I once considered attempting a biography of Siegfried Sassoon. Having now read Max Egremont’s comprehensive and perceptive book, based partly on access to private papers unavailable to previous biographers, I’m relieved I didn’t. Egremont has produced a thorough, sympathetic, balanced, engrossing account. There are two aspects to the 1886-1967 life of Captain Siegfried Sassoon, MC
By the morning of Tuesday 9 April 2002 some 200,000 people of all ages had filed past the lying in state of the coffin containing the mortal remains of Queen Elizabeth, the Queen Mother. By the time she died, aged 101, Queen Elizabeth was a figure as familiar in the national consciousness as Winston Churchill.
David Cameron (1950) by George Frederick Clarke David Cameron is what one might call a hatchet job. Written by one G. F. Clarke, it’s the tale of a simple Scottish lad sold into slavery in the New World, who escapes and leads a life of adventure in the wild fighting of the various tribes, finally
Published recently in the Times, William Rees-Mogg’s contention (in a well-meaning if speciously argued piece on the Vatican’s continuing opposition to the ordination of self-confessed homosexuals) that the sexual proclivities of priests attracted to pre-pubertal children was ‘comparable to Oscar Wilde’s relations with London rent boys’ is typical of a fashionable misapprehension which confuses paedophila
Like revolution, fame has a nasty habit of eating its children. On one level Lunar Park explores the perils that an author faces when subjected to the sort of celebrity usually reserved for rock stars and supermodels. It’s not just any old author, either, but Bret Easton Ellis himself. Or is it? The narrator of
‘Do you call that thing a coat?’ Brummell sneered when the Duke of Bedford asked for an opinion on a new purchase. The dominance that Brummell held over the fashionable was absolute; his small house in Chesterfield Street was thronged with gentlemen, often including the Prince of Wales, eager to witness the dressing ritual of
Howard and Southwell, Fortes- cue, Paine, Percy, Mayne, Milner, Owen, Houghton, Cam- pion — even the names of our prep school dormitories were a declaration of dissent. Of this list perhaps only Edmund Campion is now at all widely known, but after three years of interminable prayers for the reconversion of England and the canonisation
Julian Maclaren-Ross died in 1964, in circumstances quite as chaotic as the moth-eaten, bailiff-haunted atmosphere of his novels. Despite occasional murmurs over the intervening 40 years, the real revival of interest in his work began with a 2001 Penguin Modern Classic edition of his South Coast vacuum cleaner salesman epic Of Love and Hunger. There
Miles Kington, humourist-at-large from the moment he was born, which he remembers because a shadowy figure had snapped at him that he’s pressed for time, what does he want to be, girl or boy? He arrives to find himself surrounded by an unusually colourful family. Father, a very short man who is made all the
‘Happiness is a new idea in Europe,’ the austere, implacable revolutionary Louis de Saint-Just wrote in 1791, as events in France were moving swiftly towards the establishment of a republic and the onset of Terror. The French Revolution was (if we prefer not to go back so far as the Renaissance) the cradle of modernity.
Published in 1995, John Berendt’s Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil was one of those books whose success could be measured by the fact that dozens of people pretended they had read it when they hadn’t. Was this a novel, we wondered, or just snappy reportage with a few names changed and a
John Simpson is a television journalist. Indeed he is far more than that, being the BBC’s World Affairs editor, an amazing title that makes me think of Emperor Ming the Merciless, enthroned above the galaxies. Apart from the fact that Mr Simpson does not provoke calamity, their job descriptions are not dissimilar: the bombers go
William Boyd has written a dozen novels and short stories in the past quarter-century. That makes him a fairly prolific author. Factor in a dozen screenplays realised (and another couple of dozen that were never made, for the usual inscrutable film-world reasons), and he seems properly Stakhanovite. But take a deep breath, because Boyd estimates
A grandmother, wrote Queen Victoria in a letter to her daughter, the Princess Royal, in June 1859, ‘must ever be loved and venerated, particularly one’s mother’s mother I always think’. Few are the modern grandmothers fortunate enough to attact much veneration, but, as Jane Fearnley-Whittingstall makes clear in her guide for the best grannies, it’s
The Recipe Book of the Mustard Club (1926) Dorothy L. Sayers And he replied: ‘The flames unquenchableThat fire them from within thus make them burnRuddy, as thou seest, in this, the Nether Hell.’ It is unlikely that when Dorothy L. Sayers produced the lines above she was thinking of mustard: unlikely, but not impossible. The
Dwelling Place is the story of a planter family in 19th-century Georgia, and of the slave community which served it. As an insight into the moral dilemmas of a slave-owning society and the local patriotism which sustained the Confederate side in the American civil war, it is one of the more remarkable recent books on
The subtitle of this latest study of British generalship, ‘Ten British Commanders Who Shaped the World’, sets the bar exclusively high. Perhaps this is why in the introduction we are given three other criteria for the selection of subjects. The author seeks to illustrate military success or failure in the context of the political control
At the heart of this novel is the notion that a sexual predator can find natural cover for his activities in a war zone. Its title is taken from a Turkish phrase meaning a woman who unwittingly arouses a man’s sexual interest. The narrator, Connie Burns, is a foreign correspondent, born in Zimbabwe, educated at
No commemorative blue plaque adorns the wall of 112 Eaton Square, ‘that curious house’, in Barbara Pym’s words, ‘with its oil paintings and smell of incense’. Yet, as David Faber reveals in this important history of the Amery family, for over 70 years the house was one of the foremost London political salons. The paterfamilias
‘Everyone with a bellyful of the classics,’ Henry Miller said, ‘is an enemy of mankind.’ Was the Brooklyn bronco serious in claiming that indoctrination with ancient literature generated monsters? As readers of The Colossus of Maroussi well know, Miller himself fell under the Greek spell. So, earlier, had the Romantics (with unromantic Periclean Athens), Victorian