A man ignores his wedding anniversary and is so sickened by the bowl of flowers his wife has placed by his bed that he drops them and breaks the precious cut glass. Another man is so enraged by seeing his wife close the kitchen door when he comes in from work that he enters a
Memoirs by poets – the Top Ten? It’s an admittedly niche category, and since no one would ask this in normal conversation, or even in a pub quiz, here is the chart. It is based not on official sales or downloads but rather on my own tastes, prejudices and relatively recent reading: Last Night’s Fun,
The only thing I’m uncertain about in this uplifting and beautifully written book is its subtitle. Granted, the landscape Kapka Kassabova invokes does sound like ‘a place that struck you dumb with its majesty’, but we are not in some Shangri-La beyond the reach of mortals. The valley in question is a two-hour drive from
This is not really a history book – and even if it were, its particular charm would be better expressed by the use of an indefinite article in the title. Or perhaps ‘Histories’ might have been more appropriate. Calling things what they are, being precise, is one of the difficulties it so enjoyably demonstrates. Some
When Paul Harding won the 2010 Pulitzer for Tinkers, he was a literary unknown who had all but abandoned hopes of his debut novel getting published until a tiny independent publisher chanced upon it. That story, about George Crosby, a dying clock- repairer who lived in Maine, heralded Harding as a great new voice, championed
A circle of shell-shocked parents in a mansion flat; a dozen toddlers gripping minute, 16th-size violins, the concentration causing them to sway like drunks; the merciless sawing of their tiny bows; and a noise of indescribable horror – ‘Twinkle Twinkle Little Star’ reconceived as the hold music for Hell. These were the group violin lessons
On 7 September 1695, the 25-ship Grand Mughal fleet was returning through the Red Sea after its annual pilgrimage to Mecca when it was attacked by five pirate ships. In the ensuing battle, the pirates’ leader, an Englishman variously known as Henry Avery, Henry Every, the King of Pirates and Long Ben, seized precious jewels
Blake Morrison’s previous memoirsAnd When Did You Last See Your Father? (1993) and Things My Mother Never Told Me (2002) examined his parents with the clear-eyed appraisal that only adulthood brings. In the first, he evoked the vigour of his father, Arthur: his sense of fun when rule-breaking for thrills, and the selfish entitlement which
‘This is a book about how you don’t get over it,’ You Are Not Alone begins. If you’re new to bereavement, looking for a way through the death of a loved one, perhaps this doesn’t scream of optimism. But Cariad Lloyd’s warmth, generosity and gentle pragmatism makes her book one of the most reassuring I
The most important thing to know about ancient Greek mathematics is how little anyone knows about it. The scant evidence available today is tremendously indirect: reconstructions from unrepresentative survivals of fragments of translations of transcriptions of commentaries on compilations of summaries of allusions to refutations of excerpts of documents produced as part of an oral
Around dinner time on 21 November 2000, a nervous 19-year-old man knocked on the door of Maria Joel Dias da Costa’s house, located in the backcountry Amazonian town of Vila Rondon. The unknown man asked to see her husband Dezinho, a union leader, but he was out. She invited the visitor to wait, which he
‘Islands of stone’ would have been a good name for the Orkney archipelago, George Mackay Brown once wrote. The salt Atlantic winds mean that very few trees grow there, so stone provides for the dead – in the burial chamber at Maeshowe, for example – and the living. Less than a century ago, there were
Janet Malcolm’s formulation that a ‘journalist is a kind of confidence man, preying on people’s vanity, ignorance or loneliness, gaining their trust and betraying them without remorse’ comes to mind on page two of the darkly refulgent One Hundred Saturdays. That’s when the author Michael Frank mentions it was his idea to accompany his new
Most people know something about Florence Nightingale’s nursing expedition to Scutari and the Crimea during the Crimean War, and the ‘kingdom of horror’ that she and her nurses found there: unsanitary conditions in the hospitals, a broken-down supply system and British soldiers dropping like flies from disease rather than battle wounds. However, as Terry Tastard
In this engaging memoir, Natasha Lance Rogoff recounts the experience of bringing Sesame Street to Yeltsin’s Russia. A Russo-phile who changed her name from Susan to Natasha as a teenager, Lance Rogoff had been working in Moscow for more than a decade as a reporter and documentary filmmaker when she was approached to be the
One of Joseph O’Connor’s strengths is his magpie-like approach to history: he plunders it for stories that he can rework as fiction. His new novel is based on the exploits of Monsignor Hugh O’Flaherty, a senior official at the Vatican, who, together with colleagues, was responsible for saving the lives of 6,500 Allied soldiers and
Did you know that the elephant was the most written about animal in the Roman world? Pyrrhus of Epirus, of victory fame, was the first to introduce it to Italy as an engine of war when he invaded in 280 BC. Roman soldiers could not decide whether it was an animal or a machine. Eventually
At what point did the ponderous autobiography get edged out by the slinky elliptical memoir? Perhaps around the stage we all realised that, as Stephen Hough puts it, ‘a complete autobiography is usually boring or indecent. It’s the person at the dinner table who just won’t stop talking’. There’s certainly no holding forth (though perhaps
Bret Easton Ellis’s novels were my literary gateway drug when I was young, the stylised bleakness of his debut Less Than Zero a model for my own writerly aspirations. He was a wunderkind. The fact that he’d written his first novel while still a teenager seemed incredible to me as I read and re-read it:
It is Hollywood, in perpetual summer, and Ludwig Bemelmans has driven past some unusually well-groomed eucalyptus trees for a meeting with Elsie de Wolfe, Lady Mendl, interior decorator to the stars. In her salon is a footstool that once belonged to Madame de Pompadour. Lady Mendl’s husband comes into the room and trips over the