When, in these pages, John Birt expresses wonderment at how the boy from Bootle went on to become the 12th director general of the BBC, to enter the House of Lords and be an adviser to the prime minister it is a sentiment shared by many. The clue probably lies in the brutal Irish Christian
High on the teetering list of all the things that, down the long arches of the hacking years, have dissuaded me from trying to cobble a novel is the dreary business of describing how the characters look. You have a picture of this person or that in your head, and your reader, having coughed up
Rupert Christiansen How embarrassing. The authors of the four books I have most relished this year – Nicola Shulman’s elegant monograph A Rage for Rock Gardening (Short Books, £9.99), Virginia Nicholson’s exuberant Among the Bohemians (Viking, £20), Giles Waterfield’s brilliant satire The Hound in the Left-Hand Corner (Review, £14.99) and Selina Hastings’ fascinating biography of
Readers of the thrillers of the American writer Patricia Cornwell will find elements of her new book familiar but others oddly different. Her novels are fiction closely based on fact; Portrait of a Killer purports to be a work of fact but is founded on fiction. It supposedly unravels the mystery of Jack the Ripper,
It is a discomforting thought that, had the present fashion for kiss-and-tell memoirs, or the intense media scrutiny of politicians’ private lives, been in place a century ago, David Lloyd George might never have become prime minister. Yet, as this masterly fourth volume in John Grigg’s biography proves, he was a towering figure in exceptional
This cracking book is missing something and the want is telling. Jeremy Paxman virtually discounts the possibility that people might go into politics driven by ideas or conviction. These being the spur politicians routinely claim, Paxman’s study becomes a detective hunt for ulterior motive or unacknowledged greed. ‘This fellow says he wants to make the
The Italian author, Alberto Arbasino, has recently published a book recalling his stay in Paris as a student during 1956. Entitled Paris,
Whenever, searching through the television channels for something worth watching, I come across a Dad’s Army repeat I invariably stay with it. The series has not dated, partly perhaps because it was dated when it started. Few of us who were young in the 1960s had clear memories of the Home Guard and many of
If Harold Pinter’s plays are about the weasel under the cocktail cabinet, Matthew Parris’s autobiography is about the butchered segment of electrical cable that lies on the dusty roof of the throne of the Speaker of the House of Commons. For several decades this piece of copper wire, unused, long-neglected, has rested above the heads
Art can raise our spirits, stimulate our intelligence and increase our knowledge; it is therefore disappointing that much of our arts writing is so impenetrable. Academics seem to address their peers and forget us; it is like eavesdropping on a private conversation carried on in a foreign language. Despite this, business is booming. In 1910
It was a Catholic priest – Dom Philip Jebb, the ‘fighting monk’ and later headmaster of Downside School – who introduced Richard Cohen (alongside, as it happens, your reviewer) to fencing in the 1960s – just one of the many ironies which this new and full history of the ancient art and modern sport of
The people in Hanif Kureishi’s short fiction are rarely in the first flush of youth. Adam, the bleary sixtysomething protagonist of the title story, soon allows himself to be talked into experimenting with a new physical frame. Even at 45, Rick, the focus of ‘Remember This Moment, Remember Us’, is darkly conscious of having fetched
Gavin Menzies declares, he does not claim, that between 1421 and 1423 the Chinese discovered Australia, South and North America, and nearly reached the North Pole – in short, the world. He is ‘certain’ that if there hadn’t been a disastrous fire in Peking’s Forbidden City, killing the favourite imperial concubine and causing the emperor
INSIDE SAHARAby Basil PaoWeidenfeld, £25, pp. 200, ISBN 0297843044 Michael Palin is a decent chap, I thought, after bumping into him for a nanosecond at the Hatchards Authors of the Year party a few months ago. It was just long enough for the briefest exchange of desert tales before he was mobbed by growing numbers
Anne Enright is an Irish writer with a startling gift for domesticating the outlandish. In her last novel, about twins separated at birth, she explored the sadness at the heart of tales of freakish sameness. In her latest, based on the true story of a 19th-century Irish concubine, deranged appetites are passed off as endearing
Two running stories are brought to a close in Death’s Jest-Book. The first was introduced in the novel in which we first met Ellie, Peter Pascoe’s future wife. An Advancement of Learning, published in 1971, has that great team – politically correct Sergeant Peter Pascoe and fat, slobbish, thuggish Superintendent Andy Dalziel – investigating a
THE ILLUSTRATED ZULEIKA DOBSONby Max Beerbohm, with an introduction by N. John HallYale, £9.99, pp. 432, ISBN 0300097328 Max Beerbohm wrote a tale called The Happy Hypocrite, a reversal of his friend Wilde’s The Picture of Dorian Gray. It’s about a rake who puts on a saintly mask in order to win the love of
From Apicius to the Ivy: Roy Strong, the possessor of 800 cookbooks, has written a fascinating and scholarly study of social eating from Greece to the 21st century, a single-volume synthesis of the most significant work published in various countries and various languages over the last two decades, polished with style, bibliographical knowledge and an
The distillation of a vast quantity of historical material into a tolerably readable concentrate is a considerable skill, the historian’s equivalent of good popular science, and the late Professor Porter manifestly had that skill. To produce a history of medicine, little more than 150 pages long, that is not a completely arid list of names
Like most human beings, most novelists are neither outstandingly good nor outstandingly bad. This poses a problem for reviewers. A good novelist can write interestingly about mediocre characters; but even a superlative reviewer may find it difficult to write interestingly about mediocre novels. In consequence, reviewers all too often rush to the extremes of proclaiming