A century ago, Paradise might have appeared in the stout bindings of the Religious Tract Society and been distributed to the deserving young in the form of Sunday school prizes. Or perhaps not, given that it begins in the dining-room of an alien hotel where its heroine, all memory of her previous life temporarily erased,
When Silvio Berlusconi came to power for the second time in May 2001, in a landslide victory, Italy became unique among Western democracies: no other nation had at its head its richest citizen — the 35th richest man in the world — someone who also enjoyed a monopoly of the country’s private television broadcasting. More
I have a faded photograph of Frances Osborne. I imagine the moment the picture was taken: perhaps she had just been told that this, her first book, would be published. She must have been happy and would have shared her happiness with her children, Luke and Liberty, who, I suppose, must have been happy, too.
Finishing The Rotters’ Club and finding ‘there will be a sequel’ posted at the back was a bit of good news. As was finding that sequel on my doormat. And here’s more good news: The Closed Circle is terrific. Last seen on election night in 1979, the characters from The Rotters’ Club are now pushing
Alexis Soyer was Britain’s first celebrity chef, and the catalogue of his achievements dwarfs that of Delia or Jamie. He made his name providing banquets for the richest Victorians, including Prince Albert and half the Cabinet, yet he also designed a soup kitchen for victims of the Irish famine, which fed 8,750 people daily in
Here are 90 furious little spats about our extraordinary and inadequate attitudes to God. Alice Thomas Ellis has subtitled them her ‘assembled thoughts’ on her Roman Catholic faith and what she sees as its suicidal attempts at liberalisation. She is impassioned, funny, fearless and has been in hot water a number of times with the
In his History of the Conquest of Mexico, Prescott described the bafflement of the Spanish arriving in a country where savagery and sweetness, blood sacrifice and delicate manners co-existed unsettlingly. In Mexico nothing was straightforward. Anita Desai is known, and acclaimed, for her novels about India. The sub- continent is her birthplace and literary territory.
In this enthusiastic study of the bohemian Garman family, Cressida Connolly has chosen a hard task. Group biographies are tricky to write and risk being muddling to read: there are 21 Garmans in her index. But her greatest problem has been to make her subjects, in particular Mary, Kathleen and Lorna, the three sisters at
Nancy Mitford did not enjoy readers’ letters, according to Harold Acton’s sprightly memoir (how unlike us, Miss Beale and Miss Buss). But she did enjoy this one from a certain Mavis Mitford-Potts, following the enormous success of her first historical biography, Madame de Pompadour. It was along these lines: ‘I live alone in a bungalow
Selected Poemsby R. S. ThomasPenguin Modern Classics, £9.99, pp. 368, ISBN 0140188908 Some 40 years ago, about to sit an entrance scholarship for Aberyst-wyth, I got hold of some papers set in previous years. One I have found it impossible to forget. It was a paper of literary criticism, only there were no questions, just
The end of the world is nigh. Well, of course it is. Everything falls apart, sooner or later, including ourselves and the Earth we live on. We are particularly vulnerable today, with so many mortal threats to civilised existence competing for attention — war, pestilence, pollution, economic breakdown and moral collapse. Ian Rankin adds another
Susanna Burney was the younger sister of the more famous Fanny (one of the best-loved of English diarists and author of Evelina). Born in 1755, three years after Fanny, Susanna began writing a journal long before Fanny had conceived the idea of confiding her thoughts ‘To Nobody’. Susanna’s diaries (still unpublished) tell us less about
Parliament has so dominated the writing of English political history that the royal household has been sidelined. Moreover, the absence of a tradition of court literature as strong as the French, and prudent bonfires of such compromising documents as the letters to George III from Lord Bute, subject of this remarkable study — and to
Blenheim, 1704: Marlborough’s Greatest Victoryby James FalknerPen & Sword Military, £10.99, pp. 144, ISBN 184415050X By rights the battle of Blenheim in 1704 ought to be as well known as Waterloo. It was just as momentous, just as exciting, just as victory-snatched-from-the-jaws-of-defeat. In fact you could argue — as Winston Churchill did — that it
Denis Healey will never be the same, once you discover, as you do in this fizzing collection of mini-biographies, that his favour- ite question is, ‘Do you have sexual fantasies when you smoke cigars?’ Peregrine Wors- thorne is now forever fixed in my mind exchanging shirts with the first Mrs Nigel Lawson in a crowded
Cynics have long noted that there are certain, relatively coarse, artistic vocations in which premature death can be a shrewd career move: consider the presently thriving and/or grossly inflated reputations of, say, James Dean, Jim Morrison, Jimi Hendrix and Janis Joplin. For those who practise the more elite arts, an equally potent and far less
Liars and Saintsby Maile MeloyJohn Murray, £14.99, pp. 260, ISBN 0719566444 Darien Dogsby Henry ShukmanJonathan Cape, £12.99, pp. 279, ISBN 022407282 ‘Short’ as Peter Dimock’s potent novel about the Vietnam war may be, it packs a not insignificant punch. The curious title is to be taken literally: this really is a ‘rhetoric’, in the classical
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