The French rarely read books by foreigners about their history. This is a pity, for their own historians have not always done the job well. The ideological fault-lines of French intellectual life have obstructed understanding of France’s 20th century. A francocentric view of the world has added to the problem. So, until recently, has the
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
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
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
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
Picture this scene: in the delivery room of a Botswana hospital, a woman howls with the pain of childbirth and her midwife becomes increasingly bothered that she is disturbing the other patients. Whatever tension there is in this exchange — a woman suffering labour without drugs, an underpaid, overstretched health worker having a bad day
Edward Carson: even today, almost 70 years after his death, the name of the barrister and Unionist leader has the power to inspire hatred or adulation. A short time ago Ian Paisley was photographed at the election count in Belfast City Hall touching a bust of Carson as though it was a sacred relic. To
To a British reader who knows the subject, 1776 may seem pretty thin. To one who doesn’t, it may be confusing. It is an account of the military history of a single year of the American revolution, so the ambitions of the author are oddly limited. David McCullough doesn’t explain why the revolution began. He
Ever since Edmund Burke deserted the liberalism that had distinguished him as a champion of American independence and Irish home rule and threw up his hands in horror at events across the water, generations of writers have recoiled in disgust from the bloody excesses of the French Revolution. In other words, Robespierre and his allies
Consider this. Does lightning ever strike twice in the same place? Along the magnolia corridors of the most expensive prison ever built in England, in the sombre half-light of a locked-fast double cell, it struck fatally (if metaphorically) once and almost fatally another two times before an oblivious prison service woke up to what was
It is surely rare to find a book that describes a marriage with such breathtaking intimacy as Diana Melly does in her autobiography, Take a Girl Like Me. Not only are both the leading players very much alive, most of the varied cast are still vigorously kicking. Mrs Melly writes the story of her grippingly
Like Philip Mansel I am a passionate believer in the importance of trivia in history, or rather what most academic historians would regard as such. Years ago, at the close of the Sixties, I was the first chair of the newly formed Costume Society, in the main because I could keep the warring women gathered
Like Groucho Marx I tend to be rather ambivalent about joining clubs, but last November — in fact, exactly 48 hours before Deborah Hutton, author of this brilliant book subtitled ‘75 Practical Ideas for Family and Friends from Cancer’s Frontline’ — I unexpectedly found myself a member of what Hutton calls the last club in
To anyone who enjoyed Fernand Braudel’s masterly work on the Mediterranean or Neal Ascher- son’s wonderful Black Sea, the idea of a book on the Baltic is an appealing one. It is Europe’s other great inland sea, fed by the snows of Scandinavia and rivers such as the Elbe, the Vistula, the Niemen and the
In 1991, A.S. Byatt wrote an introduction to a reissue of her first novel, The Shadow of the Sun (1964), in which she recalls that she had: the eternal first novelist’s problem … I didn’t want to write a ‘me-novel’ [but] I didn’t know anything — about life, at least. Highly autobiographical first novels are
In the first century bc, the wrestler Nicophon of Miletus was said to have a physique which would have made Zeus himself tremble. He literally outstripped his rivals at the Olympic Games. Nicophon’s mere name, Victory Voice, announced a champion, just as that of Schwarzenegger did in the Mr Universe — and, more recently, in
This superb novel takes place in the remote settlement of Yazyk, at the end of a 100-mile spur off the Trans-Siberian Railway. It is 1919. Most of the inhabitants belong to a bizarre Christian sect who desire no part in the political upheavals further west. But events have intruded upon them in the form of
There have been many books over the years with titles that approximate to Why I Am Still a Catholic. In the Fifties a dream team would have included, I suppose, Evelyn Waugh and Graham Greene with Alec Guinness, received into the Church in 1956, as a promising newcomer. In 1955 my mother Elizabeth Pakenham, later
Many years ago, in one of those precious moments of seren- dipity, I came across a novel called Ali and Nino, set in the Azerbaijani city of Baku. This seductive, life-enhancing story tells of a love affair between a Muslim and a Christian at the city’s pivotal moment, just as the oil begins to flow
Spectator readers have known of Dr Dalrymple for many years through his regular column in this magazine. Every week we muddled our way through, unreflectively finding life all right and other people not so bad. Then, on Fridays we took Dr Dalrymple’s little magic pill and suddenly saw that we were knee-high in a rising