That most astute of reviewers, Lynn Barber, recently wrote of this curiously bloodless biography that the subject is a minor star, now only remembered for one film, Alfred Hitchcock’s Lifeboat. While this may be true, I imagine none but a dedicated cineaste can now name a film of Gloria Swanson’s apart from Sunset Boulevard, or
From the timing of Michael Crick’s book on the Leader of the Opposition we can surmise that the author, like most of the rest of us, has made his mind up already about the result of the imminent election. There will be nothing significant to add after 5 May. The Tory party will not win
It seems only yesterday that Margaret Thatcher was ranting away before an invited group of academics, journalists and experts at Chequers about the perils of German unification and the imminent subordination of all Europe to a nation of 80 million beasts, barbarians and bullies. The idea seemed distinctly odd even at the time, but not
Institutional history is a tricky genre, so prone to over-reverence, so likely to be tedious to anyone but those attached to the institution described. So it was superficially brave of a commercial press to commission a quincentenary history of a Cambridge college: brave, that is, until one discovers that its authors include Quentin Skinner, the
Ruth Rendell, writing as Barbara Vine, is the author of 12 novels which deal with extremely aberrant behaviour treated on the easiest and most companionable terms. There is no doubting that the author herself is on the side of the sane, the balanced, and the well-behaved: this is apparent in the clarity of her sentences,
Joan Brady’s previous books include Theory of War, a powerful historical novel which won the Whitbread Book of the Year prize. Now she has written a thriller. It is set in Springfield, Illinois, once the home of Abraham Lincoln and now a prosperous city overshadowed by an unholy alliance of politicians, cops, lawyers and bankers.
‘This,’ announces Max Hast- ings at the outset, ‘is an old-fashioned book.’ So it is, and it is none the worse for it. As a schoolboy, Hastings thrilled to a 1920s’ anthology called Stirring Deeds of the Great War. His own book, a Brief Lives-style collection of essays on 14 of the most colourful or
In a 1925 essay, Freud unearthed an important linguistic truth about the concept of the uncanny (unheimlich). He noticed that it had drifted very close to its apparent antonym heimlich, which starts out as ‘homely’ and can, via ‘private and personal’, become ‘secretive and repressed’. This enabled him to offer the more important psychological insight
For many people in the West, the Middle East is a source of perplexity and foreboding. Home to morose despotisms, political violence and a thoroughly ruined natural environment, the Middle East now sends us its refugees, headscarves and, most notably since 11 September 2001, violence. The peoples of the Middle East reply that their lives
This posthumous book is the summation of a lifetime’s research into aspects of the 18th-century interior in the British Isles by the leading historian of the subject. I say British Isles, for John Cornforth had strong interests in Irish and Scottish Georgian architecture, as well as English. As the former architectural editor of Country Life
Shakespeare was the great glory of England. So wrote Victor Hugo. But he added that if you went to England to admire the statue of Shakespeare you would find instead the statue of Wellington. The English did not like Shakespeare. His fame came to England from overseas. And Hugo believed that the French played their
In his 12th novel, Tim Parks revisits a subject that has been dominating his writing of late: the middle-aged man, plunged into crisis, forced to re- evaluate his life. Destiny (1999) revolved around a suicidal son and a crumbling marriage, Judge Savage (2003) involved a crumbling marriage and a distressed daughter. In Rapids, the divorce
In the last several years, English-speaking readers have been treated to a plethora of Soviet history books unlike others before them. The opening of Soviet archives has given us everything from Antony Beevor’s Stalingrad to Simon Sebag-Montefiore’s book on Stalin’s court, to new biographies of Rasputin, Lenin and Trotsky. Now, however, we have The Soviet
Defying the geographical promise of its title, The India House turns out to be set in Shropshire. Here, in sequest- ered, Eden-era retreat, two generations of a decayed rentier family — embittered grandma Mrs Covington and frosty daughter Evelyn — are doing their utmost to prevent any noxious post-war fall-out from contaminating the third. They
Most great artists begin as mimics. They do not, as Clara Schumann claimed Brahms did, come into the world ‘ready-made’. Manet prided himself on painting ‘straight from nature’, but he had spent many hours copying Old Masters in the Louvre, and his friend Degas thought they were guiding his brush as surely as they were
In 1850 when William Melville was born in Sneem, Co. Kerry, there was no British secret service. There was the Secret Vote, used by the Foreign Office to pay the pensions of retired agents, code-breakers and letter-openers and as an embassy slush fund; and there were intelligence departments of the War Office and the Admiralty
The English don’t read German literature. This is not, I suggest, because of our vulgar prejudice towards the Germans for being the people they are and having the history they do. That over-repeated Fawlty Towers episode, those ‘Vorsprung durch Technik’ commercials and endless how-we-won-World-War-II documentaries keep such unselective loathing robustly alive, but in the case
Same rubbish, new wrapper. This is the criticism usually levelled at those big bad soccer clubs who put out a new kit every season with minor alterations. Where the clubs lead, the publishers follow. David Winner, the author of this rambling and incoherent discussion of the national game, is a theoriser so prolific that he
The title of this charming book refers to the last summer the author spent in her native city of Belgrade in 1986, just before she married an Englishman and emigrated to London. Twenty-four-year-old Vesna Bjelogrlic, as she then was, picked berries in the hills near her home to make jam. Nearly two decades later, when
The history of England in the 14th and 15th centuries has traditionally been regarded either as a corrupt aftermath (as in ‘Bastard Feudalism’) or a confused prelude (as in the ‘New Monarchy’ of the Tudors). Its most vivid narrator remains Shakespeare who, perhaps surprisingly, supplies the title for this earnestly modern new account by Professor