James Joyce scholars and the Irish tourist industry are both gearing up for 16 June, the centenary of the day on which Leopold Bloom, the hero of Ulysses, set out on his odyssey through the bars and brothels of Dublin. We can expect a deluge of new books and monographs to explain or ‘deconstruct’ Joyce’s
Do not be put off by the silly sub-title: this is an admirable book on several levels. Botanical origins; plant-hunting; the arrival of plants in England; hybridisation, and the American connections. There is much history, including that of great gardens like Exbury. All is here, plus some gorgeous illustrations, including one of Marion Dorn, designer
In 1919 my grandfather was in Kars, near what is now Turkey’s north-eastern frontier, as part of a British occupation force connected with what might be regarded as the first oil war. Kars had recently been abandoned by the Russians after nearly a century (Pushkin stayed there) and was soon to be handed over to
The subtitle, ‘On Settling’, is apt; the book is about the author’s settling in (you could nearly say ‘into’) what he calls ‘the claylands’, near Malmesbury in Gloucester-shire, and about the ‘settled’ nature of that place, the threats it has survived, the way it has adapted and, by extension, the manner in which England and
3:59:4: The Quest to Break the Four-Minute Mileby John BryantHutchinson, £14.99, pp. 310, ISBN 0091800331 Fifty years ago, on 6 May 1954, it was a blustery evening in Oxford. On the Iffley Road cinder track an event took place which has since become synonymous with everything that was good about sport. To run a mile
In this fascinating book about her two autistic sons Charlotte Moore describes what would be a nightmare life for most of us. I’d like to be able to have a bath without anybody else joining me in it … to open my handbag without finding a bitten-off lipstick or a capless, leaking pen … to
‘I do really feel it would have been a better world without Teller… I think he is an enemy of humanity.’ With this uncompromising assessment of his fellow physicist, the Nobel laureate Isidor Rabi expressed a view that has found many an echo throughout the last five decades. There are several reasons to regard Edward
In June 1937, Nancy Cunard, a supporter of the Republicans’ battle against Franco’s nationalists circulated a questionnaire to the writers of the time. It asked, ‘Are you for, or against, the legal government of the people of Spain?’ Inspired by Authors Take Sides on the Spanish War, Jean Moorcroft Wilson and Cecil Woolf have repeated
I could tell you about Graham the man, the hard-drinking, wild and wayward Scots poet who spent most of his life in Cornwall among the artists of St Ives, but I hear his voice in my head saying, ‘Tell them about the poems’. So I will. Graham’s are the most talkative poems of the 20th
When I interviewed him about his novel Asylum, Patrick McGrath described himself as a ‘psychological novelist’, adding that he would be ‘very happy to spend the next 30 years working through different species of madness’. That was eight years ago, and he seems to be keeping to schedule. Asylum and then Dr Haggard’s Disease were
I’m not susceptible to ghosts, and never see or sense them; my partner, who is, reports a mildly inquisitive nocturnal presence in our house in Florence, a town where estate agents all acknowledge the likely presence of such infestations, it being so common there. Who our ghost is or was, I don’t know; I am
The unpretentious title of this excellent, delicious book is clever. Does it mean ‘a modicum of garden history’ or, in a Victorian sort of way, ‘a little volume’ of it? Either, for it is beautifully produced, would make you want to buy it but neither would prepare you for nearly 350 pages of entertaining, scholarly
Anthony Kenny does not believe in the existence of God, but his disbelief is qualified and complex. He does not believe that the existence of God can be proved through something like the five Thomist ‘proofs’: they depend too much on ‘outdated Aristotelian cosmology’. Further, he thinks that the traditional attributes of God such as
Jane Shilling is a Times journalist and single parent who lives in Greenwich with her 12-year-old son. One day, for no particular reason, she decides to take up riding lessons. She turns up at a livery stables at Rooting Street in Kent, an establishment run by a formidable lady named Mrs Rogers. Jane Shilling had
It was only by a hoax that Andre
A publishing friend arrived with an armful of new books as a cadeau maison. I have to confess I picked up Plum Sykes’s Bergdorf Blondes with a groan, expecting it to be bad, on the grounds that the young author was thin, beautiful, had an irritating name and should therefore be doomed to fail. A
‘They can’t like us a whole lot,’ was the report of one American soldier. ‘If we came into a village there was no flag-waving, no pretty young girls coming out to give us kisses as we march through victorious. ‘Oh, here come the fucking Americans again. Jesus, when are they going to learn?’ That was
In 1863, the London underworld was revolutionised — not the crime statistics, but the literal underworld, when the first underground railway opened, with trains running, unimaginably, beneath the surface of the earth. This was, as the Times had pointed out when plans were first mooted, as silly as thinking of machines that could fly through
This novel, translated from the Afrikaans by André Brink, was offered to me for review with an apologetic note advising me to abandon it at the first onset of boredom. Seven hundred and fifty dense pages later I can report that it is riveting throughout. Based on the first 50 years of Dutch settlement in
For a writer or critic to describe something as ‘interesting’ is, of course, neither revealing nor interesting. Which is a shame, for Peter Ackroyd is rather fond of this sort of information underload: Richard II is ‘perhaps the most interesting and mysterious of English sovereigns’; the putative affair between Chaucer’s wife and John of Gaunt