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The snake in paradise

The title is a slight puzzle, a tease. But quickly all becomes clear. Here is a book of painful but fictional recollections recounted by fictional novelist Imogen Bailey, which in turn become a real novel of both power and delicacy. Imogen, a young woman of great sensibility, was traumatised by the loss of her beloved

Bruiser, cruiser but no boozer

The subject of this intelligent biography was among the founders of the Modern movement in British art before the first world war, and a leading formulator of what he considered to be its principles. A philosopher/aesthetician, he was a friend of Epstein, Wyndham Lewis, Pound, Gaudier-Brzeska, and was thought a great poet by the young

Waiting for the Bogeyman

On 19 August 1805, two months before his death at Trafalgar, Vice-Admiral Lord Nelson rejoined Emma Hamilton at their home in Merton after an absence of almost two and a half years. During that time, he had been continuously at sea, at first in the Mediterranean watching for Admiral Villeneuve to break out of Toulon

Accentuating the positive

There was a time when our man at the BBC was the most famous foreign correspondent in India, his broadcasts reaching one fifth of the world’s population. Road-blocks and armed insurgents tended to melt when confronted by Tully-sahib, the man to trust, who understood the problems. For 30 years he trawled the sub-continent, covering its

The young woman and the sea

When Ellen Macarthur was nine she saved her pocket money, by eating less, to buy her first little boat and slept on the floor of her bedroom so as to store the boat’s mast and sails. At 18 she decided that sailing round Britain alone ‘seemed to be the most natural thing to do’. At

Christmas Books II

Hugh Massingberd ‘It is difficult’, writes A. N. Wilson in The Victorians (Hutchinson, £25), ‘for me to conceive of a more agreeable life than that of a Victorian country parson.’ Reading his brilliantly panoramic, constantly stimulating and humanely wise portrait of an age and the characters who created it left me longing to have been

Growing up the hard way

You don’t have to be Jewish to find this book rewarding, but you do need to be interested in humanity: every page seethes with it. There are no gruesome Holocaust testimonies: the youthful authors of these autobiographies, written in Poland in the years leading up to the second world war, had no premonition of the

Heroes, villains and bugbears

Unlike most journalistic cobble jobs, this collection of Nigel Farndale’s interviews from the Sunday Telegraph has a real sparkle: intelligent, irreverent and often unexpectedly kindly. It makes you laugh and, occasionally, it makes you gasp. Over the past five years he has quietly garnered a reputation as one of the best inquisitors, up there with

Martin Vander Weyer

Simple, spray-painted slogans

An awful lot has happened since the Canadian journalist Naomi Klein shot to radical prominence with the publication of No Logo, the first sacred text of the anti-globalisation movement, shortly after her co-religionists besieged the 1999 world trade talks in Seattle. They went on to wreck the World Bank/IMF meeting in Prague and, less successfully,

A damned dark dozen

Indelible Acts is A. L. Kennedy’s first book of fiction since Everything You Need, which was followed by a spell of suicidal desperation. We know all about that from On Bullfighting, her patchily received foray into the world of the matador which was only partly about matadors and partly about herself and her suicidal desperation.

Skeletons of mermaids . . .

Private collections of miscellaneous oddities, valuable works of art and all sorts of objects, animal, vegetable and mineral, of little if any apparent intrinsic value, are collectors’ emblems of the world in miniature, microcosmic claims to the whole macrocosm. This splendid book, elegantly analytical and lavishly illustrated, makes the collectors’ obsession understandable to the point

Who wore the royal trousers?

Revolutions no longer seem so inevitable, nor the overthrown governments so hopeless, since the failure of the greatest of all European revolutionary regimes, the Soviet Union. In The Fall of the French Monarchy Munro Price analyses, with skill and a light touch, the policies of two celebrated royal failures, Louis XVI and Marie Antoinette, and

Some very cross references

Mr William Donaldson, the most subversive and mischievous Englishman since Titus Oates, started his literary career with Both the Ladies and the Gentlemen, a DIY guide to brothel-keeping and the choreography of orgies. He extended it with the Henry Root Letters, in which, posing as a demented if upwardly mobile fishmonger, he entered into a

Beating the Wet Blanket

I am not an avid television watcher, so I did not tune into Who Wants to be a Millionaire? for about a year, but when I finally did, like nearly half the nation (19 million viewers at its peak) I was gripped. At the time I was also rather poor and thinking of going to

Servant of a theory

During the Cuban Missile Crisis, President Kennedy read Barbara Tuchman’s August 1914. As President George W. Bush prepares for a second Gulf war, he apparently is reading Eliot Cohen’s Supreme Command. Kennedy would have had more fun. Tuchman is a better read than Cohen. She also advances what proved in the circumstances to be important

Overdone and undercooked

This is a hopeless mishmash of a book. It is over 600 pages (736 with the notes), and it only covers a mere 24 years of its subject’s life. Some reviewers would say that it was badly written, but the trouble is, it isn’t really written at all. It is hurled together, without any apparent

The gate lodge to the big house

This book succeeds The Painters of Ireland, published in 1978, which established the Knight of Glin and Anne Crookshank as supreme authorities on the subject. The update adds a further 20 years and takes account of an abundance of new research; but it remains what they describe as ‘a general survey on traditional lines’, a