Once upon a time, there was an art scholar called John. He spent his days admiring marble statues, his nights in praying that he might be allowed a real-life statue as his wife. And in due course, he met a beautiful girl. She was a bit younger than him, but that was OK, because it
This short memoir deserves a longer review than this, encompassing, as it does, migration, intellectual excellence, a successful professional life, two marriages, children and an honesty and contentment not usually found in close proximity. Miriam Gross (née May), with a Jewish legal background (both her parents, who left Nazi Germany in 1933, were lawyers), was
Intriguing, the oaten seethe of thoroughbred horses in single stalls across a twilit cabin. Intimate, under the engines’ gale, a stamped hoof, a loose-lip sigh, like dawn sounds at track work. Pilots wearing the bat wings of intercontinental night cargo come out singly, to chat with or warn the company vet at his manifests: four
Robert Merivel made his first appearance in 1989, in Restoration, Rose Tremain’s popular and acclaimed Carolingian novel. The passage of time has left the Everyman doctor sadder and theoretically wiser, but still in thrall to his master, Charles II, still priapic, still governed by ‘uncontainable appetites’. He sits in his chilly library at Bidnold, his
When presented with a title of this kind, many readers think they know what to expect: drugged-up child soldiers, wince-inducing brutality, ranting demagogues, rebels in women’s wigs. This, thankfully, is not that book. It is something more nuanced, elliptical and elegant. Ghana is in a different league from Liberia, Guinea or Sierra Leone, its traumatised
Some novels gaze and report and argue: others just sing. There are some writers who love and respect the visual arts, and want to bring them into prose — Henry James is one. A work freezes into an act of contemplation and description, as in the Bronzino set piece in The Wings of the Dove.
James Wyatt was considered by George III to be ‘the first architect of the kingdom’, but he was also the unluckiest, or perhaps most careless, architect of his day. Fonthill Abbey, the Gothic extravaganza he designed for William Beckford, collapsed after just 25 years. He started building a new palace for the king at Kew,
For good or ill, black West Indian culture is synonymous with youth culture in Britain today. Even among white teenagers, a Jamaican inflection (‘buff’, ‘bruv’) is reckoned hip. The ‘Jamaicanisation’ of British cities quickened after Jamaica’s independence in 1962, when more West Indians migrated to Britain, and London was poised to become the most Jamaican
Twenty years ago Pat Barker won acclaim with Regeneration, her novel about shell-shocked army officers undergoing treatment at the Craiglockhart psychiatric hospital for soldiers during the first world war. Her new novel is a close scrutiny of parallel atrocities of 1914–18. As in Regeneration, some characters are based on real-life figures. Several scenes are set
Sitting down to inspect the final volume of Pierre Coustillas’s monumental trilogy, I decided to start by counting the number of titles by or about George Gissing (1857–1903) that gleamed from the bookshelf hard by. There were 45 of them. Next, I decided to count the number of these items with which Professor Coustillas was
