In the autumn of 1987, after London had been hit by a fierce storm, Simon Jenkins wandered through Bloomsbury and noticed that workers clearing away the fallen plane trees were finding it hard to cut through the branches. When he looked closely, he saw this was because their chainsaws kept snapping against embedded fragments of
Double identities have never been rare: Norman French conquered England. Anglo Irish led its armies to victory. German Jews helped create the modern world. Perhaps thinking of the many Germans living in London, and British in Hamburg, Munich and Dresden, Prince Albert’s eldest daughter Vicky, Crown Princess of Prussia, invented another hybrid: ‘Anglo-Germans’. This new
Richard Mabey is the grand old man of nature writing. He has produced 40 books in his noble crusade against the enemies of natural life, so a certain amount of repetition can be forgiven in Turning the Boat for Home, since in the opinion of many (not only Prince Charles) the dangers in some places
Zadie Smith’s first collection of short stories shows that she can pack all the astute social commentary of her novels just as deftly into the short form. A case in point is ‘Sentimental Education’, a comic homage to Flaubert featuring a decidedly unsentimental protagonist, Monica. Middle-aged (‘Next stop menopause and no more denim’) and feeling
This outstanding biography comes to an end, not in an atmosphere of triumph and achievement, but in a welter of frustration, division, anger and conspiracy. There is a widespread view that Margaret Thatcher’s first two administrations, from 1979 and 1983, were huge personal successes; the third, from 1987, was her mad period. That is unfair,
In the Chinese zodiac, 2016 was the year of the monkey, a trickster year full of the unhappy and the unexpected for Patti Smith. It starts badly at New Year: ‘Some guy with a greasy ponytail leaned over and puked on my boots.’ Then it gets worse, private tragedies and political shocks drawing Smith into
Vibrations, chemicals and light-waves exist in the world; sounds, tastes, smells and colours only seem to. ‘Many sensations which are supposed to be qualities residing in external objects have no real existence save in us,’ said Galileo in the 17th century. ‘They reside only in the consciousness.’ But is consciousness itself, then, other than, and
The Berlin Tunnel was an Anglo-American eavesdropping operation mounted against Russian-controlled East Berlin in 1955–56. It was a technical and engineering triumph which yielded a vast hoard of intelligence and, crucially, guaranteed early warning of any surprise Russian attack (as was mooted by the Russian military). Yet it was betrayed to the Russians by the
No nation’s defeat is ever quite straight-forward, and sometimes downfall can bring its own kind of posthumous victory. By the end of the American Civil War in 1865, for example, the Confederates had managed to recast themselves as Christ-like victims, exalted by the myth of a noble lost cause. The South had lost 20 per
In the mid-19th century, around lunchtime, a pale young man with an enormous beard could be seen in the British Museum reading room poring over piles of books about Mesopotamia. His name was George Smith, and this was his secret passion. Then, one day, a museum attendant remarked that it was a shame no one
In Hamlet a gravedigger asks the riddle: ‘What is he that builds stronger than either the mason, the shipwright, or the carpenter?’ Answer: ‘A grave-maker: the houses that he makes last till doomsday.’And yet they do not; this character has disturbed the bones of Yorick. ‘Doomsday’ is, of course, the archaic word for ‘judgment day’
Richard Humphreys spent a good part of five years, between the ages of 18 and 23, living inside a nuclear submarine, which he describes variously as ‘sleek, black and athletic looking’, and ‘this fierce black messenger of death’, and ‘this huge, black leviathan’, and ‘a killing machine’, and ‘silent as death’. The first time he
Neil Hegarty’s new novel, The Jewel, is a mass of contradictions. It’s about an art heist, but it’s not fun. It’s a love story, but it’s not romantic. And it features a woman’s wasted life, but it’s not without salvation. The overarching plot follows three characters. John, a ‘seedy’ artist-cum-art-forger-cum-art-thief, has been commissioned to steal
It’s fun to look for what’s missing in a memoir; the forgotten egos, the policy howlers buried for posterity. Some omissions are accidental. When Tony Blair published his autobiography in 2010, he raised eyebrows by neglecting to mention his celebrated blue-skies thinker, John Birt. Over more than 700 pages, For the Record is punctilious and
Any Swede old enough to remember knows where they were when their prime minister Olof Palme was assassinated. On 28 February 1986, Palme was walking home from the cinema with his wife when an unknown assailant stepped out from the shadows and shot him. We mourned not just the man, but the death of the
If we still bemoan a world of mass tourism, the mid 19th century, Orlando Figes reminds us, is where it began. Aristocrats were accustomed in youth to prolonged, libidinous grand tours through the Continent (the gap years of their day). For the masses, though, this was the start. ‘During the autumn months,’ grumbled one British
In Annie Ernaux’s The Years — her extraordinary act of collective autobiography —the ‘I’ disappears. Her memoir becomes the memoir of France since the war: each year of the author’s life is evoked in a collage of memories, images and historical fragments. Apart from a handful of photographs, in which Ernaux is the dispassionately observed
When I had a cough last week, my son Joe, who has autism, shouted at me and covered his ears. I didn’t mean to cough but, to Joe, so what? His autism means he doesn’t get other people’s intentions. People like him are sometimes said to lack a ‘theory of mind’ — lacking the idea