A parable of a lost talent
More from Bookstranslated by Krishna Winston The advantage of Crabwalk is that it is only a third as long as G
Culture
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Still on his feet in the twelfth round
More from BooksNorman Mailer was 80 years old on 31 January 2003, so let us salute the last of all the knights. He was very famous very quickly, with The Naked and the Dead, and for nearly six decades he has poured forth rich and provocative novels, biographies, non-fiction bouts of reportage – it’s hard to know
Tormented Prince Charming
More from BooksThe story begins at the ch
What voice can do
More from BooksThere was recently, in the serious and excellent Saturday Guardian review, a short piece on Oor Wullie, a small boy whose cartoon adventures divert the readers of the Sunday Post in Scotland. It was written by Ian Jack, distinguished editor of Granta, the influential literary magazine. The article mentioned a number of things that touched
Old Wasp with a weak sting
More from BooksThe pleasure boat captains who ply the coast of the Gulf of Salerno beneath Gore Vidal’s Ravello flat are inconsolable at the thought that the grand old man of American letters is returning to his homeland. The round trip that departs from Capri, and chugs past Positano and Amalfi, finishes with a flourish, as the
The young, red-haired man in the cupboard
More from BooksIf this had a third act it would make a superb film, for the cast list is virtually a re-run of Front Page, with Richard Addis, formerly of the Daily Express, now, magically, of the Canadian Globe and Mail, as the hard-bitten editor Walter Burns, and Stephanie Nolen, a young and eager reporter on the
Tales of the unexpected
More from BooksHow’s this for a good opening? ‘I took out a gun and painted the bullets gold.’ If that were a novel the author would win prizes; but he isn’t a novelist, he’s a nutcase. Let’s call him ‘J’. J was convinced that his wheelchair-bound grandmother was a vampire. He visited her one morning, did her
The fatal Dogberry tendency
More from BooksIn June 1959, A. L. Rowse was sitting on a train in the United States, writing up his journal. He was in the middle of describing an enjoyable encounter with Elizabeth Bowen in New York. Unfortunately, he was interrupted by a young woman asking if the seat beside him was vacant. Rowse indicated with his
22 Mar 2003
Hovering between fact and fantasy
FeaturesI had the strangest experience at the ballet in Dresden: all perfectly pretty onstage, the company well schooled but I couldn’t believe the orchestra. I’ve never heard a ballet orchestra playing with such love for the music – beautiful phrasing, elegantly balanced winds, seamless ensemble, the right notes all the time, in tune…I had to
DIY down the ages
More from BooksOne balmy summer afternoon in my final year at prep school, a group of my fellow-prefects and I gathered under the apple trees on the slope by the croquet lawn where only prefects were allowed, and reminisced about the five years we’d spent together. ‘Do you know, Delingpole,’ said one of them, ‘it was you
The first iron curtain
More from BooksReligious tradition has defined human societies and shaped their habits of mind more strongly than any other factor. It still does, even in communities which have lost their collective belief in God. Indifference to formal creeds may be common to the governing elites of most countries, and in Europe to their electorates as well. Yet
What it’s really like
More from BooksIn a recent column in the Telegraph (8 March) headed ‘How I long for the bombs to start falling,’ Mark Steyn wrote, ‘This interminable non-rush to non-war is like a long, languorous, humid summer, where everyone’s sweaty and cranky and longing for the clouds to break and the cool refreshing rain to fall. Bring it
Not great but definitely good
More from BooksWho was Hannah More? William Cobbett called her an old bishop in petticoats, and she was the subject of a hefty, pious Victorian biography, since when she has been pretty much forgotten. The Edwardian wit Augustine Birrell buried 19 volumes of her collected works in his garden for compost. She owes her disinterment to the
A bit of a smash in Soho
More from BooksThe legendarily catastrophic life of Julian Maclaren-Ross has tempted biographers before. But the task of pursuing him, like the Hound of Heaven, through the sordid backstreets, rented basements and sodden saloon bars of his progress has always proved too much of a challenge. It is an extraordinary story of profligacy and waste which has been
15 Mar 2003
All the fun of the fair
More from BooksIn this chunky book, Joanna Pitman tells us something we already suspect to be true, and she does it beautifully. We are, she says, obsessed with blonde hair. For instance, even though only one in 20 of us is naturally blonde, a third of women lighten their hair. Why? Because blonde hair gets you more
Failing to face up to Fritz
