’68 will do as shorthand. Most of ’68, as it were, didn’t happen in 1968. It was, at most, the centrepoint of a long accumulation of radical protest. It began with duffle-coated marches against nuclear war, a well-mannered and respectful movement whose spirit persisted to the end of the decade. (In October 1968, a rally
Often dubbed the Mona Lisa of the ancient world, the bust of the Egyptian queen Nefertiti is as immediately recognisable as the pyramids and the Rosetta Stone. Yet almost everything about this sculpture is mysterious at best, or bitterly controversial at worst, from the context of its creation to questions surrounding its acquisition by the
Peyrot, the chef at Le Vivarois in Paris, had a fascinating theory of how one of his regulars, the otherwise taciturn psychoanalyst Jacques Lacan, communicated. ‘He was convinced that the farts and burps which Lacan, as a free man, did not restrain in public, were meant to signal to Peyrot the two syllables of his
Sweet lovers, Shakespeare reminds us, love the spring. How can they not? All that wonderfully wanton colour, all that sensual fragrancy, all those budding promises of new life. And, lest we forget, all those yummy insects. For birds adore spring as well. Every year, regular as clockwork, hundreds of millions of our feathered friends take
In Havana, one week before President Obama unthawed half a century of cold relations with Cuba, I talked to the last fisherman to have known Ernest Hemingway. Oswald Carnero came from Cojimar — where the writer kept his boat, the Pilar — and was one of the villagers to whom Hemingway dedicated his Nobel Prize
Over the years I’ve been in touch with a number of middle-aged professionals who, despite the success they’ve found in their chosen careers, have asked themselves whether perhaps they should have become pilots instead. Among these correspondents (the fly-curious, we might call them), architects make up the largest contingent. It’s hard to know why this
Mona — single, childless, pushing 60 — sells wooden dolls made by a carpenter friend, which she delicately costumes from odds and ends of fabric sourced in charity shops. But her business has an odd spin-off: mothers who’ve suffered past stillbirths can come and ‘order’ a lump of carved wood made to the specified birthweight
Census is a curious, clever novel. It depicts a dystopia with a father and his Down’s syndrome son journeying from town A to town Z taking a census. The father, the narrator, knows he is dying. As a retired doctor he can interpret the fatal signs of his disease. His is a bizarre family; his
There are two sorts of people: those who can’t wait to grow up, and those who wish they never had to. It’s fair to say that women figure predominantly in the first group and men in the second, hence the preponderance of male fans of science fiction and fantasy — and dewy-eyed reminiscence about children’s
In 1999, Patrick Hemingway published True at First Light, a new novel by his father Ernest. In his role as literary executor of the late writer’s estate, Patrick edited an unfinished manuscript of some 200,000 words down to a more marketable ‘fictional memoir’ of less than half that length. The book hit the bestseller lists
In 2008, the Scottish poet Kathleen Jamie characterised the typical exponent of modern nature writing as ‘the lone enraptured male’. This was a more solemn, grown-up Basil Fotherington-Thomas, the effete schoolboy of the Molesworth books who prances about in puerile pantheistic ecstasy, saying, ‘hullo clouds, hullo sky’. Ten years on, there is barely a British
‘Nine hours,’ boasted my friend the curator about his trip to the Prado. Nine! Two hours is my upper limit in a gallery. After that I’m gasping for the tea room and gift shop. Knowing my lack of stamina, my own trip to the Prado was focused: just Velázquez and Goya. Then lunch. And a
