Grace Waterhouse ‘knew in general terms that [she] was marrying a hero’. Grace is the central character of this, Thomas Keneally’s 24th novel. In old age she looks back to the second world war and tries to disentangle the circumstances of her widowhood: her husband Leo’s capture and beheading at the hands of the Japanese.
Imperial Life in the Emerald City is the best account I have read of why the American occupation of Iraq has gone so drastically wrong. It is an exceptional piece of work, well researched, well written and well judged. Having lived the Iraqi story for over 30 years, from advising Saddam’s government on Iraqi-American relations
The title of Peter Godwin’s beautifully written and magnificently poignant memoir is taken from Zulu lore, which states that solar eclipses are caused by a celestial crocodile eating the sun. Within the covers we are offered twin eclipses, one caused by life ebbing away from Godwin’s father, the other by the darkness of Robert Mugabe’s
I wish I could be fun at parties too: Slap men across their backs and flirt with girls, Tell ribald tales, play games with young blonde curls, Shout, ‘Murphy, man, remember at the zoo!’ Instead I drink too much and hog the loo, Avoid the crowd and wince at insults hurled, Trip over doctors’ shoes,
Novelists do not always make the best critics, and vice versa. But there are writers — Henry James, Virginia Woolf and John Updike spring to mind — who are similarly gifted in both fields. Such cases are interesting because of the questions they raise about the relationship between the novels and the criticism. How similar
The 17th century was the heyday of the English ghost. Up and down the kingdom during those ‘distracted times’ of the Gunpowder Plot, Civil War and Commonwealth, spectres, revenants and phantoms were at their most restless and fretful. Church bells rang without human agency, invisible armies clattered to and fro in the darkness, drummers sounded
Until fairly recently, the name Thyssen-Bornemisza held generally positive associations — with vibrant German industrialism, responsible capitalism, pan-European cosmopolitanism, artistic connoisseurship and philanthropy, all tinged with a pleasant whiff of Hungarian nobility. Just how deeply erroneous these are revealed to have been is staggering. August Thyssen, who created the family fortune in the second half
If nothing else, this biography has to be a candidate for the Title of the Year prize. The fact that it’s about Willie Donaldson gives it a good shout, too, at Subject of the Year. Just amble through the CV: feckless squanderer of inherited shipping fortune; impresario of Beyond the Fringe; ponce (though he was
