The phrase that gives this book its title is Graham Greene’s: The nightly routine of sirens, barrage, the probing raider, the unmistakable engine (‘Where are you? Where are you? Where are you?’), the bomb-bursts moving nearer and then moving away, hold one like a love-charm. Greene was apparently proud of ‘love-charm’: he used it more
Virginia Ironside’s novel, No! I Don’t Need Reading Glasses (Quercus £14.99) about a 65-year-old granny who belongs to a local residents’ association and does a fair bit of knitting may not sound like the most alluring reading. Then there’s the title — facetious and forgettable at the same time. It would be less embarrassing to
A man raised by apes is discovered in Africa, recognised as an English lord, and escorted home. At a formal dinner, he raises a bowl of soup to his lips and slurps noisily. His grandfather, noting consternation among the other guests, immediately does the same, murmuring, ‘Quite right! Quite right! I hate spoons.’ This scene
A few months before he passed away, responding to a question about his doubts and beliefs, Jorge Luis Borges offered a rapt and potted account of the many cultural and religious registers in which human beings have for centuries been telling themselves stories about their own deaths. He then posed the following question: ‘Where does
An English peculiar, the -ish feeling comes from arriving at eightish, peckish, giving one’s hostess a warm kiss, at home among Leticia’s crowd, sardonic, lusty and brisk. Between the lettuce and the liquorice, I talk to an egyptologist who dabbles in hypnosis; intrigued, I let her practice, and see my parents farming radishes on a
Leaping from Paleolithic cave paintings to Egyptian tombs to Gregorian chant in barely half a chapter, as Howard Goodall does in his breezy but effective The Story of Music, requires panache. He compresses several millennia into little over 300 pages with the first 40,000 years — when admittedly little happened beyond some inter-cave sonar-style singing
There is something to be said for a bald-headed gnome with the power, according to his biographer, to seduce any woman he wanted, including the most celebrated and desirable actress of the day, despite being handicapped by red-rimmed eyes, bad breath and crooked teeth ‘of three colours, white, yellow and black’. And something more deserves
Henry Fonda once said that he had never had any ambition to be a film star. But then how could a man want to become someone who came out of nowhere, had no past, so that even the names we know them by were mostly not ones bestowed on them by their parents and the
This book is an account by the music-loving editor of the Guardian of how he set himself the task of learning to play one of the most daunting virtuoso pieces in the piano repertoire, and to do so within the space of what turned out to be perhaps the most hectic year in the newspaper’s
