The Natural History of Unicorns, by Chris Lavers ‘A long time ago, when the earth was green,/ There were more kinds of animals than you’ve ever seen./ They’d run around free while the earth was being born,/ But the loveliest of all was the unicorn.’ So Shel Silverstein’s saccharine ditty informed generations of kiddies. As
From Bonbon to Cha-cha, edited by Andrew Delahunty On the spine of From Bonbon to Cha-cha shines the silhouette, in gold leaf, of a dancing couple, which makes the volume look a little vulgar on the shelf. This is no mistake. The Strictly Come Dancing triumph of celebrity over expertise is to be applied to
Reborn: Susan Sontag, Early Diaries, 1947-1964, edited by David Rieff Swimming in a Sea of Death: A Son’s Memoir, by David Rieff Susan Sontag, who died in 2004, was one of the late- 20th century’s famous public intellectuals. A stupendously well-read novelist, essayist and critic, strikingly good looking with her white badger-lock, she was engagé,
Stephen Chambers, by Andrew Lambirth Of the same 1980s generation as Peter Doig and the Young British Artists (Damien Hirst, Tracey Emin et al), Stephen Chambers has always pursued a far more maverick, and profoundly more interesting, path. Starting out as a well-regarded, heavy-duty abstract painter while still a student at St Martin’s School of
At least one very startling claim emerges in this study: according to her own account, Wallis, Duchess of Windsor, never consummated her first two marriages. Indeed, she never allowed any man (before the Duke of Windsor, presumably) to touch her ‘below the Mason-Dixon line’. If this is true, it makes a nonsense of the Abdication,
Evelyn Waugh told Nancy Mitford he was ‘surprised to find’ that Proust ‘was a mental defective. He has absolutely no sense of time.’ Evelyn Waugh told Nancy Mitford he was ‘surprised to find’ that Proust ‘was a mental defective. He has absolutely no sense of time.’ (Joke, given the novel’s title?) ‘He can’t remember anyone’s
