Pendulum, eh? Well, there’s certainly something swing- ing back and forth here. Pendulum, eh? Well, there’s certainly something swing- ing back and forth here. Two years ago, lest we forget, Cultural Amnesia came out — all 900-odd pages of it. Now here’s Clive with another fat wedge of ‘essays’, some of which are essays, and
I normally make it my policy when writing book reviews never to read anyone else’s. I normally make it my policy when writing book reviews never to read anyone else’s. It clogs up your mind with someone else’s prejudices and wrong opinions,where- as in fact you are being paid to bang on about your own.
‘Some places are drenched with sorrow,’ a character in The Winter Vault tells his son, and the son reflects that some people are like that too. ‘Some places are drenched with sorrow,’ a character in The Winter Vault tells his son, and the son reflects that some people are like that too. This book is
‘Pauline was as beautiful as it was possible to be’, the Austrian statesman Metternich once observed. ‘Pauline was as beautiful as it was possible to be’, the Austrian statesman Metternich once observed. ‘She was in love with herself alone, and her sole occupation was pleasure’. Metternich was not quite fair. Pauline, as sculpted in Canova’s
Here’s a tricky question for your next pub quiz. What do the following people have in common? Here’s a tricky question for your next pub quiz. What do the following people have in common? The protagonist of Christopher Nolan’s film Memento, Scott Bakula’s character in Star Trek: Enterprise and Steve Wozniak, one of the co-founders
Marx is back in fashion. For decades Marxists have been an endangered species, but now the collapse of capitalism has caused a revival in their stock and Das Kapital tops the German bestseller lists. Tristram Hunt’s biography of Karl Marx’s shadowy collaborator Friedrich Engels could hardly be more timely. ‘Marx was a genius,’ declared Engels,
Eleven years after Jean Rhys’s death in 1979, Carole Angier published a monumental biography, a model of its kind, with 70 pages of notes and seven of bibliography. Lilian Pizzichini’s ‘portrait’ of Rhys is a book of a wholly different kind. The best way to describe it is that it bears the same relationship to
Kindly publishers sometimes seek to soften the blow of rejection by offering reasons for saying ‘no thanks’. Kindly publishers sometimes seek to soften the blow of rejection by offering reasons for saying ‘no thanks’. One, for example, turned down a novel of mine because she ‘felt the lack of any character with whom the reader
