It is hardly surprising if from time to time a contemporary novelist should attempt to write a pastiche of Agatha Christie, if only in the hope of solving the mystery of her egregious popular success and its longevity. Year after year this gentlyreared Edwardian lady produced stories of sometimes fiendish ingenuity which were seized on
When Boris Johnson was selected as the Conservative candidate for Henley in 2000, a year after being made editor of The Spectator, he called up Charles Moore and asked for his advice on how to handle Conrad Black, the magazine’s proprietor. The problem was that Boris had given him his word that he would not
One of the most dangerous tastes any British politician can admit to is a tendresse for the Teutonic. During the first world war the Liberal cabinet minister Haldane was compelled to resign because of his pro-German sympathies. It was not that Haldane harboured any political affection for Wilhelmine militarism, or had exhibited any slackness in
Leonard Woolf had a passion for animals, not unconnected with an appetite for control. Dogs (with the occasional mongoose or monkey) were his companions to the end of his life. Discussing human nature, he put them on an equal plane: ‘There are some people, usually dogs or old women, extremely simple and unintellectual, who instinctively
This highly entertaining and self-deprecating autobiography should dispel the myth, however craftily put about by the boy himself, that its author could ever have been a successful rent boy. Promotion of that role-play may rack up millions on the tabloid stage, but Everett is demonstrably far too original, headstrong and downright funny to ever have
B y now Heywood Hill’s bookshop in Curzon Street must be almost as famous as 84 Charing Cross Road. Opened in 1936, the shop first became familiar through the lively accounts of Nancy Mitford, who worked there from 1942-45. Then came A Bookseller’s War, the correspondence between Heywood Hill, away in the army, and his
As a late Seventies teenager, I was exposed to two distinct brands of American humour — or ‘yomour’ as it tended to be pronounced — each diametrically opposed to the other. One was the Bob Hope school of urbane wisecrackery that drifted over the Radio Two airwaves on Saturday mornings while my father sat approvingly
According to Bill Bryson, 99.9 per cent of the world’s ills originated in America during the 1950s. Well, he doesn’t actually say that, as such, but in the course of his book he reveals some pretty grisly statistics concerning his homeland. Apparently, chemicals in food, endless nuclear-bomb testing, teenagers, intensive television- watching, American world domination,
The late Leonard Setright was a rightly admired, genuinely idio- syncratic, provocatively pedantic and engagingly discursive motoring writer who loved any excuse to show off his Latin or to get Milton, Mozart or Ecclesiastes into a car column. He relished his reputation for having been quoted more often than anyone else in Private Eye’s Pseuds’
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