In 1850 when William Melville was born in Sneem, Co. Kerry, there was no British secret service. There was the Secret Vote, used by the Foreign Office to pay the pensions of retired agents, code-breakers and letter-openers and as an embassy slush fund; and there were intelligence departments of the War Office and the Admiralty
The English don’t read German literature. This is not, I suggest, because of our vulgar prejudice towards the Germans for being the people they are and having the history they do. That over-repeated Fawlty Towers episode, those ‘Vorsprung durch Technik’ commercials and endless how-we-won-World-War-II documentaries keep such unselective loathing robustly alive, but in the case
Same rubbish, new wrapper. This is the criticism usually levelled at those big bad soccer clubs who put out a new kit every season with minor alterations. Where the clubs lead, the publishers follow. David Winner, the author of this rambling and incoherent discussion of the national game, is a theoriser so prolific that he
The title of this charming book refers to the last summer the author spent in her native city of Belgrade in 1986, just before she married an Englishman and emigrated to London. Twenty-four-year-old Vesna Bjelogrlic, as she then was, picked berries in the hills near her home to make jam. Nearly two decades later, when
The history of England in the 14th and 15th centuries has traditionally been regarded either as a corrupt aftermath (as in ‘Bastard Feudalism’) or a confused prelude (as in the ‘New Monarchy’ of the Tudors). Its most vivid narrator remains Shakespeare who, perhaps surprisingly, supplies the title for this earnestly modern new account by Professor
Betsy Blair was born Elizabeth Boger in 1923 into a middle-class episcopalian family in New Jersey, her mother a teacher, her father an insurance broker. By the age of 12, this prodigiously confident child performer was dancing before Eleanor Roosevelt in Washington. At the age of 16 she came to audition at Billy Rose’s Manhattan
Henry VIII is the first English monarch whose features everyone knows. The sharp little eyes in the massive head, the golden beard, above all the commanding stance in which Holbein painted him, are infinitely familiar and always terrifying. This is the man who sent More and Cromwell, two of his wives and many others to
Which of the acts of courage does the title mean? In the Peninsular War, there were so many it’s hard to choose. In the seventh volume of the Matthew Hervey saga (a novel well able to stand alone), Allan Mallinson’s protagonist is a hero among heroes, when the cavalry was the cavalry and his regiment,
This sensitive, outspoken diary begins during the dark last days of the ‘dead little, red little army’, the British Expeditionary Force which bolstered the French left flank in Flanders from mid-August 1914. With the desperate defence of Ypres, through Hallowe’en into December, when the Germans were repeatedly beaten off, began the stalemate of trench warfare.
Dorothy Whipple was once a highly regarded bestselling novelist and it is typical of the excellent Persephone books that they have restored her glory within their elegant silver jackets and distinctive floral end papers. In They Were Sisters, with its, surely intentional, Chekhovian undertones, Whipple explores the fortunes of three sisters: Lucy, Charlotte and Vera.
Geoffrey Wheatcroft is rarely dull in print and this book is no exception. It is a rattling good read, although more because of its knowledge of insiders’ gossip, its pithy judgments of both men and measures and the rhythm of its prose than because of the force of its central thesis. His judgments of men
