Brian Power’s book, like the best Chinese paintings, contains a lot of empty space. You can either concentrate on what you see, or you can let your mind and imagination glide over into what might have been there. I have a silk-screen of a painting by the Song dynasty master Liang Kai (13th century) on
Six years ago I embarked on a little redecoration of my husband’s family house, over 200 years old in south- west Scotland. ‘Ah’, said a knowing friend from the Highlands, now a neighbour, who would soon embrace the same task, as we ripped up floorboards, struggled with ancient heating systems and filled skips; ‘ah’ she
John Tenniel’s name means little today, but everyone knows his work. Tenniel was the artist who illustrated Lewis Carroll’s Alice in Wonderland, creating those unforgettable images of the little girl in the Alice band who shrinks and grows so alarmingly. The cartoons which Tenniel drew each week for Punch have survived as well. Thanks to
Albert Camus was an exceptional man who lived in interest- ing times. His parents were pieds-noirs — French settlers in Algeria. His father died at the battle of the Marne and he was raised by his mother, an illiterate cleaning lady. Encouraged by inspired teachers, he won scholarships to a lycée and then university in
An unkind thought keeps coming to mind as you read this book: perhaps Henry Ford was right, after all. It is unkind because so much of Guy Arnold’s great opus is admirable. As an account of the main political events that have taken place in Africa since 1960, it is awe-inspiring, some might even say
Harold Cleaver is a middle-aged man at the pinnacle of his career. A ‘celebrity-journalist, broadcaster and documentary film-maker’, he has just interviewed the President of the United States, and asked him some pretty searching questions. This interview has earned Cleaver wide acclaim. Unfortunately, his professional success is overshadowed by a personal crisis. His eldest son
The man christened Philip Theophrastus Bombast von Hohenheim, in a mining town in Switzerland in the last decade of the 15th century, has been more mythologised than described: as a Faust, a Prometheus, a holy fool, a eunuch, a necromancer. It is not hard to see why he was attractive to the Romantic poets and
One of the most memorable images in the much-disputed film of Peter Shaffer’s play Amadeus shows Mozart retreating from an ugly family quarrel in Vienna. Leaving his demanding father and new wife to bicker, Mozart retreats into his room; with manuscript paper scattered across the billiard table, he knocks a few balls around and writes
Most of this powerful book was written nearly 60 years ago. It was then rejected by two London publishers as too anti-Soviet in tone, and a few years later by two more as too anti-German. It consists of the war recollections of a Polish countess of notable ancestry and equally notable courage, who describes exactly
It’s irrelevant, I know, but I can’t help wondering what it was like living with D. J. Taylor while he was writing this opus. It’s so steeped in Victoriana and (as Taylor acknowledges) in the fictional worlds of Dickens, George Eliot, Thackeray, Trollope and co. and it’s so big that I picture him emerging into
This book covers all the trees that now live or have ever lived: what they are, how they function, how they grow, their relation to environment, plants, animals, and the human species. It is full of curious information, traditional and recent: there are fascinating new developments in long-familiar stories, such as the part played by
Henry Cockburn (1779-1854) was a Scots advocate, Solicitor-General in the reforming Whig government of 1832-41, later a judge, contributor to the Edinburgh Review and author of delightful, posthumously published memoirs and journals. A considerable figure in the Edinburgh of his time, he is commemorated in the Cockburn Association, one of the earliest conservation societies, founded
In the context of the visual arts, the notion of misunderstood genius is a comparatively recent one, and seems to be a by-product of Romanticism. In spite of such exceptions as Vermeer, whose current reputation stands so much higher than it did in his own day, in the main the Old Master canon remains startlingly
Of the many obscure conflicts of the ancient world, the Pelo- ponnesian war is perhaps the least obscure to us, thanks to Thucydides’ carefully written, if unfinished, account of it. Despite the enormous influence it grew to have on the practice of history itself, Thucydides’ achievement did not prevent future historians from tackling the same
The prizewinning novelist Sarah Waters enjoys subverting our expectations, telling tales of the illicit, stripping away our veneers of polite respectability. In Fingersmith and Tipping the Velvet she laid bare a Victorian world of lesbian love, titillating her readers with the scurrilous idea that women could have had a good time without those bewhiskered men
This elegantly argued, amusing and acute book has been put together, in the end, for a single overdue purpose: to piss all over Edward W. Said’s ludicrous 1978 polemical work, Orientalism. It may look, for most of the journey, like a scrupulous history of the academic study of Arabic cultures, and the steady growth in
Exploration has come a long way since the Chinese traveller Hsuan Tsang visited India and central Asia in the seventh century AD, returning to warn about biting winds and fierce dragons in the Gobi. His advice for future visitors was don’t wear red garments or carry loud calabashes. ‘The least forgetfulness of these precautions entails
After a year and more of Trafalgar it is perhaps time to turn once again to Waterloo. By comparison with the feast, or glut, of Nelsoniana, there is something of a paucity of safe accounts of 18 June 1815. Besides Andrew Roberts’s ultra-compact Waterloo: Napoleon’s Last Gamble, an impressive overview of both the battle and
If you ask most people in Britain today for their views on the first world war, they tell you that it was a futile holocaust in which our nation’s brave and disillusioned young men were herded into a hell of mud and machine-gun fire by incompetent products of the English public schools. Executions for cowardice
Of the making of books about Churchill there seems to be no end. His own output was large, and largely self-centred. We already have an official life in eight volumes, with several volumes of supplementary papers, a number of single-volume lives, long and short, books by supporters, books by opponents, books by those interested in