More from Books

Take-over bid by a stranger

This is a novel on a rebarbative theme: incapacity. Not the sort of incapacity one observes in others; rather, incapacity as a curse one suffers on one’s own. Paul Rayment, a man of 60, is flung off his bicycle by an oncoming car and loses part of his right leg. He recovers, more or less,

The calm and solid Cubist

The personalities of only a handful of artists are known to the public at large. Most live on through their work with, perhaps, a ticket of biographical cliché attached to their reputation — Van Gogh’s ear, Lautrec’s legs, Turner lashed to the mast of a ship in a storm. A few are known through the

Under the volcano again

In 2003, Robert Harris published Pompeii: A Novel, which for vitality and entertainment and the atmosphere of the decadent Roman world around the Bay of Naples in the first century AD can hardly be beaten. The great eruption of Vesuvius in AD 79 and the destruction of the playground city of Pompeii is made even

Reliable friend, less reliable consul

The twin graves lie side-by-side in the Protestant cemetery in Rome, much visited, much photographed; one decorated with the lyre of the poet, the other with the palette of the painter. Beneath the first lie the remains of one of England’s greatest poets, who died at the age of 25. Beneath the second lies a

A devotee of Devon

The regional novel in England sounds like a dull and worthy research topic; investigating it might be entertaining at times, but I suspect that one would just end by concluding that it existed once, and does so no more. People still write novels about life in various regions, of course; some writers still specialise in

Frantic and fantastic

There is now an established tradition of busy stars not reading the books to which they put their names. It stretches from Hedy Lamarr, who 40 years ago sued the ghostwriters of Ecstasy and Me for misrepresentation some while after publication, to Victoria Beckham who claims never to have read a book, not even her

Sam Leith

Tragical- comical- historical

After the Victorians opens with a coronation at which ‘Land of Hope and Glory’ is played, and an expedition to the Himalayas: King Edward VII took the throne, Younghusband and his Maxim guns took Lhasa. It closes with a coronation at which ‘Land of Hope and Glory’ is played, and an expedition to the Himalayas:

Foul play in Hull

It is always interesting to see what happens when a literary novelist turns to genre fiction. Swan Song is the third novel of Robert Edric’s trilogy about Leo Rivers, a private investigator based in modern Hull. The format is instantly familiar because Rivers is a modernised and home-grown Philip Marlowe — detective, knight-errant and laconic

Best of friends | 27 August 2005

Birds are our pals. They awaken us, sing us happy songs and delight us with their plumage colours. In the garden they are undemanding visitors, not inferior to neighbours or family. The migrating species perform feats of navigation that in a human would have that person crowned upon landfall. They can fly at great speed

Why Rome fell

I n the decade before his death in 1982, the science-fiction writer Philip K. Dick was afflicted with a powerful delusion. He became convinced that the Roman empire was still in existence; that despite what was written in all the history books it had in fact never fallen. Nineteen-seventies California was merely a false projection,

Lessons in French humour

When publishers keep a children’s book in print for a certain number of years it is called a classic, by the publishers themselves, of course, then by teachers and librarians, and sometimes by men and women who knew the book when they were young. Nicholas, by every criterion, from every point of view, has attained

Chilblains in the Cotswold

One day in 1941 an officer on exercise in the Cotswolds looked down from the brow of a hill and saw a cluster of stone buildings in the valley below. On closer inspection these turned out to be a deserted farm, with a beautiful Elizabethan farmhouse and great cathedral-like barns. It was in a derelict

On a wing and a prayer

Only the short-lived excitement about the Moon missions has given our age a hint of the fervour that aviation inspired in the interwar years. The new access to a whole new element gave that generation a defining identity, a sense of being incontrovertibly different from every one that had gone before, ever. A wonderful delusion

House-building and husbandry

Bess of Hardwick has usually been viewed as a hard-hearted schemer, an unscrupulous woman who triumphed in male-dominated Tudor England by never allowing emotion to impede her ambition. Allegedly driven by acquisitiveness and a lust for power, she married four times, always moving on to a husband richer than the last. Having gained a sizeable

Tunes played by an enchantress

Frankie Burnaby is 12. She lives on a remote farm in British Columbia, where ‘the clear turbulent Thompson River joins the vaster opaque Fraser’. This novella, first published in 1947, charts the two conflicting emotional currents that, like the rivers of Frankie’s birthplace, struggle for dominance. Any new arrival is exciting in this thinly populated

Prickles and thorns

One of the oddest forms of contemporary masochism is our passion for surveys that reveal how ignorant and stupid we have become. Scarcely a week goes by without the publication of some poll telling us how many schoolchildren believe that Churchill was victorious at Waterloo or that Hornblower commanded at Trafalgar. The teaching of traditional

Mid-life midsummer madness

Many things lead to addiction and obsessiveness, even madness, but one of the most surprising, and lasting, is cricket. You don’t even have to be any good (I know); it can still take over too much of your life. Marcus Berkmann, a writer (how he finds time to write anything during the summer is a