Here’s a picture book that triumphantly exceeds the narrow bounds of the coffee-table genre. At £50 it’s hardly an impulse buy, but the photographs, covering Michael Grandage’s ten years in charge of the Donmar Warehouse, are sumptuously reproduced. And Grandage’s text is a revelation. It offers a fascinating glimpse into the mentality of a man
Sam Frears is 40. He has an extremely rare condition called familial dysautonomia, or Riley-Day syndrome; the life expectancy for most babies born with this is five years. Mary Mount has made her account of what it is like to be Sam a short impressionistic chronicle, interspersed with comments from his mother, Mary-Kay Wilmers. The
‘I have finished Julius Caesar since I last wrote & I cannot say that it left a very glowing impression on me. It was too much like my own earliest attempts at tragedy to move me in the least.’ So wrote the 16-year-old Edith Wharton in 1878 to Anna Bahlmann, her governess and literary confidante.
Jon McGregor’s debut, If Nobody Speaks of Remarkable Things, was longlisted for the Booker Prize in 2002 and won both the Betty Trask Prize and the Somerset Maugham Award in the following year. So Many Ways to Begin, his second novel, was on the Booker longlist in 2006 and last month his third book, Even
The story of the Pendle witch trials in 1612 is well known, thanks to the publication of The Wonderfull Disoverie of Witches in Lancashire by Thomas Potts, clerk to the Lancashire Assizes in which ten of the 12 accused were condemned to death by hanging. But it is also unknown because Potts’s certainties are not
A group of friends, Palestinian and foreign, go to picnic at a wadi between Jerusalem and Jericho. They are wearing bright, casual summer clothes. On a nearby rock sits another party of picnickers, only they are dressed in veils, long skirts and black coats. For a while no one says anything. Then, suddenly, over a
For over 15 years after the second world war young men between the ages of 18 and 20 were conscripted by law to serve in Britain’s armed forces for two years. This was officially in order to man the army, navy and air force sufficiently for them to be able to perform the roles which
Perhaps more than any other single historical event, the First Crusade (1096-99) lends itself to the narrative technique. This was the quest — and a successful one — on the part of Roman Catholic Europe to regain the Holy Lands taken during the Muslim conquests of the Levant four centuries earlier. Its rich cast of
Sometimes it seems as if Ruth Rendell’s heart just isn’t in all that killing any more. Certainly, her latest book, The Saint Zita Society (Hutchinson, £12.99), works best as a portrait of modern London, sharing many of the characteristics of novels like John Lanchester’s Capital and Sebastian Faulks’s A Week in December. The murders, when
James Joyce once described Ulysses — in dog Italian — as a ‘maledettisimo romanzaccione’, or monstrously big novel. It has come to stand as a modernist masterpiece, and also the acme of difficult, inaccessible, unwieldy fiction. It is to be read (if at all) effortfully, in sweaty admiration, and mercifully short chunks. One cannot help
This book deserves to be named in the same breath as those two great classics of royal biography, Roger Fulford’s Royal Dukes and James Pope-Hennessy’s Queen Mary. It shares with those two masterpieces the double advantage of being profoundly learned and a cracking good read. There is scarcely a paragraph of Bertie which does not
