According to Ward McAllister, the fabled gate-keeper of New York high society in the 1890s, to be counted among the privileged few you needed poise, an aptitude for polite conversation, a polished and deferential manner, an infinite capacity of good humour, and the ability to entertain and be entertained. And also, by the by, pots
Roy Kerridge is conservative in attitude, he loves the works of Kipling and he enjoys the company of those whom he describes as of the African diaspora but would rather not call blacks. His affection for that race may have originated with his West African stepfather; he has certainly spent much of his time in
Ken Nott is the most annoying man in England. It’s his job (he’s a shock jock, a prime-time talk-radio DJ), and also his hobby (he’s unfaithful to his girlfriend, has bedded his best mate’s wife, and, worst of all, likes to take his controversial opinions into the pub with him). And then, just when you
Not for nothing has Jeffrey Eugenides, on the strength of just one novel published seven years ago, been cropping up again and again in magazine lists of the top 10 or 25 young novelists in America. He has spent all these years in seclusion in Berlin cooking up a very cunning solution to the notorious
This vast work has the distinction of being both unreadable and unputdownable. It consists of nearly half a million words, a mountain of unsifted facts – who was whose cousin and what otherwise irrelevant uncle died in South Africa – which make you clutch your brow, tempt you to skip and thereby to run the
Even Churchill might have been discouraged had he, instead of Lord Portland, been prime minister and surveying the scene in 1807. Bonaparte had crushed the Prussians, knocked out the Austrians, and forced Russia to sue for peace. He had organised an almost total blockade of the continent against British trade, was redrawing the map of
In 1743, 393 livings within the gift of the Archbishop of York were occupied by clergymen who did not live within that diocese and another 335 incumbents held plural livings. One bishop of Winchester distributed 30 incumbencies among his family. The Church of England was corrupt and slumbered. The facts of John Wesley’s life and
‘Bold, glamorous, sexy, unrepentant,’ promises the jacket. The heroines of Fay Weldon’s short stories ‘offer a quite unique view of the world as they face their trials without fear or trepidation’. It’s not the done thing to start a review by quoting the blurb, but this one unwittingly helps to establish why these stories ought
£14.99 for individual volumes The single problem facing any translator of Proust is that there is, really, no equivalent of his style in English. He is at once classical and idiosyncratic; the rhythms and proportions of classical French style are followed faithfully in every sentence, and over the whole book. The end result looks so
