Horny black hills on red grounds and exposed roots clawing the air like scary glove puppets are typical of Graham Sutherland in his prime. Teeth and thorns, the odd crucifixion and Somerset Maugham perched on a rattan stool with a jaundiced tortoise look on his face are typical of him soon after, in the Forties,
Lord Rosebery was the great lost leader of Victorian politics. Today he is a forgotten figure, but in his time he was the most famous man in Britain. Precociously talented and a star orator, he could draw vast crowds and keep them spellbound. He was the heir apparent to Gladstone as leader of the Liberal
Simon Hoggart writes:Douglas Johnson, who has died at the age of 80, was one of the most distinguished — and most entertaining — of the academic writers who have appeared in the columns of The Spectator. In fact, the word ‘academic’ has perhaps the wrong connotations, for in spite of Douglas’s great scholarship, few people
Tim Mackintosh-Smith, author of the wonderful Travels with a Tangerine, his debut volume in the footsteps of the 14th-century Moroccan traveller Ibn Battutah, wastes little time in getting going with this remarkable sequel. Give him a word and he’ll be etymologising before you can whip out your OED. And you’ll need one to keep up.
In 1892 Frank Hall, who was building a road for the Imperial British East Africa Company, decided to punish some local Masai for obstructing his work. He raided their village with a force of 150 men armed with rifles and a machine-gun, destroyed their huts, took their cattle, but felt dissatisfied at only killing five
The bitterness of the immigrant experience, the tumultuous coming of independence to a former British colony, forbidden love and miscegenation within a close-knit Muslim community: dominant themes of Abdul-razak Gurnah’s former novels are gathered together in this one. Since, though not abnormally long, his book ranges over such a wealth of material, there are inevitably
I feel slightly cornered by the blurbs on the jacket of this book. On the front, Jung Chang, author of Wild Swans, says, ‘This is my favourite Chinese novel: a highly amusing comedy of manners that conceals a powerful emotional charge.’ On the back, Lisa Appignanesi suggests we ‘imagine Svevo taking David Lodge to China
What is one to make of this little book? There is much that is good in it, about new handguns, their use in crime and warfare and their role as fashionable accessories (notably in portraiture) of the rich and proud; about the ‘spinning’ rife in Renaissance pamphlet wars; and about that age’s wantonly cruel methods
The New English Kitchenby Rose PrinceFourth Estate, £18.99, pp. 468, ISBN 0007156448 The Dinner Ladyby Jeanette OrreyBantam, £16.99, pp. 259, ISBN 0593054296 If a Martian were to read these three recently published cookery books, his postcard home would conclude that for Earthlings money is the root of all cooking. Alain Ducasse’s Grand Livre de Cuisine
In his essay ‘Murder Considered as One of the Fine Arts’, De Quincey derides poisoning as an inferior method of bringing about the death of others. It seemed to him both sneaky and unmanly. However, the age that succeeded him was a golden age of poisoners, many of whose crimes are remembered to this day.
Curious Pursuits is a collection of the ‘occasional writing’ of Margaret Atwood — essays, reviews, talks and introductions to books. Such rehashes often remind one of Juvenal’s adage that ‘twice-cooked cabbage is death’: it was, indeed, only as a fan of Margaret Atwood’s that I wanted to review this book at all, since it would
To be successful, biographers must possess some degree of empathy with their subject. They need not convince themselves that they would always have acted similarly, still less play the part of counsel for the defence, but they will have failed if the reader does not understand why the subject of the biography behaved as he
Should rich nations give to poor nations? Put bluntly like that, the question of international aid demands the answer ‘yes’. Anyone who tries to qualify the ‘yes’ is liable to be criticised as selfish, unfeeling and inhuman. In his The End of Poverty Jeffrey Sachs sharpens the question. Should very rich people in very rich
Shortly before dawn on the 22 March 2003, as the cargo ship M
According to the business press, the age of the ‘imperial CEO’ is now behind us, swept away by a wave of scandals and collapsing stock prices. But for much of the 1980s and 1990s, Michael Eisner was an emperor’s emperor. Recruited from Paramount in 1984, the Walt Disney Company’s new chairman and chief executive officer
Almost every day throughout the Great War of 1914 to 1918 Douglas Haig kept a diary which its editors describe as ‘an understated account of the day-to-day slog of high command’. It consists of often brief notes of operations and their outcome. Magnificently edited as it is, without maps with arrows showing the directions of
It was always on the cards, to use a rather obvious metaphor, that Hilary Mantel would write a novel about spiritualism. Her earlier books were awash with hints of the numinous. Giving up the Ghost (2003), her recent memoir, duly connected these fragments of otherworldliness up to the circumstances of her own life. Now comes
At Queen Elizabeth’s funeral in April 1603, the predominant emotion among the spectators was relief. For the past 45 years her subjects had lived in continual terror of being engulfed in civil war when the childless queen died, leaving behind her a disputed succession. There were as many as 12 possible claimants to the throne
A writer, John Dearborn, known as Bron, persuades a publisher to commission him to do a book about love at first sight. Bron is obsessed with Paul Marotte, a physician living in Amsterdam who one day in 1889 sees Kate Summer on a bridge and instantly falls in love, decides to paint professionally and they
Having obsessively admired Billie Holiday’s singing for 50 years or so, having seen her perform whenever possible, having listened to her recordings again and again, and having read hundreds of thousands of words about her, I received Julia Blackburn’s With Billie in a mood of blasé scepticism. It is a pleasure to report that this