Hot on the heels of The Penelopiad, Margaret Atwood’s retelling of the story of Penelope and Odysseus, comes The Tent, a neat, must-have little volume with scarlet endpapers, a silky marker and Atwood’s own illustrations — devilish red dogs and Egyptian-looking ladies. And inside The Tent? A splendid mix of tales, retellings of myths, fables
Contemporary atheist writers are increasingly inclined to forsake purely rationalist or psychological arguments against the existence of God. The current bunch are gnawing at the edges of neurological and genetic explanations, with the implication that religion may emerge as a ‘natural’, built-in navigational error. The subtitles of the two books under review say more about
When the Soviet Union collapsed in 1991 there was widespread talk of Russia soon becoming an open, democratic polity with a thriving civil society. Under President Putin such hopes have faded. The state has seized back much of the power it lost under Yeltsin, devolution has yielded to centralisation, and the prevailing tone is authoritarian
‘She can’t stand that woman,’ an aide of Mrs Thatcher once said of Dame Shirley Porter, the notorious, scandal-prone leader of Westminster City Council during the 1980s. Such contempt was perhaps surprising, for Lady Porter was seen by many as the mirror image of Mrs Thatcher both in her outspoken character and in the aggressive
Senior diplomats may be a charming bunch, but as a rule they are not known for their modesty. Years of rubbing shoulders with world leaders, however inconsequential, tend to go to their heads. Taking themselves too seriously is an occupational hazard. When it comes to publishing their memoirs, such arrogance and pomposity are not necessarily
The journal ADAM — an acronym for Art, Drama, Architecture and Music — was the life’s work of a Jewish Romanian exile Miron Grindea (1910-95), who was its only editor. Embodying a style of cosmopolitan cultural sophistication, it represents a fascinating episode in the history of the London literary world, its bent being more internationalist
Hooray for Signal Books, publishers of the ‘Lost and Found’ series of classic travel writing. Not long ago I reviewed in these pages The Ford of Heaven by Brian Power, a memoir, first published in 1984, of Power’s childhood in north China. The notable thing about Power was how deeply embedded he was in the
Sometime in 1995 Colonel Allan Mallinson came, somewhat sheepishly I thought, into my office. He was clutching a sheaf of papers that I feared would be another piece of heavyweight Ministry of Defence bureaucracy. But no, it was instead the first chapter of his first Hervey novel, A Close Run Thing. He asked if I
This handsome and scholarly book is a catalogue of a selection of pictures of Ireland, all, remarkably, collected over the past 30 years by Desmond Fitzgerald, 29th Knight of Glin, for his famous country seat in west Limerick, where his family have held sway since 1350. It whets the appetite for the next major publication
I must declare an interest. At my solitary meeting with Maggi Hambling, she suddenly barked, ‘Would you like to see my hysterectomy scar?’ (She was dissuaded by the rather nervous men present.) I had been ‘Maggi-ed’: hit with a piece of confrontational behaviour, simply to see what the response would be. Andrew Lambirth had a
John Updike is, among one or two other things, a model art critic. Observant, sympathetic and knowledgeable, he also writes at a useful remove from the polemics that rack today’s art world. His status as an honorary non-combatant in the contemporary art wars owes something to his literary fame, to be sure. But it is
The words ‘fanatic’ and ‘Arabia’ are placed together so often that they almost seem designed for each other. A Syrian friend once asked Charles Doughty, the Victorian explorer, how he could abandon the orchards of Damascus, ‘full of the sweet spring as the garden of God’, and ‘take such journeys into the fanatic Arabia?’ Doughty
Although the Scottish Borders contain some of the most picturesque and unspoilt scenery in the British Isles, with the country houses along the Tweed putting up a fair show to rival the ch
I remember once swimming in the Batha river in central Chad. Despite recent rains the river was sluggish, warm and muddy, so much so that it was not immediately clear what was the point. I was uncertain of which way to go. I could not see my feet. I was covered in mud. And yet
On the 25 November, 1970 after a failed coup d’état, the Japanese writer Yukio Mishima stuck a knife into his belly, then had his head cut off with his own sword. Twenty years later I enjoyed a brief flirtation with a member of Mishima’s private militia, the Tate no Kai or Shield Society. Matsumura, like
Carmel Snow, routinely called ‘the legendary Mrs Snow’ by news- papers in her lifetime, edited the most perfect fashion magazine in the history of glossies, American Harper’s Bazaar, for 25 years from 1933 to 1957. It’s probably a fashion statement in itself (‘Sooooo yesterday’) that her legend has almost entirely faded from public memory. Having
‘We are here on earth to fart around,’ that wise man Kurt Vonne- gut once wrote. ‘And don’t let anybody tell you different.’ Denys Finch Hatton — who was born into the English aristocracy in 1887, and died in a plane crash in Africa not long after his 44th birthday — was one of the
Mothers and memoirs are fashionable at the moment. We’ve had Edward St Aubyn’s novel Mother’s Milk and few respectable books’ pages appear without a brand-new set of tragic, comic or tragi- comic reminiscences, leaving us grateful, if apologetic, for our own drearily staid lives. Yet it is a fact that a really good memoir usually
We know very little about the ‘good’ kings of medieval England. Weakness makes better copy. Gossip and laughter leave more traces than dumb admiration. Contemporaries, fascinated and appalled by their complex and unstable personalities, have left us vivid accounts of Edward II and Richard II, whose reigns both ended in deposition and murder. By comparison,
How much more do we need to know about Sir Wilfred Thesiger? Alexander Maitland, his literary executor and friend for the last 40 years of his life, collaborated with Thesiger on six books of his travels, and we have Thesiger’s first two classics, Arabian Sands and The Marsh Arabs, not to mention two other mainly