12 May 2007

In January 1923 Aldous Huxley signed a contract with Chatto & Windus, which would guarantee him a regular income for three years. He would be paid £500 per annum and in return agreed to ‘supply the publishers with two new works of fiction a year, one of them to be a full-length novel’—an onerous undertaking.

The desire to wage war as if it were keyhole surgery is, after a certain fashion, a laudable one. It indicates that a government can no longer afford to treat its own population, if not that of the enemy, as mere cannon fodder. Each soldier killed is ten, a hundred, votes lost. But the new-found

John Walsh’s new novel is a paradoxically enjoyable account of the decline and fall of an Exeter College student of theology who becomes for a short time a performer in vaudeville and then an evangelist of Longford innocence and charity who believes he can perceive potential good in even the most depraved young women. Walsh

Giuseppe Garibaldi must be among the most commemorated secular figures in history. Italian towns invariably have a square or a street named after him, and many contain statues, stations and other sites as well. In Genoa Garibaldi is represented not only by a vast equestrian bronze in front of the Opera but also, in diverse

Winston Churchill once famously declared, ‘this pudding has no theme’. Michael Alexander’s book, subtitled ‘The Middle Ages in Modern England’ — a period which in his view stretches from well before the Industrial Revolution virtually to contemporary culture — has far too many. His contention is that medievalism sprang from two main impulses: the rise

In Britain public money is being allocated to identify and promote ‘moderate’ Islam, in the hope of discouraging the ‘extremists’ and ‘fundamentalists’ whose supposed misunderstanding of the Faith is, in fact, the version most practised in those societies where it is the majority religion. The result is not likely to be much more than the

One of the most interesting conversations I have ever had took place in a Carmarthen pub. There were three of us, the others a builder and a policeman. At one point the policeman told us the weight of a severed human head: it was 14 pounds, and he should know, he went on, having had

One day in 1915, when Stalin was in exile in Siberia, he was eating dinner with a few other revolutionaries. Everyone had to say what his greatest pleasure was. Some said women, others — can this be true? — ‘earnestly replied that it was the progress of dialectical materialism towards the workers’ paradise’. Stalin, known

John Preston’s fourth novel is a quiet dramatisation of the famous Sutton Hoo dig of 1939. Known as ‘the British Tutankhamun’, the excavation in Suffolk uncovered several Anglo-Saxon cemeteries, including one magnificent royal ship burial, and was thrown into relief in September that year by the outbreak of the second world war. The author exploits

There are probably better ways to welcome tourists to your country than with the words, ‘Go home England. Bastards.’ To their credit, Henry Hemming and his travelling companion Al, both suspected by the Slovak border guards of being Islamic extremists and denied entry, do not go home. With a retaliatory cry of, ‘Go home Slovakia.