historical allegory in The Plot Against America; John Updike doing it as a thriller in Terrorist; Jonathan Safran Foer doing whatever it is that Jonathan Safran Foer does in Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close; Ian McEwan’s Saturday;
This enthralling and important book offers vital reading for anyone with a serious interest in opera. Its author Philip Gossett describes himself as ‘a fan, a musician and a scholar’; more specifically, he works from a base at the University of Chicago as one of the foremost authorities on the period broadly circumscribed by Rossini’s
I ought to declare a tribal interest in Patrick Collinson’s latest instalment of collected essays: he and I both grew up in that unjustly overlooked and astringently beautiful county, Suffolk, which figures largely in his text. Our respective childhoods embraced the polarity of Suffolk religion in the mid-20th century: solid Prot, of course, but divided
Narendra Singh Sarila has a theory. Because he is a man of high intelligence and has researched diligently into the sources, his theory must be treated with respect. As one of India’s most senior ambassadors he is well qualified to assess the limitations of state papers and to distinguish between what politicians say and what
fuga, fugas — music now, not backat school where Harry Roberts flashed his gown,a toga to berate a class as slackas Rome became; we’d been meant to be English Augustans, but were soon brought downto being worthy only of a fewemotive Saxon nouns and verbs: the sea had brought our Fathers to a sanded shore,packed
An oddity about J.G. Ballard is that his unquestionable truths about English society are often encased within deliberately, and stupendously, implausible plots; his trick is to conjure reality from the deeply unrealistic. Kingdom Come, his latest novel, demonstrates that he is still, in his eighth decade, as outré as ever, and still as keen to
Although Barry Unsworth’s latest novel might in some sense be about the relationship between Islam and Christianity, other less trendy themes are much more effectively addressed. Besides, The Ruby in Her Navel is told by a fictional character so convincing in his strengths and weaknesses that all considerations of politics, religion, history and morality are
The suggestion was made the other day that Dylan Thomas may have been dyslexic. Apparently, the experts deduced this from the style of his poetry. It seems an odd assertion. Dyslexic children find difficulty, and therefore no pleasure, in reading. Dylan, according to his parents, taught himself to read when he was three, and thereafter
In the opening pages of Italo Calvino’s If on a Winter’s Night a Traveller books are memorably divided into certain useful categories: Books You Needn’t Read, Books You Mean To Read But There Are Others You Need To Read First, Books That If You Had More Than One Life You Would Certainly Also Read But
No modern country wishes to understand itself through its remote past more ardently than does Korea. Nineteenth- century Korean nationalists were anxious to trace their state back to a mythical semi-divine hero, Tan’gun, who founded Korea in the third millennium BC. (Koreans will probably be irritated if it is suggested that this resembles Japanese eagerness
It may have taken until the late 1960s for the expression ‘the personal is political’ to condense an important truth, but — as Lucy Moore’s fascinating new book shows — that truth is not a new one. Liberty tells the story of the French Revolution through the lives of the great salonnière Germaine de Staël,
This is an ambitious book. Andrew Motion set out to write a memoir of his childhood but not from the standpoint, and distance, of a grown-up looking back; he set out to write it in the character of a child and teenager living through his experiences. The result can be startling. Of his father, a
Roy Adkins, an archaeologist, wrote a book for the Trafalgar bicentenary called Trafalgar: The Biography of a Battle. Despite the curiously pretentious title and a jumbled content, this reviewer described it in these pages as ‘eclectic but engaging’: Trafalgar was, after all, a straightforward battle, and the author had quoted a large number of apt
‘Why do your tales of degradation and humiliation make you so popular?’ a fellow drinker at Moe’s Bar asks Homer Simpson. Homer replies, ‘I dunno, they just do.’ The toper would have been wiser to have addressed the question to Toby Young. No writer in Christendom has made a greater success out of failure. Young’s
This is a wonderful book — lucid, funny, sharp, truthful, cheeky, generous, erudite, surprise-crammed, and emanating a delicious tang of sophisticated amusement. I would love to continue in this vein but I’m afraid I mustn’t. It’s just not right. You see, the book is a collection of literary columns written by Nick Hornby for an