Two or three years ago, I was invited with my rather posh then girlfriend to a grand party up in Yorkshire somewhere, and we were billeted for the night with a fellow guest who lived nearby. Our host was one Sir Tatton Sykes, Bt — known around those parts, as ‘Sir Satin Tights’ — an
In New York in 1920 the writer Hattie Mayer, under her pen name Anzia Yezierska, published her first collection of short stories, entitled Hungry Hearts. Poignant sketches of Jewish family life among the tenements and sweatshops of the Lower East Side, they gain additional impact from the reader’s continuing awareness that English is not the
If any of Byron’s contemporaries at Cambridge had been asked to nominate The Man Most Likely To, it is a safe bet that it would have been William Bankes, and while things did not turn out quite as any but his immediate set might have guessed, that hardly detracts from his biographical appeal. Rich, clever
A 12th-century eyewitness at Sant- iago de Compostela described his fellow pilgrims: Some, such as the Greeks, hold the image of the cross in their hands; others distribute their possessions to the poor; some carry iron or lead for the construction of the basilica of the Apostle James; and others, who have been liberated by
Carlos Ruiz Zaf
The main lesson of history is that we do not learn the lessons of history. Did (for example) anyone at the Pentagon heed the wisdom of Colonel T. E. Lawrence, soundly advising against the military occupation of Iraq? Of course not. That was way back, buddy: this is now. Experience teaches, time and again —
Colin Wilson is a very great man, ‘the only important writer in Europe’. That is his own estimation, and I do not quarrel with it because Wilson’s self-esteem is not just vanity but necessary to his career. As he sees it, the pattern of our lives is created by ourselves through the use of imagination
There never was a ticket with the word ‘POSH’ stamped on it by the P&O shipping line, which meant a passenger to India went out on the port side and returned on the starboard and got the best of the cooling breezes. So, where did the word come from? Michael Quinion says humans fear the
There is much to commend this book. Charles Clover lays bare the depths of a neglected subject — the rape of our seas — to expose the destruction caused by modern technological fishing. This is an issue which needs populist exposure; Clover has done it admirably. I hope it will attract readers who might otherwise
A crime novel by Chekhov? Professor John Sutherland positively chortles in the introduction at his readers’ likely surprise. Indeed, any novel by Chekhov is probably news for those readers, and Sutherland, who delights in literary mysteries, waves in front of our eyes the date of the only previous translation: 1962. It was the date of
The meteoric rise and swift fall of Anne Boleyn, she of the thousand days, has gripped the imagination even of sober-minded academic historians, Eric Ives describing it as ‘the most romantic, the most scandalous tragedy in English history’. Much of the fascination derives from the fact that the evidence is confusing, and no explanation appears
Just how unhappy was Jane Welsh’s 40-year marriage to Thomas Carlyle? For decades after the publication of J. A. Froude’s scandalously revealing biography in 1883, it was widely regarded as one of the dirtier secrets of Victorian literary history. She never wanted him in the first place, he was sexually impotent, she was bitterly jealous
A curious volume, this, and you would be right in thinking that anyone writing a book review of someone else’s book reviews needs to justify himself. (Indeed, the first essay in this book is a review of Sven Birkerts’s book reviews, at which point we seem an unnecessarily remote distance from literature itself — I
I will cheerfully own to having struggled in the past with Ronald Frame’s novels. Brooding once over a stack of photographs brought back from a fortnight’s holiday in Kerry, I realised that lurking among the margins of practically every snap — here flung down on a bathing-towel, there wedged beneath the picnic basket — was
‘The victor writes the history,’ says Peter Hofschröer in his latest attempt to rewrite it himself. ‘Rarely has this old adage been more apposite than when applied to Wellington and Waterloo.’ In his two previous books, the second of which is called 1815, The Waterloo Campaign: The German Victory, he argued that the Duke of
Miles Hudson is a military historian with several interesting books to his credit, especially his War and the Media (1981), written with Field Marshal Sir John Stanier. He gives his latest book the subtitle ‘A Cautionary Tale’, and so indeed it is. It tells the story of the various forces sent to Russia in 1918–19
Michael Collins, he tells us, was brought up in a terraced street south of the River Thames in Southwark, a district I don’t know very well. I have been there a few times, usually visiting west African friends and acquaintances, a fact that might strike Michael Collins as ironic. For if you look closely at
This book, republished after almost 40 years, has survived as a South African classic while most other memoirs about life under apartheid have been forgotten. It’s not just because it’s beautifully written, in a plain, unpretentious style, but also because it conveys, with acute observation, the combination of ordinariness and danger which is implicit in
Marie of Romania (1875–1938), though little known to most readers today, was probably the most dynamic and effective royal consort of the 20th century, and certainly the most glamorous. A granddaughter of both Queen Victoria and the Tsar Alexander II, she was brought up in England by her parents, the Duke and Duchess of Edinburgh.
Within just a week of the tragic assassination in Dallas, the widowed Jackie Kennedy summoned the presidential chronicler Theodore H. White to a midnight conference at the family compound on the stormy Cape Cod shore. For four hours her whispery voice mesmerised him as she set out her vision of the Kennedy White House as