Despite the title, this is not one of those gloom-mongering surveys of the state of culture that so regularly (usually at the end of a decade) predict the Death of the Novel, the End of History, the Death of the Individual, and the like. Indeed, on closer inspection, ‘The Last of England’ turns out to
In 1743 John Breads, a butcher, stabbed to death Allen Grebell in the declining Cinque port town of Rye on the east Sussex coast. Grebell was the brother-in-law of James Lamb, the mayor who lived in the town’s big house, Lamb House, that was later to be home to Henry James and E. F. Benson.
At first sight Gilbert Adair’s new book seems like shameless pornography of a particularly sad and depraved kind, but more charitably and more accurately we discover as we read on that it is the story of an unlikely martyr-hero who risks his life in the cause of militant homosexuality rather than suffer suicidal loneliness. As
Crime is a species of performance art. Acts of murder, theft or fraud assume the collusive presence of an audience formed from that law-abiding majority for whom felony on a grand scale holds an inextinguishable glamour. Even a simple mugging possesses elements of street theatre, as if some sort of scenario had been worked out
In this, her ninth novel, Maggie Gee has determinedly sought — like God in the beginning — to make the watery world she has created ‘teem with countless living creatures’. She did not, however, see to it that it was good. For The Flood teems not only with living things (birds ‘quivering, flashing on the
Dan Fesperman’s first book, Lie in the Dark, was a fine debut: set in Sarajevo during the civil war, it had homicide detective Vlado Petric struggling to investigate a murder case while sniper bullets snapped about his heels. The Small Boat of Great Sorrows (Bantam Press, £12.99) is the follow-up and it is written to
The story of the emergence of the poet from the prose writer Edward Thomas — not his emergence as an acknowledged poet, that took another 30 years — is probably well known but is so astonishing it can bear a brief retelling. From his early twenties Thomas had been earning a living, supporting his family
Diplomat, soldier, diplomat again, humanitarian, environmentalist: you cannot plan a career like that today. But that has been the CV of John Henniker, otherwise Major Henniker-Major MC, now the eighth Lord Henniker, who, in his late eighties, has written a modest and readable account of his life and work. Born in 1916, and following a
Set in Anatolia in 1922, The Maze describes the retreat of a Greek brigade to the sea. Under the questionable guidance of a brigadier addicted to morphine and a hypocritical priest without the slightest understanding of their parlous situation, the detachment is lost in the arid landscape. Thanks to the trail of droppings left by
David Mitchell has fast established himself as a novelist of considerable authority and power. His first novel, Ghostwritten, was published as recently as 1999, and Cloud Atlas is only his third. Anyone who read his remarkable debut, or its successor, number9dream, will instantly recognise the characteristic moves and bold gestures of this amazing extravaganza. His
In September 1519 the Armada de Molucca of five ships and 250 sailors had set out from San L
Wagner’s masterpiece, Tristan, has now a considerable literature of its own, with books devoted to its harmonic structure, its baleful influence on artists of various kinds, its philosophical significance, its sources in the mediaeval literature of courtly love, its phonographic history, and plenty of other things. Roger Scruton’s impressive new book is concerned with its
When I first met Terry Smith ten years ago, in the library of Long Lartin top security prison in Worcestershire, he was part of a cockney criminal elite as exclusive and self-perpetuating as the Whig junta that once controlled England. Along the austere corridors in that microcosm of misanthropy and discontent, Smith and his ilk
There was a time when the Catholic party of the Church of England was not consumed by the latest ecclesiastical millinery. Its driving force then was a passion for social righteousness. It was also fun in the hands of perhaps the most flamboyant of Christian Socialists, Stuart Headlam. Headlam is still sometimes remembered for standing
Six CDs, 75 minutes eachwww.csaword.co.uk Lying stock-still with a bandage over your eyes for several weeks has its bonuses. In the bookshelves downstairs sit all those spines that for years have been gazing at you reproachfully, pleading ‘when are you going to take me down and read me?’ Help is at hand. You don’t have
Ever since the posthumous publication in 1979 of Testimony, his volume of memoirs, ‘as related to and edited by Solmon Volkov’, Dmitri Shostakovich has ranked not only as a great Russian composer but also as a great figure of Russian literature — sullenly truculent, cynically embittered and permanently disappointed. Some scholars, indeed, have gone so
Whatever else may be said of Guy Vanderhaeghe, author of The English Boy, he does at least have one serious fan. The admirer in question is Annie Proulx, who appears on the front cover of this new novel extolling ‘a feast of a book’, and on the back suggesting that ‘here are brilliant writing, picaresque
Any author who subtitles his book ‘The true story of …’ this, that or the other inspires some disquiet in the reviewer. If this is the true story, then the implication is that previous versions have been, if not untrue, then at least seriously misinformed. In his history of the British invasion of Tibet in
Nicholas Shakespeare is one of the few contemporary British novelists who successfully integrate the political with the personal in the lives of his characters. Like Graham Greene, he has an eye for a dramatic historical backdrop: in The Dancer Upstairs, it was the Shining Path insurgency in Peru; in his new novel, Snowleg, it is
The Portraits of Hector Berliozby G