‘Tomorrow morning some poet may, like Byron, wake up to find himself famous,’ wrote Randall Jarrell, ‘for having written a novel, for having killed his wife; it will not be for having written a poem.’ Jarrell’s cynicism is too slick, too rueful; but it does snag something in Robert Lowell, as it does in several
Roger Louis, Kerr Professor of English History and Culture at the University of Texas at Austin, former president of the American Historical Association, honorary CBE, editor-in-chief of the Oxford History of the British Empire, is one of those infuriating Americans who know more about our history than we do ourselves. In his fastness deep in
There is a delightful tradition among the English of writing guide books to inaccessible parts of the world. Nowhere has inspired us more than South and Central Asia, seat of the Raj and the theatre that staged the Great Game. Contrary to what one might suppose, it is not a tradition that died with the
One-to-one conflict injects adren- alin into sport. For a period, inevitably finite, a pair of rivals will elevate themselves above their contemporaries, and produce contests which will divide not only cognoscenti, but also the community at large, into two camps. This book is about one of the most magnetic of such contests for primacy waged
This, as its title suggests, is a poignant book. In his account of the world’s last great polio epidemic in Cork, to which he fell victim at the age of six, nearly 50 years ago, Patrick Cockburn is neither self-centred nor self-pitying. He shows journalistic detachment in discussing the history and character of this terrifying
For far too long, the history of 20th- century Russia has been understood almost exclusively through the prism of politics, as if it were about nothing more than Marxism and Leninism, revolution and totalitarianism, war and famine. But in fact the history of Russia over the past 100 years is not only one of multiple
In a learned essay on semiotics (and here, I imagine, the chaste Spectator reader will blanch but, steeling himself for the worst, bravely carry on reading) published in 1979, Umberto Eco explored the role of the reader in the construction of a text. The essay, ‘Lector in fabula’ — punning on the Latin tag, ‘lupus
Steven Johnson has written a bold little book that very nearly undermines the only moral precept of my adult life: thou shalt not get into video games, since then thou really won’t, ever, get any work done. Thank heavens, his argument wasn’t quite that good; but it came extremely close. His key thesis is this:
With this book, character assassination reaches a level not known since William Shake-speare did the business with the Macbeths, another family with political interests. First there was Michael Crick with Jeffrey Archer, Stranger than Fiction. Now there is Crick’s ex-wife Margaret with Mary Archer. I see from the blurb that there is a daughter, who
The names reverberate like a sustained drumroll — Victory, Royal Sovereign, Téméraire, Colossus, Mars, Bellerophon — an overture heralding the violence that will erupt when the warships drifting slowly downwind finally break into the crescent line of the French and Spanish fleet. At midday on the 21 October, the first massive broadsides are fired, smoke
One of those little footnotes to history that has always intrigued me is that the Bolsheviks planned and carried out the October Revolution in the palace of the Tsar’s mistress. The idea of Lenin, Stalin, Trotsky and the rest of them strutting about the marble-clad halls and damask-swathed boudoirs of the great courtesan’s mansion in
To my shame, back in the 1980s, I wrote a less than charitable obituary for the Daily Telegraph of the 13th Duke of St Albans, which dwelt unnecessarily on his unfortunate City directorships. This provoked a volley of letters from his grandson, Lord Vere of Hanworth, couched in intemperate terms. I seem to recall demands
Philip Augar has found a snappy title for this forensic examination of the sins of the investment banking fraternity, and a startling figure: $180 billion. That is the amount he reckons the big hitters of Wall Street and the City harvested in the 1980s and ’90s in the form of excessive profits for their firms
Lucrezia Borgia was not the fiend history made her out to be. According to Gaia Servadio, she was a radiant symbol of Renaissance woman and, moreover, a judicious administrator of her husband the Duke of Ferrara’s realm. Lucrezia’s ethereal blonde looks had so captivated Lord Byron that, in 1816, he stole a strand of her
The origin of language is one of the riddles of mankind. History begins with languages already formed, the intricate relics of vanished civilisations. As history progresses, so languages deteriorate. Latin and Sanscrit are richer and more expressive than any of their living successors. As Adam Smith wrote in his beautiful essay of 1761, Considerations concerning
When the poems of Philip Larkin came to the fore in the late Fifties, I admired his graceful colloquialism but was dismayed by his almost proselytising gloom; life wasn’t given much of a chance. So I decided that he was a great Comic poet — stretching the idea of Comedy to almost Renaissance widths and
Ian Fleming pretended they were glamorous, John le Carré claimed they were brainy and unscrupulous. Commander Crabb, in real-life 1956, made Britain’s spies into the figures of fun they went on being until the Iraq fiasco showed they could be dangerous, too. He was the middle-aged chap, tripping over his flippers in a baggy wet-suit,
When banking families fell out in Renaissance Florence, disputes tended not to be settled by the financial regulator. In April 1478 in Florence cathedral, members of the Pazzi family murdered Giuliano Medici and came close to killing Lorenzo the Magnificent himself. Several of the Pazzi conspirators were hanged and left to dangle from the windows
Martin Meredith ended his 1984 book on Africa, The First Dance of Freedom, with a quote from a recent report by the Economic Commission for Africa which looked ahead to the continent’s future over the next 25 years. On existing trends, it predicted, poverty in rural areas would reach ‘unimaginable dimensions’, while the towns would
When Sybille Bedford was born, in Germany in 1911, it was into a world already vanishing: a world where ‘people were ruled by their servants’, lived in opulent houses (fully staffed by their rulers), ate heavy Edwardian-Germanic cuisine at very frequent intervals, took nothing so vulgar as holidays, but went south for their health, or