Everyone knows about the Spanish civil war, first battlefield in the struggle that broke out in 1936 and ended nine years later in the ruins of Berlin. It has been immortalised in the work of Hemingway, Orwell and Koestler and commemorated in the heroic deeds of the International Brigades. This is how it is remembered
So she’s been fired! We now know why Valérie Trierweiler, the established companion of the president of the republic is currently in hospital suffering from ‘a severe case of the blues’. That must surely be the clear implication of President Hollande’s refusal at his New Year’s press conference to confirm that Valérie is still First Lady of
In January 1976 New York’s late-lamented National Lampoon produced a bicentennial calendar as a contribution to the general rejoicing. For every day of that year a selection of disastrous news events was commemorated. Presidents of the United States were cut down, marine life was wiped out by oil spills, native Indian women and children were
Photopoetry, by Manuel Alvarez Bravo Manuel Alvarez Bravo, born in 1902, lived to be 100 and worked as a photographer in Mexico for eight decades. He was destined to spend his life as a clerk in a provincial tax office but escaped with the help of Edward Weston and Tina Modotti. This collection, which contains
Will President François Hollande’s decision to send French troops into battle against the insurgent fundamentalists in Mali prove a turning point for his faltering presidency? Not for the first time, a nice little war may serve to rescue a failing political reputation. Hollande’s approval rating jumped from 40 to 44 per cent in the days
Of the making of many books about J. Robert Oppenheimer there is apparently no end. There have been 23 previous lives, seven of them published since 2004. This situation, which would have delighted its subject, is now complicated by the appearance of Inside the Centre: The Life of J. Robert Oppenheimer by Ray Monk, previously
The first round of the French presidential election is a national carnival that seldom disappoints. If Sunday’s vote follows the opinion polls, only President Nicolas Sarkozy with 28 per cent of the vote and his Socialist party opponent François Hollande (a predicted 27 per cent) will remain in the ring. The country will then be
There’s nothing like a crisis to rescue an ailing candidate Yes, he’s back. Just when the French Socialists thought that they were jogging into the Elysée Palace for the first time in 17 years, a discredited president has remounted his favourite war horse, a national security crisis, and with three weeks to go before the
The most remarkable thing about this book is that it should have been published at all. No one could have imagined in 1961 that Private Eye — a blotchy reproduction stapled together on what looked like yellow scrap paper — would still be going 50 years later, selling hundreds of thousand of copies every fortnight
Kisangani, capital of the province of Orientale, Democratic Republic of the Congo, once Zaire, is the setting for A Bend in the River, V.S. Naipaul’s grim masterpiece, published in 1979, about post-colonial reality in central Africa. Naipaul’s plot describes a tribal war that threatens the city. This actually happened 20 years later, when Kisangani became
Africa is the setting for several of V. S. Naipaul’s finest fictional stories — In a Free State, A Bend in the River, Half a Life. Africa is the setting for several of V. S. Naipaul’s finest fictional stories — In a Free State, A Bend in the River, Half a Life. And there is
About 100 years ago two brothers settled in the same small English town and raised 12 children. Charles Greene was a scholar, destined for the Bar, who blundered into schoolmastering while eating his dinners at the Inner Temple and later became headmaster of Berkhamsted School. His younger brother, Edward (known as ‘Eppy’), declined to go
The scandal over Liliane Bettencourt’s L’Oréal fortune is exposing the way French high society operates, says Patrick Marnham. And it is harming President Sarkozy in the polls It all started as a banal family squabble over €17 billion. Liliane Bettencourt is heir to the L’Oréal family fortune and among the 20 wealthiest individuals in the
The French president’s chances of re-election look bleak. But the problem is not his politics, says Patrick Marnham, so much as his embarrassing personal life Gordon Brown is not the only European leader who is regarded as an electoral liability by his own party. With two years to go before France’s next presidential election Nicolas
‘I never knew peaceful times’, Irène Némirovsky once said, ‘I’ve always lived in anxiety and often in danger’. ‘I never knew peaceful times’, Irène Némirovsky once said, ‘I’ve always lived in anxiety and often in danger’. This comment was made during a radio interview in 1934, when the novelist, who would later write Suite Française,
With the opening paragraph of The Dogs and the Wolves (first serialised in France in 1939 and never previously translated) Irène Némirovsky takes us to the heart of her story: the complexities of Jewish life in eastern Europe and France in the first part of the 20th century. The Ukrainian city in which generations of
Patrick Marnham visits Brazil’s annual festival of literature Many years ago a wild-eyed Englishman hacked his way into the Amazon rain forest and disappeared, never to be seen again. Since then the fate of Percy Fawcett, known as ‘the Colonel’, has remained a mystery. Fawcett, a heavily bearded pipe-smoker in a deerstalker hat, was a
‘You might be wondering how I end- ed up in the lace business . . . ’, so the hero of The Kindly Ones, a doctor of law and former SS officer, introduces himself to readers of his fictional memoirs. Dr Max Aue, an ingenious Nazi of Franco-German descent, has survived the war and assumed
Africa: Altered States, Ordinary Miracles, by Richard Dowden Out of Africa always something new in armchair solutions, with the eternal certainty that none will work. Colonialism? Bad. Decolonisation? Disastrous. Neo-colonialism? Wicked. Bob Geldof? Er, no. So, leave the place alone and its bonjour Mugabe, or worse. For well-wishers from the north it has been a
In 1932 a young English art historian recently returned from his travels sent an enthusiastic article to The Spectator about a series of brand new murals he had seen in the courtyards of the Ministry of Education in Mexico City: All these paintings [he wrote] are conscious expositions of Communism. The ultimate object … is