It was soon after he finished work on Flora Britannica, his hugely successful book about the wild plants he had spent his life exploring, that Richard Mabey fell ill. It began as a nagging feeling of ‘ill- fittedness’, being out of kilter with his surroundings, and with the loss of all taste and hunger for
When Silvio Berlusconi came to power for the second time in May 2001, in a landslide victory, Italy became unique among Western democracies: no other nation had at its head its richest citizen — the 35th richest man in the world — someone who also enjoyed a monopoly of the country’s private television broadcasting. More
Tucked into the pages of The Tyrant’s Novel, Thomas Keneally has slipped a short letter. Giving his reasons for writing the book and stating that he believes it to be the best he has yet produced, the letter is presumably intended for reviewers and booksellers, and it provides information in many ways crucial for readers,
Who Killed Daniel Pearl?by Bernard-Henri Levy, translated by James X. MitchellDuckworth, £20, pp. 454, ISBN 0715632612 The last time Mariane Pearl saw her husband Daniel, correspondent for the Wall Street Journal, she was preparing a celebratory dinner for their last night in Karachi, and he was setting off for a final interview he believed crucial
When aid workers, battling in distant places to bring some kind of comfort and safety to displaced and miserable people, are asked why they do what they do, many reply that it all comes down to the immediate and very simple satisfaction of giving a hungry person something to eat. ‘There are,’ notes David Snyder,