Do campus novels reflect the reality of university life? When I was a Fellow of Peterhouse, back in the Eighties, I was asked with tedious regularity whether the experience resembled Porterhouse Blue, Tom Sharpe’s grotesquely overblown satire. But even as I (truthfully) denied it, a few vignettes would slide past my mind’s eye — such
First published in 1857, The Ladies’ Oracle dates from a period when very little literature of real merit was widely considered appropriate reading material for respectable young women, with the consequence that the presses fairly overran with little books designed to fill, rather than enrich, their idle moments — lest the Devil had plans for
In the delightful correspondence (1944) between the late actress Athene Seyler and the actor Stephen Haggard, she inquires of a potential professional performer: Does he aspire to be a power in the theatre, a leader or more vulgarly a star? Then let him be prepared to devote his entire energies, thoughts and interest to his
A special thrill when visiting country houses — as I used to do every week in the unconvincing guise of what Evelyn Waugh described in A Handful of Dust as a ‘very civil young man’ engaged in chronicling family seats — was the occasional opportunity of handling one of Humphry Repton’s original ‘Red Books’. This
This is the most dazzling era in astronomy that human history has ever known, but for all the attention it commands it could be the dullest. It seems almost routine, a swiftly forgotten news item at best, to see images of Mars beamed back from the planet’s surface or to have a comet’s content analysed
This is a novel on a rebarbative theme: incapacity. Not the sort of incapacity one observes in others; rather, incapacity as a curse one suffers on one’s own. Paul Rayment, a man of 60, is flung off his bicycle by an oncoming car and loses part of his right leg. He recovers, more or less,
The personalities of only a handful of artists are known to the public at large. Most live on through their work with, perhaps, a ticket of biographical cliché attached to their reputation — Van Gogh’s ear, Lautrec’s legs, Turner lashed to the mast of a ship in a storm. A few are known through the
