Nobody has ever quite known what to do with the German-language novelist Hermann Hesse. Born in 1877 and living until 1962, he rather deliberately refused to experience most of the traumatic events of his culture. His tiny home town was Calw, in the Black Forest, and he lived mostly in backwaters, and latterly for decades
Bess of Hardwick — who died Elizabeth Talbot, Countess of Shrewsbury — was a remarkable and fascinating woman. The wife of four men, builder of four houses, and by her death the second richest woman in the country, the exceptional Bess has attracted many biographers. Kate Hubbard’s new book differs from these by examining Bess’s
The main attraction in the Kenyan port of Mombasa is Fort Jesus, a vast, ochre-coloured bastion overlooking the Indian Ocean. Dominating a dusty skyline of palm trees, minarets and tower blocks, it was erected during the opening cannonade of European empire. In 1505 a Portuguese armada sacked and torched Mombasa, shortly after its ‘discovery’ by
In the winter of 1820–1 a 29-year old woman named Anne Lister went to stay with some female friends who lived nearby. This was a visit between gentry families of the sort that Jane Austen describes in her novels. But there the resemblance ends. By the end of her stay Anne had flirted with four
The sea — that wine-dark whale road, to mix Homeric and Anglo-Saxon evocations of it — has always held a special place in the human psyche. A site of both great peril and great opportunity, it has influenced our languages and our cultures, just as it has our economic systems and the contours of our
You will doubtless recall the model villages of your childhood holidays: the cold rain beating down upon you as you wander, confused, from the 1:15 scale Stonehenge to the 1:18 Houses of Parliament to the 1:32 scale model railway, before sneaking your foil-wrapped sandwiches into the tea shop to share a pot of tea. Or
The ‘gift books’ are out again, piled high in Waterstones, books that have only one reason to exist: to be given to people who don’t want them on Christmas Day. Having written one or two myself, I have seen the look on the faces of potential purchasers as they pick one up and leaf idly
The most striking and difficult aspect of this novel is its incredible scale. How can a reviewer best discuss an enterprise containing a vast survey of life in Germany, Britain and the United States and the transformations of these societies from the end of the 19th century to the 1980s? Two volumes cover the experience
Republicans hate to admit it, but the stability brought by the long reign of that most careful of monarchs Elizabeth II has helped Britain manage the decline from empire to middle-ranking power surprisingly well. As the Treason Act of 1351 is no longer in force, and to ‘compass or imagine’ the death of the sovereign
The title of Matthew Dennison’s new biography of the man who wrote The Wind in the Willows appears to nod to another children’s classic of the Edwardian period. J.M. Barrie subtitled Peter Pan — first staged in 1904, four years before the publication of Kenneth Grahame’s book — ‘The Boy Who Wouldn’t Grow Up’, and