More from BooksThis is the most old-fashioned new book I’ve read for a long time, something that I think Curtis Cate would regard as a compliment. In the Preface he writes, characteristically: Perhaps, indeed, the day is not too distant when, new post-modern norms having imposed themselves through a process of Nietzschean ‘transvaluation’, marriage (even between ‘heterosexuals’)
An oddball miles from anywhere
More from BooksTranslated by Theodosia Robertson Hot and silent, dusty and deserted, the town of Drohobycz seemed, during the few summer days I spent there some years ago, like a place forgotten in time. The houses had a certain faded, Austro-Hungarian glamour, but seemed to have been built for different people, in a different era. The central
Top dog and dogfights
More from BooksThe big idea behind this little book has been touted as ‘Americans are from Mars; Europeans are from Venus’. That’s not quite right. The real thesis is not that Americans are war-hungry and Europeans peace-loving, but that Americans deal with problems, and Europeans avoid them. If anything, Americans are from the planet Can-do, and Europeans
Famous and forgotten faces
More from BooksPaperback edition £29.95 I was much attached to Kaled. She stood at the corner of Fleet Street and Chancery Lane, pert, stylish, mocking the scribes and hacks scurrying round her feet. She was faintly androgenous, a pageboy Tiresias who saw and knew all that passed along that street of shame. She is there today, much
Life on board the pirate ship
More from BooksWhen, in 1825, Harriette Wilson began her Memoirs with ‘I shall not say why and how I became, at the age of 15, the mistress of the Earl of Craven’ an avid readership settled down to revel in what was clearly going to be the work of an old pro. So perhaps it is as
The anatomy of a hero
More from BooksThe first word of Edgar Vincent’s biography of Nelson is not encouraging. It is ‘Jump!’, which is what a sailor is supposed to have shouted to young Horatio as he boarded the boat that was to take him out to his first ship. How does Mr Vincent know that the sailor shouted that? He might
His own worst enemy
More from BooksMy partner wanted to leave the dustwrapper of this book at home. He denied my suggestion that he didn’t want to be seen reading it on the train, claiming it was just his natural care for books. Anyway, he’s been quoting from it ever since, though his choice of quotes and mine are possibly Mars
Where all parties are guilty
More from BooksAlgeria is one of the most pitiful of failed Arab states. For ten years and more, the news has been coming in regularly that people somewhere in that country have been butchered. Qui tue qui? is the question Algerians themselves ask. Here is a civil war, all the more sinister for being undeclared and undefined.
Public relations disaster
More from BooksPrivate lives of the rich or celebrated or infamous kinds in New York often resemble one of those inside-out buildings designed by the architect Richard Rogers in the 1970s; like the Pompidou Centre in Paris, with its exterior escalators and air-conditioning ducts, or the Lloyd’s building in London, where lifts and pipes are part of
Fruits of empire
More from BooksSince Henry Hobhouse wrote his story of five plants that changed the world, Seeds of Change, nearly 20 years ago, the history of commodities has become a fashionable literary genre. So he must rate as one of its pioneers. But unlike many of his imitators, he has not been content to make a whole book
Heavy losses on the cultural front
More from BooksThe start of this book is extremely annoying. On page three there is an inept echo of Gibbon, which has the effect of making us observe that Elon’s style is greatly inferior to the high culture which he sets out to describe. On page four there is a patronising remark about Moses Mendelssohn, the first
Intruder in the dust
More from BooksThe Emma of the title was an intrepid young woman who journeyed to the Sudan in search of exotic adventure. Owing to an ill-chosen marriage she found herself at the centre of a bloody civil war. A few years later she met with an early death. One’s loins need to be well girded before embarking
A square peg
More from BooksIn life, it helps to be called Rothschild. Victor Rothschild discovered this well before he became associated in the public mind with think tanks and spycatchers. Visiting the United States as a 29-year-old Cambridge academic in 1939, he was received by President Roosevelt, as well as by the Secretary of State, the Treasury Secretary and
8 Mar 2003
Own goals galore
More from BooksFOOTBALL CONFIDENTIAL: SCAMS, SCANDALS AND SCREW-UPSby David Conn, Chris Green, Richard McIlroy and Kevin MousleyBBC, £6.99, pp. 256, ISBN 0563488581 By chance I picked up Tom Bower’s Broken Dreams shortly after putting down a paperback reissue of Selina Hastings’ biography of Nancy Mitford. Curiously there was a solitary point of contact. This was the description