The first world war was the last major conflict to be brought to an end in the traditional fashion, with a formal treaty of peace. Or, rather, several treaties of peace, one for each of the defeated belligerents. They were all negotiated in Paris, but named after the various royal palaces in which the signing
Ferdinand Mount Andrew Brown has spent a lot of his life writing about religion, not least for The Spectator. He has never written anything remotely like Fishing in Utopia (Granta, £8.99), but then nor has anyone else. The book tells the story of how the author fell in love with Sweden and everything Swedish, including
Caroline Wallace, a journalist specialising in book reviews and the occasional travel piece, is asked, or rather told, to go to Dublin to interview Desmond FitzMaurice, a once famous playwright and foreign correspondent, in order to revive interest in his now forgotten work. Fitzmaurice is nearly 90, and so there is no time to be
At first glance, these books have an awful lot in common. Indeed, all three might have been produced by the same self-centred chatterbox, so similar is the slightly manic, self-consciously jokey, self-interrupting, lower-middle class vernacular in which they are all written. Fluent, full of ideas and, above all, conversational. All three authors treat their imaginary
There are literary monuments that don’t allow for intimacy. Robert Musil’s The Man Without Qualities is one of these imposing masterpieces; Hermann Broch’s The Sleepwalkers is another. There are literary monuments that don’t allow for intimacy. Robert Musil’s The Man Without Qualities is one of these imposing masterpieces; Hermann Broch’s The Sleepwalkers is another. Vastly
The Benefit of Farting was published in pamphlet form in 1722, ostensibly by one Don Fartinando Puff-Indorst, Professor of Bumbast at the University of Crackow (a ‘crack’ being 18th-century slang for a fart). The Benefit of Farting was published in pamphlet form in 1722, ostensibly by one Don Fartinando Puff-Indorst, Professor of Bumbast at the
It all began at Hardwick Hall. Imagine an impressionable and imaginative young boy staying with his relations, wandering about absorbing the atmosphere of that miraculous survivor of an Elizabethan house. Mark Girouard’s intellectual curiosity about English architectural history was ignited by his childhood experience of living in those extraordinary rooms. He was on the roof
In 1800 Henrietta Clive, wife of Edward Clive who had been appointed Governor of Madras in 1797, embarked on an 1,100-mile, seven-month journey round southern India with her two daughters and her Italian artist friend, Anna Tonelli. This was an unusual thing to do at the time, and the fact that she was accompanied by
At first glance, a history of running seems a pretty doomed exercise, like writing a history of breathing, or sneezing. For how can anyone really describe and ‘historicise’ an intrinsic physical process, something people do, involuntarily, without thinking? Perhaps alert to this potential pitfall, Thor Gotaas confines himself to a specific sort of running —
For generations, the Christmas ‘funny’ book has received a poor press. For generations, the Christmas ‘funny’ book has received a poor press. We have all been given one, usually by someone who thinks we still have a sense of humour. We have opened it in good faith, we have searched within for the promised mirth
