Charles Richter, born in 1900, was, in the words of his biographer, ‘a nerd among nerds: regarded as peculiar and intensely private even by scientists’ standards. And we’re talking about people who put red-and-white bumper stickers on their cars that read, “If this sticker is blue, you’re driving too fast”.’ The only seismologist most of
Henrik Ibsen’s fictional world of marital breakdown and sexual hypocrisy in the fjords and farmsteads of Norway spread an unfamiliar polar chill at the end of the 19th century. His plays introduced Norwegian literature to a British audience and electrified such writers as Edmund Gosse and G. B. Shaw. His influence can also be felt
The Paris Review came into being in 1953, when a group of young Americans living in Paris, among them George Plimpton and William Styron, decided to start a literary magazine. Their intention was to get away from the academic factionalism that then prevailed in literary journals, and simply publish good writing, whether fiction, poetry or
Natasha Cooper’s heroine, Trish Maguire, is a barrister who subverts the stereotypes, an outsider whose troubled background sometimes gives her more in common with clients than colleagues. At the start of A Greater Evil (Simon & Schuster, £17.99), the latest novel in the series, Trish’s private life is on a relatively even keel. At work,
The artist Fothergill; the scene an Essex landscape.Tall trees framing the fields, a church beyond.And riding towards the painter on a sturdy cobA country figure followed by vestigial shapes. The foreground grass growing from half-brushed strokes.The trees massing to summer leaf, as yet part-formed.Those nearly people following the rider and his horse,These ghostly labourers on
If you are English and love the poetry of Robert Lowell, Anne Sexton, Zbigniew Herbert or Czeslaw Milosz, you probably have Al Alvarez to thank, directly or indirectly. The unostentatiously brilliant, cosmopolitan reviews Alvarez contributed to the Observer over a decade from the mid- 1950s, together with his taste-changing 1962 anthology The New Poetry and
