Thomas Stamford Raffles (1781-1826) is a man whose name is now better known than his doings. Its syllables conjure a world-famous hotel, a prep-school, the former business class brand of Singapore airlines, a shonky packet of fags, E. W. Hornung’s Raffles the Gentleman Thief, and Viz comic’s Raffles the Gentleman Thug. He also gave his
The joke doing the rounds in Beijing is that the Swedes gave the Nobel Literature prize to the wrong Chinese. It should have gone to the Communist Party’s propaganda department, for writing the enthralling fantasy about the Politburo’s wife who (supposedly) pours cyanide into the mouth of a British businessman (or spy, as most people
‘I don’t profess this tome to be one of deep reflection or profound, serious thinking,’ writes Miranda Hart, which may or may not come as a surprise to her readers. ‘I am nowhere close to one of them French philosophers; I basically lollop through life like an amiable hound.’ If self-knowledge tends to be hard
It’s hard to tell Argentina’s story without moments of despair. Even those who are fond of this country — like me — can struggle to identify the bright spots in its history. It’s been a tale of genocide, shrinking borders, pointless wars, hyper-inflation and vicious dictators. Even the end of the second world war brought
This novella tells the story of the Crucifixion from the point of view of Mary. Contrary to art historical belief she was not, we are now told, kneeling at the foot of the Cross nor cradling her son’s broken body in her arms. Instead, she left the scene early, slipping away to save her own
They have mostly achieved eminence, the original cast members who appeared on stage or in the film adaptation, 30 years ago, of Julian Mitchell’s homoerotic spy fable Another Country. Kenneth Branagh has his coveted knighthood, Daniel Day-Lewis and Colin Firth have won Oscars — and Rupert Everett? I’m not quite sure what has happened to
A degree in maths might have helped. ‘Correction of the Day,’ wind charts, slide-rules, log tables, maps of the terrain, OP reports — all combined (again and again) to make four 25-pounders point the right way. B-Troop, ‘officer material,’ we learned our parts: don’t get VD; take care when choosing your friends; prefer gin and
First there was Sir Walter Raleigh, who after ‘getting one of the Mayds of Honour up against a tree in a Wood’ went on to write The Historie of the World. Then there was H.G.Wells, who cut a swathe through the high-minded girl intellectuals of the early 20th century, a new species, before writing The
Fortunately the author explained how he came to make the choices for this book in his column here (29 September), because otherwise your reviewer might have wasted words in debating the criteria for inclusion. These are the 100 of the top racehorses that Robin Oakley admires the most and which he thinks are particularly popular.
Having lived in London for 35 years, I thought I knew its architectural highlights pretty well, but this book is a revelation. It shows an aspect of the city that I hardly realised existed. I had always believed that, in what must now be called the Downton years, Britain’s grandest families preferred to sacrifice their
Pretentious, effeminate, sinister and even obscene, the fork of folktale was a sign of loose morals, silly decadence or sexual deviancy. To insist on eating with a fork was a very bad sign until the 17th century. Italians were the first to relax their stance on ‘furcifers’ (fork bearers, like the devil) when they recognised
This is an exhilarating novel. Its general gist is that in a multicultural society so-called honour often trumps virtue, political expediency frequently wins out over inconvenient truth, and comforting illusion tends to be preferable to disagreeable reality. And assimilation is very hard, especially in Miami, where the entire story is set. The two central characters
There is a famous piece of film — well, famous to those of us who know more about the Beatles than is possibly good for our health — where John Lennon encounters a fan who has broken into the star’s Berkshire estate. Clearly a lost soul, the fan is searching for meaning, signficance, some sort
‘Senior British diplomats really knew how to write,’ declares Matthew Parris in his introduction to The Spanish Ambassador’s Suitcase, a collection of ambassadorial despatches about funny foreigners and filthy, far-flung climes. Well, up to a point. The pieces in this collection, a successor to Parting Shots, are often elegantly phrased and colourful, but at the
Some years ago, Susan Hill stated in an interview: ‘It’s not plot that interests me but setting, people in a setting, wrestling with an abstract subject.’ In her ghost stories, of which Dolly is the latest, Hill exploits the impact of setting on character: the role of atmosphere and environment in shaping human suggestibility and
