Sex, Afghanistan without the risk of death, Nepalese temple bells; more sex, India when it wasn’t deforested and covered in a cloud of smog; yet more sex and a lot more drugs: yes, I can quite see why travel-writer Rory MacLean wishes that he’d been old enough to have done the Hippie Trail in its
Glorious, bloodless, last, perhaps all of those things, but the revolution of 1688 was hardly a revolution at all. It was the neat solution to a succession crisis: how to keep the throne of England secure against a Roman Catholic successor to the Roman Catholic James II. The essential ingredients were the resolve of James’s
Compared with the romance and legend of the Jacobite rebellion of 1745, the ’15 is, as Daniel Szechi ruefully concedes, ‘a dowdier bird’. It has been ill-served by history, just as the Jacobites as a whole have been neglected by historians of the 18th century in favour of the broader trend of Britain’s march of
In the Brisbane Botanical Gardens,Walking the avenue of weeping figs,You can see exuded latex stain the barkLike adolescent sperm. A metamorphosis:The trunks must be full of randy boys. At home, the Java willowsWhen planted alongside a watercourseWere said to stem the breeding of mosquitoes.Here, they have nothing else to doExcept to stand there looking elegantIn
Ah Oxford! Welcome to the City of Dreadful Spite, otherwise known as Malice Springs, the permanent Number One on the Bitch List. Not since the vituperative pamphleteers of the English Civil War has there been a community so dedicated to character assassination as the dons of Oxford. Living on the same staircase, dining side by
Some people’s lives drive you into a rage. Alan Turing’s is one. In The Man Who Knew Too Much David Leavitt unexpectedly compares him to Alec Guinness playing Sidney Stratton in The Man in the White Suit. Like Stratton, who invented a suit that would never wear out, Turing was a brilliant scientific deviant, interested
Some day this book may be in the footnotes of all social histories of the early 21st century, not for what it contains but for what it is: 500 pages of not the collected, but the selected letters of one human being. For, sidelined by the telephone and the email, the letter-writer is about to
Of all the odd, forgotten corners of eastern Europe, the province of Volhynia must be among the oddest and most forgotten. A land of marshes and forests, memorable for its impassable roads and its lonely villages, Volhynia now lies in the north-west corner of Ukraine, along the Polish border. But before the second world war
Not long ago I listened to a Radio Two interviewer interrogating Kate Bush about her new album. The particular track that had excited his interest was ‘Mrs Bartolozzi’, a puzzling little number about a woman who sits watching the clothes fly by in her washing machine. What was it all about?, he wondered. Ms Bush,
In Cold Skin, a brilliantly suspenseful début novel by Albert Sánchez Piñol set in the years after the end of the first world war, a young man arrives on a desolate Antarctic island, where for the next 12 months he will study the local climate. Oddly, his predecessor, who was due to be collected, cannot
There can seldom have been a better first sentence in a book by a daughter about her mother: ‘“Heil Hitler!” shouted Mummy as she pushed Daddy down the stairs at Assendon Lodge.’ Even better, the next few lines reveal that the second world war was in progress at the time, Daddy was in uniform, and
T S. Eliot thought Hamlet an ‘artistic failure’, Shakespeare being unable to reconcile the theme of the old revenge tragedy on which the work is based with the conception of the character of Hamlet himself. One may agree with this while still finding the play compelling; indeed the most puzzling of the tragedies. The revenge
Of course, he never did. Margaret Thatcher had more sense than to enter into any kind of discussion with Arthur Scargill — the horror of the beer-and-sandwiches relations between previous governments and the unions was too great. Before the 1984-5 miners’ strike which dominated and defined Thatcher’s second term in office, just as the Falklands
I am sitting in the London Library as I write this. I am wearing Rafael Nadal tennis shorts, which come below the knee. Obviously, I look ridiculous. But this is the role of the middle-class, middle-aged English male, to feel slightly out of time, out of kilter, with the world around him. Sometimes down in
When I was a child in the 1950s, I had a delightful book called The Golden Geography which tried to encapsulate every aspect of the globe — its landscape, its climate, its people and their occupations — in a small sketch with a brief caption. From a section called ‘This is Asia’, I learned that
‘Roman Britain,’ I asked a friend of mine, a committed pacifist and the veteran of endless marches against the war in Iraq, ‘a Good or Bad Thing?’ ‘Oh, good,’ my friend answered, not even deigning to ponder the question. Startled by the knee-jerk speed of her response, I asked her to explain. ‘Well, the roads,
Golfers, I have to admit, can be great bores. Just listen to the pros discuss their performance after a round in a major championship or ask a golfing friend about his game and you can be stuck listening to tales of triumph and tribulation with as much chance of escape as the Wedding Guest from
With the publication last year of Your Face Tomorrow 1: Fever and Spear, the first volume of a trilogy and his eighth translated work of fiction, it was plain that Javier Marías was embarking on a project which required readers to leave behind all conventional ideas of what a novel is. At one point in
Until 1970 when he got his first Weimaraner from a litter in Long Beach, California, William Wegman was just another West Coast conceptual tyro, doing regular doubletake stuff like spelling out the word WOUND in sticking plaster stuck to the face. He loved the way the puppy asleep looked like a dropped sock. That gave
The 90th anniversary of the start of the battle of the Somme falls on 1 July. Several books mark it; it made a scar on the nation’s memory that is still severe, and it is still often called the day when the army suffered its worst casualties. Strictly, this is not true, for General Perceval