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
This is one of the most devastating but, at the same time, restrained and balanced indictments, among the many that have appeared, of the conduct of the Roman Catholic Church in the face of the Holocaust. It is restrained in that it avoids extreme positions, let alone emotive language, even disagreeing with the expression ‘Hitler’s
In 1845 Newman was received into the Roman Catholic Church. More than a century and a half later, the fires of controversy ignited by the Oxford Movement which he led, as an Anglican priest, until his reception, seem to have died down. Newman himself is widely regarded as a great Christian apologist and a sympathetic
‘What-ho,’ says an Excess sub-editor appreciatively as Simon Balcairn files his sensational account of Margot Metroland’s party for the American revivalist Mrs Melrose Ape in Vile Bodies by Sir Cecil Beaton’s pin-sticking prep-school contemporary, Evelyn Waugh (variously described in these diaries as ‘my old arch enemy’ and ‘that swine’). Another ‘sub’ remarks that Lord Balcairn’s
It all comes out of War and Peace? Well, Tolstoy makes a good starting-point anyway for such an adroit historian of place and people as Dr Figes. In an early chapter Natasha, the young Countess Rostov, is visiting ‘Uncle’, an old family friend and retired army officer who has gone native and lives in a
Despite its provocative title, this is not a salacious book. Any reader hoping for disclosures about Woolf’s lesbian love affairs will be disappointed. But do we really need another book on Virginia Woolf when there are already two excellent biographies, by Quentin Bell and Hermione Lee, and numerous essays – such as Helen Dunmore’s perceptive
‘Yes,’ writes the eponymous narrator of this exceptionally clever, vivacious account of sibling rivalry, ‘there are many wax dolls on the shelves of my memory and I make sure I still twist the pins now and again, in passing.’ The dolls most vindictively pierced are those representing her twin sister and her mother. There are
I remember the day, the time, the place. Discussing the world’s news with the village butcher, I brought up the perjury trial, and he said, ‘Who?’ Silent among the sausages in Greens Norton, I looked at him with a wild surmise. Remember this: in July 2001, it was still possible to meet an Englishman who
After his father died Blake Morrison wrote an emotive and bravely candid book about him, from which Morrison pŒre emerges as an ebulliently attractive man, but also as a domineering father and an unfaithful husband. Morrison showed the manuscript to his mother. She made no objections, and only one request – that he omit the
There is doubtless some passing pleasure to be had in making it into the Royal Enclosure or, failing that, the ‘Sunday Times Rich List’. But for those in political and media circles the last opportunity has passed for gaining immortality in the pages of the Pepys of our times now that the final volume of
It was 1971, at the Dudley Hotel, Hove, late at night during a Tory conference, and Sir (as he then wasn’t) Max Hastings and I were discussing editorship. He was then working for the BBC. Specifically, we were talking about the editorship of the New Statesman. There was discontent there about the tenure of R.
Professor Linda Colley is a distinguished historian. In her Britons, published in 1992, she proved that good, imaginative professional history could attract a wide public. Captives is a more complex book that demands close reading, as she unravels the ambiguities that challenge customary certainties of imperial history. The empire celebrated at Queen Victoria’s Diamond Jubilee
Prominent in any contemporary dictionary of received opinion should be the assumption that all terrorism has ‘root causes’ that render violence ‘understandable’ because the aggrieved have ‘no alternative’. It comes with all the shock and invigoration of a cold bath to find someone arguing against this contemporary shibboleth. Alan Dershowitz believes that the assumption of