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
If the popular idea of the men who founded the British Raj as a lot of brutish pig-stickers and greedy nabobs who despised the Indians they exploited and thought their civilisation of no account still persists, this fascinating, well-researched book should be enough to dispel it. At the end of the 18th century, when the
Sarah Waters is a rarity – an up and coming writer in this age of hype who actually deserves the prizes and plaudits bestowed on her, and then some more. She is not a literary dot.com but a true novelist, with strengths that are fundamental to the form rather than traditional, although all kinds of
Charlotte Bach was unusual even in those who stood by her: Don Smith, a gay sado-masochist with whom she was collaborating on a book called Sex, Sin and Evolution; Bob Mellors, a founder of the Gay Liberation Front, who had custody of her papers until he was murdered in his Warsaw flat; a man whose
Fifty-one years ago no one would have written this book, and, if someone had, no one would have read it. The constitution was not changing; and the judges’ role as the third arm of government would have been of interest, if at all, to lawyers only. It was minimal and marginal. Judges still proclaimed themselves
KOBA THE DREAD: LAUGHTER AND TWENTY MILLIONby Martin AmisCape, £16.99, pp. 306, ISBN 0224063030 Eric Hobsbawm is arguably our greatest living historian – not only Britain’s, but the world’s (as the torrential translation of his oeuvre tends to confirm). The global reach of his knowledge and culture, his formidable linguistic armoury, his love of jazz
Of all my heroes whom I have been fortunate enough to encounter in the flesh, none was more friendly and relaxed than Peter Cook. Unlike some previously worshipped from afar, he was completely lacking in self-importance and had an almost puppyish desire to amuse – as well as a generous readiness to be amused. As
From the time I was a little girl, long before I knew I wanted to be a writer, I had three ambitions which I felt that I must achieve in order fully to realise my potential as an adult. And they were: to take drugs, to sleep with Jews and to be notorious. In short,
The more one reads about polar exploration in previous centuries, the more one comes to the conclusion that men were different in times gone by, stronger, wilder, possessed of an almost perverse capacity to withstand cold and hunger. They travelled without the benefit of radios, thermal underwear or light-weight sledges; when things went wrong no
It is two years since Panorama was shunted out of peak time on BBC1 into exile late on Sunday night. There were one or two protests, but the BBC reassured its critics that ‘we will strengthen the News’. Two years on, the Six o’Clock News has the agenda of a second-rate tabloid newspaper and the
The voices we rarely hear in literature are those of the children of the men and women who have shaped modern Africa. The parents leave behind fulsome, instructive, self-justifying autobiographies as a matter of routine, but little is ever known of the plight of their offspring. Conditioned by the knock-on effects of their parents’ actions
The English have loved ancient trees for centuries, have celebrated them in story and poetry, have given them names, sung songs and danced dances in their honour, have invested them with railings, plaques and chains. Artists and photographers have tried to portray special trees, along with special horses, people and pigs: notably Strutt in 1822
You’ll have noticed them on the roads, minibuses, full of schoolgirls, being driven by harassed teachers to some country location where the girls will be put through end-of-term, healthy outdoor activities, protesting all the way. Among any group of eight 13-year-olds there’ll be a victim, a loner, a leader, and so on – it’s been
A young writer produced a brilliant novel that attacked religious fundamentalism, rubbished the press, found politics corrupt and the members of the British upper class shallow and boring. The date was 1930 when the 27-year-old Evelyn Waugh published Vile Bodies. Sixteen years later Kingsley Amis read Brideshead Revisited at St John’s College, Oxford and sent
‘Everything of value in our spiritual and cultural life springs from our soil.’ Thus spake Vaughan Williams; and Peter Ackroyd has undertaken a detailed proof of that proposition in this exploration of the origins of the English imagination. He has constructed a vast genealogical table, decorated with tiny marginalia, to identify the begetters of our
According to Ward McAllister, the fabled gate-keeper of New York high society in the 1890s, to be counted among the privileged few you needed poise, an aptitude for polite conversation, a polished and deferential manner, an infinite capacity of good humour, and the ability to entertain and be entertained. And also, by the by, pots
Roy Kerridge is conservative in attitude, he loves the works of Kipling and he enjoys the company of those whom he describes as of the African diaspora but would rather not call blacks. His affection for that race may have originated with his West African stepfather; he has certainly spent much of his time in
Ken Nott is the most annoying man in England. It’s his job (he’s a shock jock, a prime-time talk-radio DJ), and also his hobby (he’s unfaithful to his girlfriend, has bedded his best mate’s wife, and, worst of all, likes to take his controversial opinions into the pub with him). And then, just when you
Not for nothing has Jeffrey Eugenides, on the strength of just one novel published seven years ago, been cropping up again and again in magazine lists of the top 10 or 25 young novelists in America. He has spent all these years in seclusion in Berlin cooking up a very cunning solution to the notorious
This vast work has the distinction of being both unreadable and unputdownable. It consists of nearly half a million words, a mountain of unsifted facts – who was whose cousin and what otherwise irrelevant uncle died in South Africa – which make you clutch your brow, tempt you to skip and thereby to run the