Nine cups of milky Nescafé Gold Blend a day; a low-tar cigarette smouldering; a hot-water-bottle always on her lap; the Times crossword almost completed at the Formica table; knitting on the go; and novels — she always read the last page first. She was one of that generation of women who didn’t go to university
Watching Heston Blumenthal arrange the infernal horror that is a lamprey’s head on a plate is one thing; seeing an enthusiastic dinner guest suck the raw, bloody meat out of it is quite another — something you will never, in fact, unsee. But finding the YouTube link to this spectacle in the chatty preface to
If I had a slave owner in my family background I’d probably keep quiet about it. Richard Atkinson, in his remarkable first book, has gone to the other extreme. Not only did he seek out as much information as he could about the activities of his Georgian forebear, also called Richard Atkinson, but he’s made
Question: which American president and first lady would you care to imagine having intercourse? If that provokes a shudder, be assured that the sex scenes between Yale law students Hillary Rodham and Bill Clinton in Curtis Sittenfeld’s latest novel are cringe-free — even the one involving manual stimulation that takes place in a moving car.
On 6 May 2010 the eurozone crisis was tearing through the continent. Greece was bankrupt, and it looked as though Spain or Italy could be next. Markets were on edge, volatility was high — and then something very strange happened. The S&P 500, one of the US’s main stock indexes, began to crash. It went
With more than a dozen acclaimed novels to her name, not to mention short stories, poetry, a memoir and a Booker nomination, you might think that Michèle Roberts could have counted on being published for life. But as so many ‘established’ authors know painfully well, in that ever-hungry-for-the-new world there’s no such thing as tenure.
The French have a love-hate relationship with heroes. For the great 19th-century historian Jules Michelet, the French Revolution was supposed to have inaugurated the age of the people: ‘France cured of individuals,’ he wrote in the preface to his history. But that same Revolution created a pantheon for its grands hommes. Anyone who has spent
One of the great mysteries of European history is how for the best part of 700 years a family who produced so many complete duffers as the Habsburgs managed to play such a crucial role in world affairs. There was certainly the odd exception to the general rule, and some highly effective women; but it
Heteropoda davidbowie is a species of huntsman spider. Though rare, it has been found in parts of Malaysia, Singapore, Indonesia and possibly Thailand. (The uncertainty arises because it’s often mistaken for a similar-looking species, the Heteropoda javana.) In 2008 a German collector sent photos of his unusual looking ‘pet’ to Peter Jäger, an arachnologist at
In the two generations since Watergate, the image of the journalist has gone from that of plucky truth-seeker to sensationalist and partisan hack. Somewhere along the way the fresh-faced idealists of All the President’s Men gave way to the dissociative anti-hero of Nightcrawler. Corporate-driven news values? Probably. Phone hacking? Definitely. But what grates more is
One of the delights of going to stay with my grandparents in the 1970s was that my grandmother was a fan of the wrestling on ITV’s World of Sport. My parents wouldn’t ever watch it. It was fixed — a pantomime. But my grandmother seemed oblivious. It was the only sport she followed, apart from
It was not until I went to Harvard in 1988 to take a year out from the Foreign Office that I came to realise how riven by ideology the world of US foreign policy had become. For 20 years I had been moulded by the resolute pragmatism of British diplomacy. My American sabbatical threw open
Once in a while, just at the right moment, a truly gorgeous real-life love story appears out of the blue, or in this case out of a chance purchase on eBay. Thanks to a serendipitous sequence of connections, including a perspicacious dealer and a fast-moving literary agent, the wonderful (and super-latively edited) seat-of-the-pants romance of
It’s the perfect opportunity to crack open those classics of 19th-century fiction you’ve always been meaning to read, and I am here to offer some recommendations. But there’s an immediate problem. Do I gesture towards the blindingly obvious? Or do I recommend a variety of obscure and arcane titles? The former strategy is liable only
On the way back from my daily dawn march in the park, I often pass my neighbour, a distinguished gentleman in his late eighties, taking the air on his doorstep. I stand behind the area railings and shout: ‘How are you?’ And he shouts back: ‘Bored!’ At least not lonely. His sixtysomething son is with
Cinema history is a strange thing. A couple of months ago the Guardian began a series in which film critics write about ‘the classic film I’ve never seen’, some admitting to have unaccountably avoided exposure to genuine masterpieces such as Metropolis (1927) or À Bout de Souffle (1960). Others have revealed they have yet to
Give thanks to the person who invented Venetian blinds, they say, or it would be curtains for us all. Curtains is mostly what people got at a Houdini show. He’d come on stage, be locked up or sealed in or tied down, and then the curtains would descend. They could stay drawn for an hour
At a well-reported political meeting at London’s Queen’s Hall during the first world war the preacher and suffragette Maude Royden used a phrase that would pass into history. ‘The Church shall go forward along the path of progress,’ she argued hopefully, ‘and be no longer satisfied to represent the Conservative party at prayer.’ ‘Conservative’ would
This is Roger Scruton’s final book. Parsifal was Wagner’s final opera. Both works are intended to be taken as Last Words: testaments of belief at the end of a long spiritual journey. In the introduction, Scruton identifies the enduring problem in his life, and ours, as: ‘How to live in right relation with others, even
To describe a new book as ‘eagerly awaited’ is almost unpardonable. Yet Mark Doty’s What is the Grass: Walt Whitman in My Life is exactly that. It’s not just that Doty is an extraordinarily fine writer whose every word sings on the page. Poetry has a tendency to come into its own at exceptional times