This massive volume weighs in at seven pounds on the bathroom scales and cost The Spectator £14.50 in stamps to send out for review. If it is difficult to write about, this is not because of its size and weight but because the eye is constantly caught and distracted by fascinating pieces of information, so
First published in 1914, two years after he had married Virginia, Leonard Woolf’s second novel The Wise Virgins must have shocked its readers with its tale of an unfortunate coupling and hasty marriage. Now the romance/sex all seems rather tame, and this fiction startles for a very different reason: its harsh caricature of Jewishness (Woolf
The Duke of Bedford insisted that railway stations built on his estate had to be picturesque. He chose a half-timbered design based on Loudon’s Encyclopaedia of Cottage, Farm and Railway Architecture. His stations can still be seen from that improbable survival, the slow train from Bletchley to Ridgmont, Millbrook, Fenny Stratford and Woburn Sands. Future
This first volume of Bill Clinton’s biography, taking the story as far as his presidential election victory in 1992, comes at a peculiar time. Unlike many of the hasty invectives pronounced upon the 42nd president, Nigel Hamilton’s study is written on the grand scale, drawing on much of the published record and delving further with
What’s It All About? joins Bob Geldof’s Is That It? and Auberon Waugh’s Will This Do? on a shelf of wryly self-questioning autobiographies, although, unlike the other two, it doesn’t make even a ghost of an attempt at answering the question. For this is Cilla Black, beloved popular entertainer, mighty-lunged singer of the 1960s and
Whatever else this is, an intimate portrait of Mrs Parker Bowles it is not, or at least not one written by the author. This is a scissors-and-paste job, the bones of earlier would-be biographers whitening in every chapter, which gives it an air of California or Bust. Clearly done at speed, there are many errors
The work of the obituarist is not unlike that of the book reviewer. Both have to tell their reader what the subject of their piece is all about; both have to pass judgment on its merits and demerits; both have to provide something which will be entertaining as well as informative. Under the direction of
Here’s a real cure for anyone with a bad case of things-are-getting-worse-itis. Written in 1962 principally for the American market, London Perceived has now been republished over here for the first time in 40 years, which seems staggering. I’ve never read a better summary of London or Londoners. And it has hardly dated at all.
As a historical novel Thomas Gage is more Hardy than Tolstoy. The classic historical novel — as concocted by Walter Scott and perfected by Tolstoy — gives the reader an unexpected viewpoint from which to witness a great historical moment. Fictional characters with fictional relationships are the centre of attention, but they weave in and
This is an exceptional biography, which is just as well, since I don’t think one could bear to have the heartbreaking story it tells recounted carelessly. John Clare is one of the great Romantic poets, but his history and origins have always meant that he was either treated with neglect or used by his admirers
This is not exactly an autobiography — John Mortimer has written three already, one about old age — but more like a collection of reminiscences designed to inspire and warn his grandchildren of the delights and pitfalls of life. It is a testament, the ‘Will’ of his title, in which he bequeaths to them the
Martha Gellhorn, an American who lost faith in America, was one of the most important war-reporters of the 20th century. She was not interested in briefings from the top brass, though she sometimes used her blonde charm to get the top brass to fly her where she needed to go. What she did, in her
If it is to be interesting, contemporary history has to be a battle between good guys and bad guys. In his The Roaring Nineties Professor Joseph Stiglitz lets the reader know at an early stage in the proceedings that he is a good guy. As he says in the preface, when he first fell in
All the clichés are true: travel refreshes the taste for living; it brightens the jaded mind, it stimulates and deludes. The border that is crossed in leaving the familiar behind is the same one whether the journey is travel at its most serious — on perhaps the Terra Nova or the Endurance — or a
As you went into the tower door of the church at Marsh Baldon (Oxon), there used to be two wall-tablets. One was to the relations of Sir Christopher Willoughby, who died in 1808, and the other was To the Memory of Friends, listed as John Lane, Elizabeth Lane, Phanuel Bacon, Margaret Bacon and Ann Barton.
What is going on here? What on earth is going on here? Christopher Ricks, the world’s leading critic of poetry in English, Frank Kermode and the American Helen Vendler his only rivals, has devoted, has lavished 500 pages of hard-core, hardback, exegetical analysis to the words which propel Bob Dylan’s songs. The issue is not
The great popular success of Forster’s Howards End, published in 1910, meant that he was under pressure to set to work on a new novel, and in the following year he did so, but in a mood of self-doubt. He told himself it was wrong to force oneself to write; that before attempting a new
World history is pitted with world wars. Last century was conceited enough to call its pair the First and Second. One of the turning-points of that Second was the Anglo-American landing in Normandy on 6 June 1944, of which the 60th anniversary falls next year. David Stafford, a leading 20th-century historian (once a professor at
Very occasionally one comes across a book which, in its unexpected delights, inspires one to leap about wild with praise, and rush out to buy copies for friends. This first work by William Newton, retired doctor, will surely have this effect on many readers. It is, simply, the story of remarkable teenage years in the
The perfect anthology, like the perfect hors d’