The first word of Edgar Vincent’s biography of Nelson is not encouraging. It is ‘Jump!’, which is what a sailor is supposed to have shouted to young Horatio as he boarded the boat that was to take him out to his first ship. How does Mr Vincent know that the sailor shouted that? He might
My partner wanted to leave the dustwrapper of this book at home. He denied my suggestion that he didn’t want to be seen reading it on the train, claiming it was just his natural care for books. Anyway, he’s been quoting from it ever since, though his choice of quotes and mine are possibly Mars
Aldo Leopold once wrote, ‘There are some who can live without wild things and some who cannot.’ John Lister-Kaye’s Song of the Rolling Earth – his first book for many years and undoubtedly his finest to date – is written by one who cannot live without wild things, but makes essential reading for those who
Algeria is one of the most pitiful of failed Arab states. For ten years and more, the news has been coming in regularly that people somewhere in that country have been butchered. Qui tue qui? is the question Algerians themselves ask. Here is a civil war, all the more sinister for being undeclared and undefined.
Private lives of the rich or celebrated or infamous kinds in New York often resemble one of those inside-out buildings designed by the architect Richard Rogers in the 1970s; like the Pompidou Centre in Paris, with its exterior escalators and air-conditioning ducts, or the Lloyd’s building in London, where lifts and pipes are part of
Since Henry Hobhouse wrote his story of five plants that changed the world, Seeds of Change, nearly 20 years ago, the history of commodities has become a fashionable literary genre. So he must rate as one of its pioneers. But unlike many of his imitators, he has not been content to make a whole book
The start of this book is extremely annoying. On page three there is an inept echo of Gibbon, which has the effect of making us observe that Elon’s style is greatly inferior to the high culture which he sets out to describe. On page four there is a patronising remark about Moses Mendelssohn, the first
The Emma of the title was an intrepid young woman who journeyed to the Sudan in search of exotic adventure. Owing to an ill-chosen marriage she found herself at the centre of a bloody civil war. A few years later she met with an early death. One’s loins need to be well girded before embarking
In life, it helps to be called Rothschild. Victor Rothschild discovered this well before he became associated in the public mind with think tanks and spycatchers. Visiting the United States as a 29-year-old Cambridge academic in 1939, he was received by President Roosevelt, as well as by the Secretary of State, the Treasury Secretary and
FOOTBALL CONFIDENTIAL: SCAMS, SCANDALS AND SCREW-UPSby David Conn, Chris Green, Richard McIlroy and Kevin MousleyBBC, £6.99, pp. 256, ISBN 0563488581 By chance I picked up Tom Bower’s Broken Dreams shortly after putting down a paperback reissue of Selina Hastings’ biography of Nancy Mitford. Curiously there was a solitary point of contact. This was the description
James Watson has all the makings of a great biographical subject. He is notoriously volatile, splenetic, and aggressive. During his career he has not fought shy of public controversy. And of course he is globally famous for a single achievement: having been one of the two men who, in 1953, ‘discovered’ the double-helix structure of
Jonathan Bate, the general editor of this series, which replaces the Oxford History of English Literature, announces in a preface how exceptionally difficult it is to write literary history at all in modern times. As the slightly awkward new title of the series suggests, there is all that American, Scots, Welsh and Irish stuff now.
Asked who was the greatest French poet AndrZ Gide famously replied, ‘Victor Hugo, hZlas!’ I confess to having had similar feelings about King Lear. Of Shakespeare’s four great tragedies I find it the bleakest and least sympathetic, with the most exasperating protagonist and the most preposterous sub-plot. The naivety and perverse behaviour of young Edgar
Those who prefer their history straight may look askance at the historical novel, particularly if it is military. Accuracy is all. Surely it was the 31st Foot rather than the 38th and was the rifle yet in service and when did the Iron Duke say that it had been a really, really close-run thing? But
This is a remarkable novel. Written in a beautifully crafted prose, its theme is the resistance of China to Christianity. Missionaries, one of them of mixed blood, make their way into the mind and heartland of China, seeking to bring the good news of the crucified and resurrected Lord to those who are still devoted
It is a seductive idea to assess ‘the invention of America’ through the history of the dollar, for no other country’s conception of itself is so intrinsically bound to its currency. The biggest brand in the world, from its introduction the dollar has financed capitalism and conflict in equal measure. In the process it has
We have had to wait seven years for Graham Swift’s latest novel. Was it worth it? The hero of The Light of Day might think so. George Webb shares the patience of Job. He is prepared to wait eight or nine years until the woman he loves is let out of prison and re-emerges into
Judge Savage is a dashing mixture of thriller, social comedy and dysfunctional family saga. The dust-cover is misleading. It shows a very black black in a judge’s wig, looking thoughtful and gleaming with sweat. Judge Savage is not like that at all. He is ‘almond-coloured’ (Parks doesn’t say whether with or without the shell), of
I have to register a strong complaint about the misleading and opportunistic title of this book; it is not about ‘the Great Game’ as the phrase is usually understood. Various interesting and valuable attempts, such as the studies by Peter Hopkirk, have made the case that the British/Russian rivalry for control over Central Asia not
Assuming that a biography is worth writing in the first place, it is often asserted that after 20 years or so another look at the same subject is justified. It is nearly 20 years now since Selina Hastings’s subtle and perceptive account of Nancy Mitford appeared; and so even if the heart sank at the