The Sixties are there in the first sentence of the first chapter of this social, political and cultural history of the decade: On the first day of October 1963, as the earliest whispers of dawn were edging across the cliff tops of the Yorkshire resort of Scarborough, the new leader of the Labour party nervously
‘No thanks. Too much sex.’ Thus an elderly friend dismissed my offer to lend him John Stubbs’s compendious biography of John Donne. His fears are groundless. Stubbs tells us virtually nothing about the paramours who inspired Donne’s youthful poems, partly because no new information is available and partly because the poet’s exquisite testimony on the
Waiting for the second volume of a good biography is a painful process. I feel very sorry for anyone who read Brian McGuinness’s excellent Young Ludwig (part one of the life of Wittgenstein) when it was published in 1988. The philosopher’s exciting story broke off in 1921 and fans have been left dangling ever since
‘There’s a dry wind blowing through the East and the parched grasses wait and spark.’ This is not the sort of language we associate with a high-ranking official in the Foreign Office, but things were different in 1916. Not altogether different, however. ‘Islam is a fighting creed, and the mullah still stands in the pulpit
Only if you have spent the last few months living in a remote corner of Chad will you not have noticed that this year marks the centenary of Sir John Betjeman’s birth. We have already seen telly programmes, church restoration appeals, commemorative CDs of his readings, Cornish cliff walks and special outings on West Country
‘I am entirely against the promotion of a sense of humour as a philosophy of life,’ wrote Kate O’Brien, with just that chilling aloofness that marks out her two heroines in The Land of Spices. Mère Marie-Hélène, Reverend Mother of the convent school of La Compagnie de la Sainte Famille in Mellick (a fictionalised Limerick),
I wonder how much my enthusiasm for Alexander McCall Smith’s stories about Precious Ramotswe, the founder of The Ladies No. 1 Detective Agency, came from reading them while in a French hospital recovering from an emergency operation? Grateful to be transported from my hospital bed to Botswana and find myself in her company I wouldn’t have
The front cover shows a mature English beauty in an Oriental doorway, elegant in a turban, with twinset and pearls. On the back is a Country Life portrait of a radiant English rose. Both are Ann Allestree, who for 30 years supped at the high table of grand society, travelled, and set down her impressions.
Professor Kennedy is a decent liberal who hopes for the victory of the brotherhood of man. He begins this study of the UN, its history, successes, failings and prospects for reform by quoting Tennyson’s ‘Locksley Hall’: Till the war-drum throbb’d no longer, and the battle-flags were furl’dIn the Parliament of man, the Federation of the
In 1961, when he was 62, Ernest Hemingway shot himself. Almost half a century later, this bombastic, vainglorious, paranoid man, whose writing captured the minds not only of his own generation but of all subsequent ones, still exercises a powerful attraction for biographers. Though no one has yet written a better account of Hemingway’s unhappy
The premise of John Sutherland’s new book is that many people wrongly think of reading as an all-or-nothing ability, like, say, tying one’s shoes: either you can do it or you can’t. Such people would no doubt consider a book about how to read a novel as irrelevant as one titled How to Eat Crisps
The arc and light and breadth and nothing kempt,Flat shining fields of sand, the shallow-carvingTigris and Euphrates of the beach streamsWhere individual flying grains are seen,The wet compactions out of which grew keepsI slopped moat water on at the end of the day,Playing decay and knowing I was loved,Coves where my face would drop past
Sir John Soane is London’s lost architect. You can visit his museum in Lincoln’s Inn Fields, and the picture gallery he designed at Dulwich. But since his death in 1837 his greatest masterpieces have gone. The Victorians demolished the law courts at Westminster, and the glittering royal entrance to the House of Lords. The RAC
Cry Shame (1950) by Katherine Everard Cry Shame! is the torrid tale of a 13-year- old girl who leaves home to become a dancer: in her brief career she learns things she is too young to know, runs off with a man four times her age, assiduously breaks the seventh commandment, has an affair with
Anyone interested in the history of Germany, of nationalism or of dynasties will be gripped by this book. Born at the start of the 20th century, heirs of an ancient German dynasty, Princes Philipp and Christopher of Hesse-Kassel were good-looking, modern young men. English was their second language, Queen Victoria’s liberal daughter the Empress Frederick
On an autumn Saturday in 1944 Private Robert Prentice, an 18-year-old rifleman trainee, makes a long journey from his camp in Virginia to New York City, to see his mother. He is soon to be sent abroad, France most likely, and there he’ll see action, which will at least be a change from tedious, thankless
Kate Atkinson’s previous novel, Case Histories, was a successful experiment in crime fiction. One Good Turn is its sequel. In the first book, which was set in Cambridge, Brodie Jackson was a standard-issue private eye — ex-army, ex-police, with a broken marriage and a penchant for country music. Now, thanks to a £2 million inheritance
‘Nothing was over. Nothing is ever over.’ Thus muses Humphrey Clark as he travels towards the small windswept northern port of Finsterness, scene of formative childhood holidays. Humphrey, a reclusive marine biologist, is on his way to collect an honorary degree. Much more significantly, at Finsterness he will re-encounter Ailsa Kelman, his childhood companion and
Before the fire, before the ash, before theBodies tumbling solitary through space, oneThin skin of glass and metal met another….Two man-made behemoths joined in a fatal kiss. Although this poetic and deeply philosophical expression of the author’s love (no other word will suffice) for the Empire State Building ostensibly celebrates the 75th anniversary of the
In one of P. G. Wodehouse’s stories the attempts made by Oliver Sipperley, editor of the Mayfair Gazette, to inject some pep into the mag are hampered by poor old Sippy’s inability to ward off unwelcome contributions from his formidable prep school headmaster on recondite classical topics. I experienced not dissimilar difficulties when editing the