Among the great works of art written in the prison camps of the second world war are Messiaen’s Quartet for the End of Time, Viktor Ullman’s The Emperor of Atlantis, Ezra Pound’s The Pisan Cantos and P. G. Wodehouse’s Joy in the Morning. Spot the odd one out. Robert McCrum, with some ingenuity, has managed
W. H. Davies was a phenomenon of whom, it seems, few nowadays have heard. His lines, ‘What is this life if, full of care,/ We have no time to stand and stare?’ were quoted with approval in the local pub the other day, but nobody knew who wrote them. In 1996 that poem, ‘Leisure’, was
This diptych of a novel starts with a surprise. Margaret Drabble’s fame rests largely on fiction dealing with social issues in contemporary Britain. But here she has taken real-life intrigue, madness and murder in 18th- century Korea as the subject for the first half of her book. Her inspiration, Drabble tells us, came from a
‘His name is protean. He begets doubles at every corner … On the wet morning of 27 November 1582, he is Shaxpere and [his prospective wife] is a Wately of Temple Grafton. A couple of days later he is Shagsper and she is a Hathaway of Stratford-on-Avon. Who is he? William X, cunningly composed of
The sixth in the ‘No. 1 Ladies’ Detective Agency’ series of novels is as delightful as any of its predecessors. Mma Ramotswe and her able assistant, Mma Makutsi (‘the most distinguished graduate of her year from the Botswana Secretarial College’ with a 97 per cent pass mark), continue to dispense true justice in a corrupt
Two of a good thing is usually better than one — unless, of course, the good thing in question is you. Nobel Prize-winner José Saramago’s new novel, The Double, is built around just such a premise. His main character, a mildly depressed history teacher called Tertuliano M
This is a reissue in paperback of a novel that utterly vanished on its first publication in 1998. Since it is exceptionally good, it is worth explaining its disappearance. Review copies were sent out by Bellew, its original publisher, and copies were sent to the Society of Authors for submission to their Sagittarius Prize (best
It was no fun being captured by pirates. Hanging from the yardarm or walking the plank was the least of your worries. According to Alexander Exque- melin’s eye-witness account in Buccaneers of America: Amongst other tortures then used, one was to stretch [the victims’] limbs with cords and at the same time beat them with
In 1799 Susan O’Brien underwent an operation for breast cancer. She was 56 and, her sister having died of the disease, she nerved herself for the knife. The doctors insisted on blindfolding her during the operation, but she took nothing to ease the pain and remained fully conscious throughout. She was convinced that the operation
Six weeks after the defeat of the Taleban Rory Stewart started to walk across Afghanistan. He took the direct route through the central mountains from Herat to Kabul when there was still deep snow on the paths and ice cracking underfoot. The chances of surviving the weather, the Pashtun, Taleban and al-Qua’eda while entrusting himself
Mustapha Kemal, otherwise Ataturk, took the corpse of the Ottoman empire and re- animated it as Turkey. Break-ing both the old sultanate and the hold of Islam, he laid the foundation of a democratic state. It was an extraordinary achievement, not to be witnessed again until Mikhail Gorbachev broke the Soviet Union and the hold
‘We are very proud of Amir Temur,’ the Uzbek ambassador to the Court of St James’s told Justin Marozzi. ‘We do not call him Tamerlane.’ Nevertheless this is the title of Marozzi’s biography, and perhaps the publishers insisted it be marketed as Tamerlane, which is Temur-i-Lan or Temur the Lame, the name Amir Temur not
If William Coldstream (1909-87) was a dull painter, as he is sometimes thought to be, he was most certainly not a dull man. An artist who spent much of his life in a three-piece suit, an administrator with ‘an irresistible urge to turn a serious story into farce’, he was captivating in conversation, a natural
Disney hijacked Margery Sharp. The novelist, who died in 1991, is remembered chiefly for her series of (now animated) children’s books, The Rescuers. Sharp wrote The Eye of Love, one of 26 adult novels, half a century ago. It is a bittersweet comedy that encompasses intimations of tragedy — the ‘wrong’ outcome is never impossible
The plumber came this morning — £75 including VAT. He was still expensively engaged when a bike brought Frederic Raphael’s Rough Copy in a paperback version whose glued spine is in constant contest with the reader. Anyway, surely an opportunity to recoup the plumber’s fee. Strangely, the author himself raises the question of my financial
One February day in 1845 a well-dressed young man walked into Gallery Nine of the British Museum and hurled a lump of sculpture at a glass case. He smashed the case and shattered its contents — the Portland Vase, a famous piece of Roman glass. The vase was broken into 200 pieces. The vandal turned
Pablo Neruda had three houses in Chile, the most lovely of them at La Isla Negra, on the Pacific coast near Valparaiso. This house is Neruda’s love-song to the sea that inspired so many of his poems. Like a stranded boat on the beach, its timbers creak, a collection of figure-heads loom from the rafters
As a rule, I disapprove of reviews which review the author and not the book, but some occasions demand it. The British, I don’t know why, are notoriously myopic, mean-spirited even, about multiple talents. In France one could be a poet and a stripper and be taken equally seriously as either. David Baddiel is best
Timothy Garton Ash has become a bishop. In Free World, he has written something which is less a work of political analysis than an extended sermon about the value of political liberty and international co-operation between Western states. Of course, no one is against these admirable things, but they sometimes come at too high a
‘When you look at families, there is no such thing as normal.’ Indeed not. Justin Cartwright gives us the Judds, an apparently ordinary English middle-class family, and examines their response to a private catastrophe. The book begins as Juliet Judd, eldest child and ‘prodigal daughter’, is released from prison in America. She has been locked