20th century

Charlotte Moore’s family have lived at Hancox on the Sussex Weald for well over a century. Charlotte Moore’s family have lived at Hancox on the Sussex Weald for well over a century. Hancox is a large, rambling house, and the Moores are a family who throw nothing away. Charlotte Moore still cooks on a 1934 Aga. Every drawer and every cupboard bulges with letters, diaries, receipts, even cheque book stubs. Moore has pieced together this chaotic archive to construct the history of her family. It is a complex but riveting story. Hancox was bought in the 1891 by a 23-year old spinster named Milicent Ludlow. Both her parents had died,

Why haven’t we heard of Phillis Bottome? In her 60-year career she published 33 novels, several of them bestsellers, short stories, essays, biographies and memoirs. Why haven’t we heard of Phyllis Bottome? In her 60-year career she published 33 novels, several of them bestsellers, short stories, essays, biographies and memoirs. She lectured widely in Britain and America. She was translated into nine languages. Her 1937 novel The Mortal Storm predicted the horrific consequences of Fascism. MGM made a film of it, starring James Stewart — the studio’s first openly anti-Nazi film. It premiered in America in 1940, just as Hitler’s troops entered Paris, and was arguably influential in persuading the

Patrick Shaw-Stewart was the cleverest and the most ambitious of the gilded gang of young men who swam in the wake of the not-so-young but perennially youthful Raymond Asquith. Julian Gren- fell, Duff Cooper, Charles Lister, Edward Horner: they were as one in their conviction that the British were superior to other races, that public schoolboys were superior to other Britons, that Etonians were superior to other public schoolboys, and that their own precious clique was superior to other Etonians. Apart from that, the only obligatory common factor was that one should love, or at least profess to love, Lady Diana Manners. The corrupt coterie, as they proudly styled themselves,

It has taken more than half a century, but at last the Anglophone world has woken up to the fact that 20th-century communist history makes a superb backdrop for fiction. So extreme and dramatic were the Russian revolution, the arrests and the purges, Hitler’s invasion of the Soviet Union and the imposition of Stalinism on the eastern half of Europe that all you have to do is write down what really happened and it sounds like fiction anyway. English historians such as Catherine Merridale (Night of Stone) and Simon Sebag-Montefiore (The Court of the Red Tsar) have known this for a while now. Now English novelists, from Martin Amis to

Norman Stone forsook the chair of modern history at Oxford university for Ankara after realising that the ‘conversation at high tables would generally have made the exchanges in the bus- stop in the rain outside seem exhilarating’. Norman Stone forsook the chair of modern history at Oxford university for Ankara after realising that the ‘conversation at high tables would generally have made the exchanges in the bus- stop in the rain outside seem exhilarating’. Dur- ing an earlier incarnation at Cambridge, Stone taught a galaxy of historians. His protégés include David Blackbourn, Harald James and Richard Overy, followed by Niall Ferguson and Andrew Roberts, all bar two now working at

When she was a little girl, playing in the countryside around her missionary parents’ home in China, Pearl Buck used to come across the scattered body parts of babies abandoned for animals to devour. She would bury them, and tell no one. When she was a little girl, playing in the countryside around her missionary parents’ home in China, Pearl Buck used to come across the scattered body parts of babies abandoned for animals to devour. She would bury them, and tell no one. Born in 1892, she buried painful experiences all her life, telling no one, apparently forgetting — but they came out in her stories and novels. Her

This book could have been a classic. It starts as an account of the author’s family, no better, no worse than many such; but then, amongst the grandparents and the uncles, one figure starts to shoulder his way through the rout of characters, slowly at first, but then, perhaps two thirds of the way through, you realise he is dominating everything. Macdonald Hastings, the author’s father, is one of the great comic, and tragic, figures of our time. Without him, the book would have been Henry IV, Parts I and II without Falstaff, a chronicle of events and people doing extraordinary things. With him, the writing quickens, the perception deepens,

The car manufacturer Henry Ford dominates this remarkable book, managing, like Falstaff, to be its tragic hero, villain, and comic relief all at the same time. A gaunt, pacing figure, he conducted interviews while standing, believed in the values of small Main Street America (though his methods of industrial mass production destroyed these), and in pacifism, fitting out a ship to sail to Europe in an attempt to stop the Great War (though later he made billions out of armaments, and had machine-guns mounted on his factories while his paid thugs shot down hunger-marchers). He believed in many things, in the soy bean, wholemeal bread and unpolished rice; he hated

Do we need another huge life of Arthur Koestler? He wrote a great deal about himself, including three autobiographical works: Spanish Testament (1937), describing his experience as a death-row prisoner of General Franco, Arrow in the Blue (1952) and The Invisible Writing (1954). He also contributed to The God that Failed, the fascinating collection of testimonies by former Communists which Dick Crossman edited in 1949. He and his last wife wrote an unfinished joint memoir, published a year after their deaths as Stranger on the Square (1984). An ex-wife, Mamaine, contributed a volume, Living with Koestler (1985). Then a quarter-century after his death came a large-scale 640-page biography entitled Arthur

For those unfamiliar with Martin Amis’s short story, ‘What Happened to Me on My Holiday’, written for The New Yorker in 1997, it was a purist exercise in autobiographical fiction; not even the names were changed. For those unfamiliar with Martin Amis’s short story, ‘What Happened to Me on My Holiday’, written for The New Yorker in 1997, it was a purist exercise in autobiographical fiction; not even the names were changed. The Pregnant Widow is a far more complex, troubling piece of work. Amis did indeed spend much of the summer after his second year at Oxford in a castle near the Mediterranean, though not in Tuscany; that would

Nobody who reads Nigel Farndale’s The Blasphemer is likely to complain about being short-changed. Nobody who reads Nigel Farndale’s The Blasphemer is likely to complain about being short-changed. It tackles five generations of the same family, three wars, Mahler’s ninth symphony and contemporary Islamic terrorism. Along the way, it ponders the nature of male courage, the theological implications of Darwinism and, rather more surprisingly, the existence of angels. As a journalist himself, Farndale also seems to have noted the career path of Sebastian Faulks — that great exemplar for all British journos dreaming of literary glory. Like Birdsong, The Blasphemer depicts a soldier’s affair with an older French woman who

This handsome and encouraging book is perhaps unfortunate in its title. The suggestion is that the author has been forced to rummage among the wreckage that is England in order to find something, anything, that is still intact. Its origins and intentions are quite the opposite. As Richard Ingrams explains in his short introduction, when he was editor of Private Eye he published a regular feature called ‘Nooks and Corners of the New Barbarism’, written by John Betjeman — a suitable kind of investigation for a satirical magazine. When, in 1992, he founded The Oldie, a feature called ‘Unwrecked England’ written by this author, Betjeman’s daughter, was precisely intended to