Like Richard Hannay, I had to run to catch the early morning train from London to Edinburgh. Thankfully, unlike Hannay, I wasn’t wanted for murder — I’d merely overslept again. As the train pulled out of King’s Cross, I fished out my old Penguin edition of The Thirty-Nine Steps, Hannay’s first — and most famous
First things first: this is one of the heaviest books I have ever read. Eventually I finished with it resting uncomfortably on my knees, as I perched on the edge of my bed. It reminded me of when I met Jennifer Worth (of Call the Midwife fame) and she showed me her hardback copy of
When the novelist David Vann was 13, his father — a difficult, unhappy dreamer in his thirties, constantly in dread, as Vann puts it, ‘of becoming something other than what he had always imagined himself to be’, and who had failed first as a dentist and then as a commercial fisherman in Alaska — blew
Should you wish to have a good copy of the 1916 edition of Wisden, cricket’s annual bible, you should be prepared to part with at least £5,000 and, quite possibly, much more than that. This reflects its rarity — the Great War ensured that the almanac had a limited print run — but also the
In a recent book review, the historian Norman Stone wrote: ‘Maybe the second world war can now be left to novelists.’ Perhaps he was thinking of Allan Massie’s 1989 masterpiece A Question of Loyalties, an utterly convincing portrayal of a man making all the wrong choices for the noblest reasons in Vichy France. It’s such
The last time I cried was September 1989. That was my first week at public school. The reason I cried was that my allocated room-mate, a malevolent pixie named Toby Cox who later became one of my closest friends, had informed me that he ‘knew a lot of people’ at Harrow and he was going
weeding alongside beans in the same rush as them 6 a.m. scrabbling at the earth beans synchronised in rows soft fanatical irresponsible beans behind my back breaking out of their mass grave at first, just a rolled up flag then a bayonet a pair of gloved hands then a shocked corpse hurrying up in prayer
The front cover of this book describes the Hermitage as ‘the Greatest Museum in the World’. That sobriquet must go to the Louvre. The Hermitage is perhaps the second greatest, one which its current director Mikhail Piotrovsky calls an ‘encyclopaedic’ museum, housing ‘the culture of humanity, which is represented in all its variety…’ Not quite.
Up the stairs with flying feet, You would burst upon us, cheering Wellington’s funereal street. Fresh as paint, though you’d been ’railing Up from Scotland all the night, Or had just returned from scaling Some appalling Dolomite… Pundit, publicist and jurist: Statistician and divine; Mystic, mountaineer and purist In the high financial line; Prince of
