In September 1946 a 23-year-old Englishwoman sailed for India in one of the first passenger liners to be reconverted from a trooper. She spent the following Cold Weather as the dogsbody with a documentary unit making films about tea gardens in Assam. Fifty-four years on she would describe this excursion into Asia as ‘a huge
EDITH WHARTON’S FRENCH RIVIERAby Philippe Collas and Eric VilledaryFlammarion, £22.50, pp. 149, ISBN 2080107224 London, even in normal years, is rained on for 150 days to Nice’s 60; it receives a paltry 1,500 hours of sunlight in comparison to Nice’s enviable 2,700. And yet, despite the town’s proud boast of having 1,000 hotels and 3,000
The niceties of Saul Steinberg’s cartoon drawings are doodle-related. Figures begin at the nose, become elaborately hatted and shod and strut like clockwork toys; words are transformed into free-standing objects; horizontal lines denote runways or table edges. Often, it seems, the draughtsman’s pen went on automatic, pen-pushing the same old absurdities, perplexities and double-takes on
If Kafka had never existed, critics might now be using the word Warneresque, instead of Kafkaesque, to describe the sort of fiction represented by the three remarkable early novels for which Rex Warner is now chiefly remembered. But then, if Kafka had never existed, perhaps The Wild Goose Chase, The Professor and The Aerodrome would
A. N. Wilson claims that he can imagine nothing more agreeable than the life of a country parson, ‘born in the 1830s with the genetic inheritance of strong teeth’. The Victorians are still vivid to him: from his 1950s childhood, he can recall the last vestiges of their way of life – gas-lit station waiting-rooms,
