As Hamlet said, ‘Look here upon this picture and on this.’ Early this year Garry O’Connor produced a book about Paul Scofield. The actor’s personal life being famously uneventful, there is little there for lovers of theatre gossip. It is, despite a few pretentious notions about Scofield’s psyche, an admirably thoughtful book on the player’s
‘I don’t know if it is a sign of old age,’ wrote P. G. Wodehouse in the mid-1950s, ‘but I find I hate Christmas more every year.’ Another marked change that the Master noticed in ‘the senile Wodehouse’ was that he no longer had the party spirit and preferred to stay at home with a
I first met Tim Slessor when we were contemporary undergraduates at Cambridge, half a century ago. Etched into my memory are Slessor’s pride in and sadness about his naval officer dad, whom he had adored, and whom he had lost as an eight-year-old. Becoming a successful TV producer and journalist, Slessor worked in the United
It is hard to overpraise this admirable – indeed one would have thought impossible – account of the history of England, Scotland and Ireland from the accession of Charles I to the restoration of his son Charles II. The great masters of English 17th-century historiography, S. R. Gardiner and Sir Charles Firth, between them took
Much is made by writers these days of the need for ‘getting distance’, for putting frontiers, oceans, whole continents between themselves and the sources of their inspiration. A spell on a Mediterranean island, a prolonged residence in some foreign capital or a creative writing fellowship at an American university are all supposed to do the
I cannot think of many less festive offerings than Richard Avedon Portraits (Abrams, £24.95), but it has to be admitted that his merciless exposure of such grotesques as a blood-and-guts-spattered rattlesnake-skinner and a Duncan Goodhew-lookalike beekeeper, whose naked body is swarming with the six-legged tools of his trade, makes one sit up and take note.
The theme of Henry James’s The Aspern Papers is well known: an unscrupulous biographer seeks the unpublished papers of his subject, a long-dead poet, through the cultivation of the poet’s former mistress, a forgotten old lady living with her spinster niece in Venice. He insinuates himself into the household, leading the niece to hope for
THE WEST AND THE RESTby Roger ScrutonContinuum, £12.99, pp. 196, ISBN 0826464963 Two reincarnations of the Old Oligarch – alike in deploring The Way We Live Now, different in emphasis and style – jostle for the moral high ground. Gore Vidal’s diagnosis of global schism centres on the US and its (mal)administration. Like a liberal,
Byron Rogers for years wrote the ‘Village Voice’ column in the Daily Telegraph, and this collection of articles on his life over the past 22 years in an English village is published because of the continued weekly requests of his readers. Blakesley is not a picture-book village. Rogers found ‘a lost triangle of land where
MAN OF THE CENTURY: WINSTON CHURCHILL AND HIS LEGENDby John Ramsden HarperCollins, £25, pp. 652, ISBN 002570343 In January 1965 John Lukacs came from France with his son to attend Churchill’s state funeral. He came, he writes in the contemporary account of his visit, reprinted in this book, in order to say ‘farewell to the
