‘I do feel the strongest urge to talk,’ confides the narrator when a chance meeting with the beautiful Olivia after more than 30 years brings back disturbing memories of what she tells us is ‘a terrible story’. The encounter takes place in Bordeaux where Kate, American, is sightseeing while her English husband attends a conference,
The anchoring memories of this novel go back to the second world war. That is where crucial people in the plot received their opportunities and their wounds. Less easy to fathom, for this reviewer anyway, was why most of the book seems to take place in the 1970s. Nothing much was done with this egregious
In the 16th century Montaigne voiced the fear that missionary endeavour — the white man’s ‘contagion’ — would hasten the ruin of the New World. Though Jesuits played their part in the spoliation of the Americas, only the most romantic could claim that Indian tribes there lived in a state of prelapsarian grace, so artless,
Michael Holroyd describes the first copy of his last book of memoirs plopping through the letterbox, the kind of moment that might have called for champagne anywhere but in the Holroyd household, which celebrated the book’s arrival with macabre revulsion: ‘I seemed to see, clambering through its pages, a troupe of ungainly, poignant, gesticulating clowns
Eugenia de Montijo was born in a tent, during an earthquake, in Granada in 1826. Her father, a Liberal minor grandee, had joined the French army, been wounded at Trafalgar, and welcomed the replacement of the Bourbons by the mediocre Joseph Bonaparte in 1808. Threatened by the Carlist wars, in 1833 he sent his wife
Although it probably won’t, this book deserves to lay the ghost of Dresden, to demolish the myth and establish the rule of objective historical judgment. Frederick Taylor opens his investigation as long ago as AD 350 and carries it down to 2003. On the way, he gives us a condensed history of the strategic air
It seems only the other day that Ian Huntley was convicted at the Old Bailey of the pointless murder of two pretty Cambridgeshire schoolgirls, Holly Wells and Jessica Chapman, and here, already, is a book about the case by a journalist who covered every day of the investigation. One is bound to ask why. What
My favourite titbit about the Oscars is that if at any point during the Wagner- ian length of the ceremony you get up to go to the loo, a young person who has been loitering in the aisles will instantly nip in and occupy your seat, giving it up gracefully on your return. The point
The Museum of the French Resistance in Brittany lies just outside Saint-Marcel in the Morbihan department, near to Malestroit. It is extensive and consists of a number of buildings situated in a large wooded park. But what makes it special is that it covers the site of the battle of 18 June 1944 which was
‘Naturalist-in-charge’ was Shel-ton’s title as fisheries expert on board the Tellina, a research vessel. It holds good throughout this excellent memoir, which contains much pertinent information and few idle sentences. By page 30 I’d learned that apple wood makes the best catapult, about the guanine crystals in fish scales, about lampreys, the names of his
The death of Francesco Cenci has the ring of a contemporary crime. A wealthy, well-connected man is killed when he steps onto a balcony which inexplicably gives way beneath him. Within days of his burial, local gossip suggests that it was no accident — the hole in the balcony is too small for anyone to
Walter Moers has cleverly built a fantastical tale around 21 drawings from the work of the famous 19th-century illustrator, Gustave Doré. The woodcuts reproduced in the book are of gryphons and monsters, naked damsels and dragons and the faces of the moon; Moers has plenty to go on. He spellbinds and spooks it all up
Mark Abley is a Canadian poet of Welsh descent who has recently been travelling the world in search of minority languagues which are bleeding to death or, in the case of Welsh, Faroese and Basque, just about succeeding in staunching their gaping wounds. This is an emotive subject for many writers (perhaps especially for poets),
When not thinking and writing, Richard Pipes tells us in these memoirs, he is at a loose end. At different times he had ambitions to be an art historian or perhaps a musicologist, he also says, but settled to be a historian. The writing of history depends in the first place on scholarship. Vixi is
Tucked into the pages of The Tyrant’s Novel, Thomas Keneally has slipped a short letter. Giving his reasons for writing the book and stating that he believes it to be the best he has yet produced, the letter is presumably intended for reviewers and booksellers, and it provides information in many ways crucial for readers,
American Dynastyby Kevin PhillipsPenguin/Allen Lane, £18.99, pp. 397, ISBN 071399746X The prosperous Floridan seaside resort of Sarasota should be natural Bush country. Home to golf courses, marinas and retirement condos, the town’s Republican Congress- woman Katherine Harris shot to fame in the 2000 presidential election as the official appointed by Governor Jeb Bush to make
Good Morning, Midnight is an excellent novel by that mistress of introspective sensitivity, Jean Rhys. Reginald Hill hijacks the title for his far less morbid new detective novel starring that trinity of beings, Detective Superintendent Andy Dalziel, Detective Inspector Peter Pascoe and Sergeant Wield. Good Morning, Midnight is, however, definitely Pascoe’s case. Dalziel plays an
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