Betsy Blair was born Elizabeth Boger in 1923 into a middle-class episcopalian family in New Jersey, her mother a teacher, her father an insurance broker. By the age of 12, this prodigiously confident child performer was dancing before Eleanor Roosevelt in Washington. At the age of 16 she came to audition at Billy Rose’s Manhattan
Henry VIII is the first English monarch whose features everyone knows. The sharp little eyes in the massive head, the golden beard, above all the commanding stance in which Holbein painted him, are infinitely familiar and always terrifying. This is the man who sent More and Cromwell, two of his wives and many others to
Which of the acts of courage does the title mean? In the Peninsular War, there were so many it’s hard to choose. In the seventh volume of the Matthew Hervey saga (a novel well able to stand alone), Allan Mallinson’s protagonist is a hero among heroes, when the cavalry was the cavalry and his regiment,
This sensitive, outspoken diary begins during the dark last days of the ‘dead little, red little army’, the British Expeditionary Force which bolstered the French left flank in Flanders from mid-August 1914. With the desperate defence of Ypres, through Hallowe’en into December, when the Germans were repeatedly beaten off, began the stalemate of trench warfare.
Dorothy Whipple was once a highly regarded bestselling novelist and it is typical of the excellent Persephone books that they have restored her glory within their elegant silver jackets and distinctive floral end papers. In They Were Sisters, with its, surely intentional, Chekhovian undertones, Whipple explores the fortunes of three sisters: Lucy, Charlotte and Vera.
Geoffrey Wheatcroft is rarely dull in print and this book is no exception. It is a rattling good read, although more because of its knowledge of insiders’ gossip, its pithy judgments of both men and measures and the rhythm of its prose than because of the force of its central thesis. His judgments of men
A book on Waterloo as short as this (the text proper is 100 pages, small format) tempts a rush to judgment; it has certainly been widely acclaimed already. Paul Johnson’s dust-jacket puff says that the battle ‘is both one of the most decisive in history and the most difficult to describe’. Decisiveness is important: Waterloo
Tom Maschler, son of a distinguished Jewish publisher, was born in Berlin in 1932 and came to England with his parents in 1939. After Leighton Park School, having turned down a place at Oxford, he worked on a kibbutz and as a tour guide, hitch-hiked round America and did a brief stint of National Service
All of a sudden, there is a buzz about Cynthia Ozick. Although respected for many years as a writer of fiction and criticism, no one ever seemed to expect her to reach a wide audience. Now, together with more famous luminaries, she has been announced as a contender for the first Man Booker International Prize:
The only good thing New Labour have done in office they did in their first week: the granting of independence to the Bank of England. In every other respect, things have gone the other way: a 60 per cent increase in taxes and spending; the ruthless subordination of schools, hospitals and police forces to the
This book is a goldmine of once highly secret intelligence material: the diary kept, night by night, by the head of the counter-espionage branch of the security service, MI5. Diaries were forbidden to British combatants (though, luckily for historians, the chief of the general staff, among others, broke his own rule, and kept a long
For once the publisher’s blurb has it right. This is a ‘sweepingly ambitious’ project, written by a ‘towering and often provocative figure in musicology’, ‘an accomplished performer as well as scholar’ who, while achieving numberless other things, contributed ‘160 articles on Russian composers’ to the New Grove. I can personally vouch for his toweringness, his
‘This book,’ notes Roméo Dallaire in his account of the 100 days of genocidal killing in Rwanda in 1994, ‘is long overdue, and I sincerely regret that I did not write it earlier.’ With the continuing massacres in Darfur, however, Shake Hands with the Devil could hardly be more timely. Dallaire was a highly respected
‘The Colosseum is the most famous and instantly recognisable monument to have survived from the classical world.’ In the 19th century the thing to do when in Rome was to visit the Colosseum by moonlight, and quote Byron. This is no longer possible. The ruin is closed at dusk, and anyway the moon will have
Sir Samuel Brittan has long been a national institution. As economics editor of the Observer in the early 1960s and the principal economic commentator on the Financial Times from 1966 to his retirement in 1998, he wrote an influential weekly newspaper column for almost 40 years. He still contributes to the Financial Times, often to
The Great Stinkby Clare ClarkPenguin, £12.99, pp. 358, ISBN 0670915300 The Second Life of Samuel Tyneby Esi EdugyanVirago, £10.99, pp. 278, ISBN 1844081060 The Icarus Girlby Helen OyeyemiBloomsbury, £16.99, pp. 320, ISBN 0747575487 With an aversion to ghost stories I was surprised to find myself greatly moved by Strangers. Like the author, Taichi Yamada, Haidi
I read this nice well-intentioned book with devotion, despite its being thoroughly reader-resistant to anyone of a sceptical turn. For a start, these days, alien is corn. Everyone but a bonehead regards the universe as altogether a subtler mystery than is explicable either by science or via little men with misshapen heads descending on saucers
What in the world has happened to the culture of France? If you enter a room almost anywhere in the West when two or three of the arterati are gathered together and ask them to name interesting young artists, no one will mention anyone French. The same goes for literature and drama. In music there
While the Victorian age was certainly one of unprecedented industrial and technical advances — an age, if there ever was one, of science and reason — it was also an age of unconventional religious enthusiams and spiritualist vogues. From seances held in the drawing-rooms of upper-class London families to Christian revivalist gatherings in the slums
Will Alexander McCall Smith’s readers remain loyal now that he’s not writing about Bots- wana, which he sees as an earthly paradise, but about Edinburgh, which even her most devoted citizens couldn’t claim for her, beautiful though she is. He’s as amazed by that skyline as they are, but no one is more aware than