The head of history at a well-known English girls’ school was wont to say that she had learned nothing at Cambridge and all her history had been set in place at the age of ten by The Children’s Encyclopaedia. Rebecca Fraser will know exactly what she meant. Massively informed, she is as unstuffy as the
At university I had a tutor who would announce once a year, when the subject duly came round, ‘I’m too emotionally involved with Simone Martini. I can’t lecture on him. I’m now going to the Buttery. Any or all of you are welcome to join me there.’ And he would depart, trailing clouds of glory
The biographical note on the jacket of this magisterial book tells us that Professor Geza Vermes was born in Hungary in 1924 and that from 1957 to 1991 he taught at the universities of Newcastle and Oxford. It also tells us that ‘his pioneering work on the Dead Sea Scrolls and the historical figure of
One of the paradoxes of our age is that the hereditary principle is in eclipse everywhere except the first great republican democracy. With all our faults, we love our house of peers no more, and there are no longer any political dynasties in England (unless you count Benn) or elsewhere in Europe. But the last
Why, oh why, would a pleasant-looking, intelligent woman of 66, a retired English teacher with a grown-up son living in California, place an ad in the New York Review of Books announcing her age and inviting men to approach her for sex and then publish an account of the gruesome encounters that followed? A profound
Here’s a Christmas present for anyone with a serious interest in travel. It doesn’t matter whether you’re an armchair aficionado or grizzled explorer. There’s something for everyone, as they say. Eric Newby, the octogenarian doyen of the travel-writing genre, has put together a wonderful literary journey through the centuries and across the seven continents. Where
This lovely little bluffers’ guide to the founders of the American Republic came out of a chat Gore Vidal had in 1961 with his old friend, John F. Kennedy. There they were, Jack, Bobby and Gore, lounging around the Kennedy holiday compound in Hyannis Port after a vigorous game of backgammon — Gore won. Jack
This new collection is, surprisingly for a little black book, decidedly unsexy. In fact, A. S. Byatt — unsurprisingly, perhaps, for those readers who persisted through the Victorian mumblings and fumblings of Possession — does bad, awkward sex rather well. Here is a gynaecologist and an art student getting together (note especially the prophylactic double
Who Killed Daniel Pearl?by Bernard-Henri Levy, translated by James X. MitchellDuckworth, £20, pp. 454, ISBN 0715632612 The last time Mariane Pearl saw her husband Daniel, correspondent for the Wall Street Journal, she was preparing a celebratory dinner for their last night in Karachi, and he was setting off for a final interview he believed crucial
Behind many great stars of stage and screen lurks a mysterious, sometimes sinister manager figure, minder or mastermind, whose precise role in their protégé’s life, especially in terms of creative input, may be hard to define. Richard Burton’s career was kick-started by the Welsh schoolmaster whose surname he took. Tommy Cooper’s affairs were handled for
Twenty years ago Clive James’s poetry represented all that I most disliked about contemporary Englit. For a start it was practically ubiquitous. Barely had one laid down the Christmas number of the London Review of Books containing a lengthy Jamesian summary of the bygone year, it seemed, than one walked into a bookshop to find
When Philippe Labro, novelist, journalist, cineast, television producer and man about Paris, woke up one morning in 1999 at his usual hour of three o’clock it was with a profound and intimate conviction: ‘Quelque chose a changé.’ This was not occasioned by a physical malaise, although his bedclothes, even his pillows, were drenched with sweat,
For all of us who are paid to make jokes about pop music, Sting is a bit of a godsend. Earnest to the point of pomposity, visibly self-satisfied and even more serious about his music than George Michael, the former teacher and long-term sex symbol has come to represent a certain sort of middle-aged rock
Between antiquity and the 18th century, aside from a couple of Portuguese priests in Abyssinia, we have no record of Europeans venturing into the heart of Africa; incredible but true. Following in the priests’ footsteps came James Bruce, the Scottish laird who returned home to be ridiculed by Dr Johnson for his tales of Ethiopians
The story has been told dozens of times already, but never gets dull, and until the 1996 McDonald’s libel case there had not been a longer saga played out in any English court. From 1867 the Tichborne claimant dominated conversation for years, and people openly despaired they might die before a verdict was reached. Photographs
A Place of Hidingby Elizabeth GeorgeHodder & Stoughton, £18.99, pp. 576, ISBN 034076709X Blacklistby Sara ParetskyHamish Hamilton, £12.99, pp. 432, ISBN 0241141885 I have in front of me three novels, all of which are over 400 pages long. Their average length, in fact, is 482 pages and their average weight is 783g. A Place of
When Dylan Thomas first lived at the Boathouse, Laugharne (tel. Laugharne 68) there was no electricity, no running water and the rats took liberties. Today it is a spick and span little gimcrack museum. I went there recently hoping perhaps for a faint psychic whiff of Wales’ most famous son. But the place has been
Minette Walters is an unusually uneven writer. Although we know she is just one person it is as though there are two writers taking it in turns to produce the novels. Her last one, Fox Evil, was a histrionic, scrappy affair, while Disordered Minds is far more intriguing, and has characters that seriously engage your
‘Cora sits at the bay window, writing, in a fat manuscript book with a lock, about a man she once married … and wishing in the nicest possible way that he was dead.’ At the beginning of this novel, Cora, former madame of the Hotel de Dream, Jacksonville, Florida, finds herself alone and lonely in
Say ‘Rossetti’ to most people, and you will get back ‘Dante Gabriel’, or ‘Christina’, or perhaps a description of paintings of exotically beflowered, heavy-jawed women. It is impossible to imagine that anyone will respond with, ‘Of course, William Michael’, much less ‘Lucy Madox’. Angela Thirlwell, in her passionately argued double biography, wants to bring Dante