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Betjeman’s world of trains and buttered toast

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

Victims and/or beneficiaries

‘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,

Where golf is in the blood

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

The maze of the mind

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

Shaggy dog story

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

Triumph and tragedy

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

Sex, comics and the Holocaust

Howard Jacobson has called Kalooki Nights ‘the most Jewish novel that has ever been written by anybody, anywhere’. What does this mean? It is a novel whose hero, Max Glickman, is Jewish. It is a history of two Jewish families living in Manchester, the Glickmans and the Washinskys, and a study of the degrees by

Uneasy biographical bedfellows

The dust jacket of this book shows two heads confronting one another: General MacArthur, aggressive, arrogant, defiantly puffing cigar smoke at the world at large; the Emperor Hirohito, impassive, phlegmatic, quietly obstinate. The subtitle, ‘MacArthur, Hirohito and the American Duel with Japan’, similarly suggests that within the book a double biography will be found. The

Small maelstrom in Yorkshire

An abiding impression of the Victorian period is its mania for being straight-faced to the point of seeming strait-laced, for order and precision, for enumeration and explication. The Times affirmed that ‘just now we are an objective people. We want to place everything we can under glass cases, and stare our fill.’ Gathering the Water tells

Myself when younger

A screenwriter’s lot is not a happy one. You write all those scripts, most of which never get close to being made; you must deal with dim, philistine producers and deranged, egomaniacal directors who don’t necessarily know what they want but know that what you have written is not what they want; you must watch

Pity (for E, aged three)

I picked a beetle up and let it go,And that was pity;But not the pity that you could not goToday, as you’d been promised, to the ZooBecause you were too sick.So ‘What a pity’ were the words I spoke,And then you asked your question: ‘What is pity?’ I’ve searched and searched, but can’t find out

Stalling at the starting line

Seven per cent of zebra finches stutter. So did Moses, Demosthen- es, Aesop, Churchill, Darwin, Nietzsche, André Malraux, Marilyn Monroe, Henry James, Somerset Maugham, Charles I, George VI, and Lewis Carrroll. So do Margaret Drabble and Marc Shell, the author of this comprehensive, learned, even playful book. And so, declaring an interest, do I. Many

The art of the irrelevant

Asked whether a good review would sell a book, the publisher Rupert Hart-Davies replied, ‘No, but a concatenation of good ones may do so.’ One would like to think this true, even while observing that the bestseller lists regularly feature novels which are either not reviewed at all, or have been given brief and sometimes

Standing room only

The story of the Black Hole of Calcutta was once as familiar to schoolchildren as the battle of Hastings or the Gunpowder Plot. On 20 June 1756, after a fierce battle lasting several days, in which the British defensive force of 515 men had held out against an Indian army numbering tens of thousands, 146

As per the American dream

If ever you need to rouse a vineyard owner from vinous slumber, creep up behind him and whisper ‘Parker’. He will leap to his feet, eyes blazing, either with $ signs or with aggrieved Gallic pride. For the name of Robert M. Parker Jr is charged with electricity throughout the world of wine. His is

Her own worst admirer

Audrey Ruston was born in Brussels in May 1929, of a Dutch baroness, Ella van Heemstra, and an English father, Joseph Ruston, some kind of toff, among whose distant ancestors was James Hepburn, Earl of Bothwell, the third husband of Mary Queen of Scots. Ruston soon abandoned his wife and daughter for a long lifetime

Finding the tools to finish the job

This massive study of Hitler’s war economy runs to half the length of War and Peace, partly for the reason that the author shares with Tolstoy the annoying habit of repeating himself frequently and at length. Although I suspect the book will be cited more often than read and perhaps more often read than understood,