Exploration has come a long way since the Chinese traveller Hsuan Tsang visited India and central Asia in the seventh century AD, returning to warn about biting winds and fierce dragons in the Gobi. His advice for future visitors was don’t wear red garments or carry loud calabashes. ‘The least forgetfulness of these precautions entails
After a year and more of Trafalgar it is perhaps time to turn once again to Waterloo. By comparison with the feast, or glut, of Nelsoniana, there is something of a paucity of safe accounts of 18 June 1815. Besides Andrew Roberts’s ultra-compact Waterloo: Napoleon’s Last Gamble, an impressive overview of both the battle and
If you ask most people in Britain today for their views on the first world war, they tell you that it was a futile holocaust in which our nation’s brave and disillusioned young men were herded into a hell of mud and machine-gun fire by incompetent products of the English public schools. Executions for cowardice
Of the making of books about Churchill there seems to be no end. His own output was large, and largely self-centred. We already have an official life in eight volumes, with several volumes of supplementary papers, a number of single-volume lives, long and short, books by supporters, books by opponents, books by those interested in
No society has ever thought about itself more intensely, or spent more time considering how best to present itself, than the ancien régime in France for the 150 years or so which led up to the revolution. As Benedetta Craveri demonstrates in her excellent and extremely readable The Art of Conversation, this ideal of living
It would be a mistake to assume that this account of the work of one of the 20th century’s most celebrated designers (a familiar name to many for his London Underground and Shell posters of the Twenties and Thirties) is a book to be bought chiefly for its illustrations, splendid though they are. The text
This is a loosely connected series of tales which make up an intriguing, sometimes frustrating and occasionally both compelling and hilarious collection of ‘snatches’ from a bizarre alternative world history, which proclaims that there is no such thing as fiction, and that we are always one step away from destruction. Trotsky’s ghost, a cannibalistic contessa
Even the rubbish on the flyleaf isn’t rubbish. One of the astonishing things about Simon Gray’s new book is that the publishers’ claim that their author has ‘developed a new literary genre’ turns out to be accurate. This is the same blend of autobiography, anecdote and random reflection that made The Smoking Diaries a bestseller.
I have never met the 2nd Earl Jellicoe. I wish I had because to shake hands with this remarkable man, the Achilles of the title, would be to shake hands with honour, courage and duty fulfilled. If the author has him right it would also be to shake hands with wisdom, fun and a whiff
In 1968 I was introduced to Gerald Hamilton, the figure of comic evil on whom Christopher Isherwood based the title character of his 1935 novel Mr Norris Changes Trains. When he died in 1970, I rang the obituaries editor of the Times to ask if he would like me to write about the old rogue.
