Book Reviews

In August 1915, in his tent at GHQ on the Aegean island of Imbros, General Sir Ian Hamilton, commander-in-chief of the Gallipoli expedition, woke from a dream in which someone was attempting to drown him in the Hellespont. ‘For hours afterwards,’ he wrote in his diary, ‘I was haunted by the thought that the Dardanelles were fatal: that something sinister was afoot: that we, all of us, were pre-doomed.’ This was not how it had seemed when what had been confidently designated ‘the Constantinople expedition’ set out for the distant and largely unknown Turkish peninsula. As an exhilarated Rupert Brooke had explained to his mother: We are going to be

In his 2004 book The Vanishing Newspaper Philip Meyer predicted that the final hard-copy newspaper will plop through someone’s letterbox in 2043. So who’ll be the first to go? In the latest competition you were invited to imagine that one of the major newspapers has ceased publication and provide a verse lament for it. A couple of you submitted entertaining entries in the style of William McGonagall, poet and tragedian — take a bow, David Silverman and Carolyn Thomas-Coxhead — and my head was also turned by Brian Murdoch, who didn’t seem overly sad about the demise of the Guardian. Over to D.A. Prince, who pockets £30 and her fellow

George Gissing’s The Whirlpool was originally published in 1897. In this shortened version of the foreword to the new Penguin Classics edition, D.J. Taylor argues that its author is ‘the last great Victorian novelist.’ In the early summer of 1896, hard at work on the manuscript of what was to become The Whirlpool, George Gissing struck up a connection with the Jewish novelist Israel Zangwill. A natural solitary, wary of unburdening himself even to the friendliest male associate, Gissing seems to have decided that Zangwill, author of the best-selling Children of the Ghetto, was a suitable repository for his confidence. The fascinated account that Zangwill gave to his friend Montagu Elder of

There are man-haters everywhere, it seems, from children’s telly to high culture. Charges of sexism have been levelled against the creators of the Daddy Pig character in Peppa Pig — daddy is portrayed as a hopeless bumbling idiot while Mummy Pig is the embodiment of good sense — and the literary critic Harold Bloom argues that there is ‘a strong element’ of misandry in Shakespeare (whereas misogyny, he says, is hard to find). The latest challenge invited you to climb aboard the bandwagon and compose an extract from an imaginary novel written from the perspective of a female chauvinist author. In a small but accomplished entry, Sergio Michael Petro, Frank

As Johnny Rogan notes in this new biography of Ray Davies and the Kinks, it is almost 50 years since the term ‘Swinging London’ was first used by a newspaper to describe ‘the most exciting city in the world … all vibrating with youth’. Those smashing times may not have lasted long but the vibrations carry on to the present day. Happily, many of the protagonists are still with us — David Bailey, Mary Quant — and so is Ray Davies CBE, part of the swinging city scene but apart from it too. The Kinks were a superb proto-rock group but they were also, in the words of George Melly,