Very few people have ever dared to publish a book of aphorisms, and certainly hardly anyone in recent memory. The form is so demanding, basically requiring novelty, truth and literary excellence all at the same time, that even to embark on it needs a writer with high and justified confidence in his own abilities. Don
This year’s crop of art books for Christmas is the usual mixed bunch, and if they have anything in common, it is their general lack of festive associations. The one exception is M. A. Michael’s Stained Glass of Canterbury Cathedral (Scala, £25), a beautifully illustrated picture book with an exemplary and truly instructive text, which
All writing has some literary precedent; where better then for a first novelist to find inspiration than the Bible, the first book? David Maine takes the few, terse chapters of Genesis that comprise Noah’s story for his striking reconstruction of this crucial episode in Christian history. The Flood introduces us to ‘Noe’, ‘still a vital
The word ‘Wahhabi’ entered popular consciousness at the same time as ‘9/11’ and is now about as loaded as the word ‘Nazi’. But whereas ‘Nazi’ is understood by all, ‘Wahhabi’ has crept into the vocabulary of modern global terrorism with little explanation other than that it and ‘Wahhabism’ are considered part of the mindset of
Opinion polls, it could be said, are the descendants of Mass Observation. This was a non-academic social survey started in 1936 by three people. Tom Harrisson was an anthropologist who had turned his attention from the tribes of the South Pacific to the habits of the people at home. He employed investigators to observe the
One of the more amusing characteristics of the English upper classes is their habit of going around disclaiming their upper-classness. Just as Anthony Powell, a lieutenant-colonel’s son educated at Eton and Balliol and married to an earl’s daughter, used quite seriously to maintain that he was ‘a poor boy made good’, so Jonathan Gathorne-Hardy, an
In the wake of a presidential election where both candidates’ fervid speech- ifying took them back and forth across the good-ol’-boy American heartlands, the rugged swathe of territory that plays host to the characters in Mark Spragg’s finely crafted novel seems almost as familiar as my own reflection. For the purposes of this quintessentially Great
Peter Hall and Richard Eyre both published diaries about their time running the National Theatre, edited in Hall’s case by his head of PR, John Goodwin. Alan Bennett’s diaries are a bestseller. So are Joe Orton’s, with their devotion over a mere eight months to extra-curricular, often subterranean activity. The ‘celebrity diary’ as a literary
The boil and hiss of mediaeval Hell, as conceived by Dante, is hard for us to imagine. Yet the 1935 Hollywood melodrama, The Div- ine Comedy, contains a ten-minute reconstruction of Dante’s inferno inspired by Gustav Doré’s God-fearing illustrations. Spencer Tracey starred reluctantly in the film; the damned are wedged against each other in a
The word ‘Wahhabi’ entered popular consciousness at the same time as ‘9/11’ and is now about as loaded as the word ‘Nazi’. But whereas ‘Nazi’ is understood by all, ‘Wahhabi’ has crept into the vocabulary of modern global terrorism with little explanation other than that it and ‘Wahhabism’ are considered part of the mindset of
Even as the Christmas season draws in upon us, the academy’s best-loved post-foxhunting bloodsport — pointing out scholarly inadequacies in the new Dictionary of National Biography — continues. The latest and most eye-stretchingly savage instance comes from Nikolai Tolstoy, in a letter prominently published in the TLS. He complains that in August 2002 he was
Robert Service has set himself a formidable task. He has to explain how the son of a wife- beating, dirt-poor Georgian cobbler, brutalised by drink, became a Russian despot as ruthless as Ivan the Terrible. A master of his sources, which include the partially opened Soviet official archives, Service triumphs in portraying Stalin’s personality in
The Wolof call it a goui, the Tswana a moana, the French the calabash tree and all Australia the boab. Welcome to the strange world of the baobab tree, the subject of Thomas Pakenham’s excellent new book. The tree was discovered for Europe in 1749 by a 21-year-old Frenchman, Michel Adanson, after whom it has,
This beguiling little book, nostalgically illustrated with faded family snapshots, describes the long and arduous life of a tortoise who died earlier this year at Powderham Castle near Exeter, aged 160. According to the blurb, Timothy survived six monarchs, two world wars and many generations of the family who looked after him. The story that
Jeremy Bernstein is extraordinarily, perhaps uniquely, well qualified to write a biography of Robert Oppenheimer that is both authoritative and extremely readable. In the first place, he is himself an eminent physicist, a professor for nearly 40 years and the author of some 50 technical papers. In the second place, he is an exceptionally gifted
Millions, perhaps even billions of words have been written about al-Qaida over the past three years. We know of the group’s origins as an Office of Services in Afghanistan in the 1980s, when Osama bin Laden used CIA cash to recruit and train foreign fighters for that last gasp of the Cold War, the jihad
Nicola Lacey wanted to write an ‘intellectual biography’ of Herbert Hart, on the model of Hermione Lee’s Virginia Woolf. It’s a tall order. How to cope with the fact that the philosophy of law is even harder to understand than Virginia Woolf’s novels? And though an academic lawyer like Lacey is the best person to
Miles Fitzalan-Howard was one of eight children of a fairly distant cousin of the previous two Dukes of Norfolk, and so grew up in the give and take of life in a large family. Up until the age of about 30, he had no great expectation that he would succeed his predecessor, who was married,
A question posed early on in Mark Cousins’s book is bound to spur a reviewer’s pride: ‘Who are Griffith, Dovzhenko, Keaton, Ozu, Riefenstahl, Ford, Toland, Welles, Bergman, Truffaut, Ouedraogo, Cissé, Dulac, Chahine, Imamura, Fassbinder, Akerman, Scorsese, Almod
During the mid-17th century the idea gained ground in various parts of Europe that the world was about to come to an end. Bewildered by the effects of widespread war and revolution, bad harvests and a miniature Ice Age taking the form of savage winters, people made ready for the sounding of the Last Trumpet,