In the vast Benedictine monastery of Monte Oliveto Maggiore between Siena and Rome, the cycle of frescoes depicting the life of St Benedict by Giovanni Anionio Bazzi includes a charming self-portrait of the artist standing with a couple of pets at his feet, for all the world a 16th-century Italian Dorothy with a brace of
Mark Twain had a notoriously thorny relationship with German, a language he gamely tried to conquer. His main beef was with its knotty grammar: ‘Whenever the literary German dives into a sentence, that is the last you are going to see of him till he emerges on the other side of his Atlantic with his
Decent, clever, charming, eloquent, hard-working, conscientious and terribly, terribly nice, Shirley Williams is one of Britain’s best-loved politicians. Mark Peel’s admiring biographybegins in Chelsea in 1930. Shirley, as he matily calls her, was the eldest daughter of the political philosopher George Catlin and the bestselling author Vera Brittain. Life at home was affluent, comfortable and
No one watches Antiques Roadshow for the antiques. Instead we’re hanging on the punter’s reaction to his three-grand valuation. ‘It was very precious to Aunt Mabel; we’d never dream of selling it,’ says the mouth. ‘Fortnight in Barbados,’ say the eyes. The Antiques Magpie by the Roadshow’s Marc Allum exhibits the same preference for stories
To understand quite how disgruntled the reviews of the latest Bridget Jones diaries have been, you have to recall quite what she meant to her readers first time round. It wasn’t just the way she seemed to sum up the female condition for unmarried women in their thirties — indeed, she put a name on
On 12 April 1945 the Berlin Philharmonic gave its last performance. The atmosphere in Germany was apocalyptic, the Allied invasion was expected at any moment. The concert playlist had been devised by Hitler’s architect, Albert Speer, and included Brünnhilde’s last aria and the finale from Wagner’s Götterdämmerung, the ‘twilight of the gods’. There were reports
What makes someone the fastest man on earth? The current tenant of the informal title held by such sporting icons as Jesse Owen and Carl Lewis starts with a version of the pastoral. Here is Usain Bolt as a child of nature, running free in the wilderness near the remote village that was his birthplace
The novelist David Plante is French-Québécois by ancestry, grew up in a remote Francophone parish in Yankee New England and came to London half a century ago when still an avid young man. For 38 years he lived there with the late Nikos Stangos, a cosmopolitan of the Greek diaspora, whose father had been expelled
We all know that if you can remember the Sixties you weren’t really there. But Graham Nash, of the Hollies, and later of Crosby, Stills & Nash, was there, and has decided at the age of 71 to prove that he can well remember both them and subsequent decades by favouring us with his autobiography.
When one notices the first symptoms of senile dementia (forgetting names, trying to remember the purpose of moving from one room to another, and so on), books can be wonderfully helpful. At the age of 80, Penelope Lively, the prolific, generally esteemed, novelist, has written an encouraging guidebook for the ageing: For me, reading is
Lord Arran was responsible for the bill to legalise homosexuality and a bill to protect badgers from gassing and terrier-baiting. One, he said, had stopped people badgering buggers; the other stopped them buggering badgers. The Homosexuality Act had an easier passage through the Lords. ‘Not many badgers in the House of Lords,’ he observed. The
Skip this book if you dislike dogs, or even if you are indifferent to them, or echo an acquaintance of Brian Sewell’s who told him: ‘We expected better of you than such silly, sentimental anthropomorphism.’ If you are such a person, you will be horrified by Sewell’s habits — starting with the one of the
This is a curious book. Its title and the name of its publisher suggest that it is going to be an indictment by two journalists of their old profession. These two are now safe and snug in higher education: Stewart Purvis, a former chief executive of ITN, became Professor of Television Journalism at City University
Ask any England cricket fan in his fifties to name his favourite batsman and chances are he will say David Gower. (Unless he says Geoffrey Boycott: the cavaliers and roundheads tend to divide along these lines.) In 114 Tests between 1978 and 1992, Gower’s elegance, timing and grace bewitched us all, not least because we
