A comet streaked into France in the 1930s, its fallout sending the staid echelons of haute couture into a tailspin. A mere 30 years later a rogue missile blasted into London, blowing dainty English clothes sense to smithereens. Both these thunderbolts shot the stuffing out of cloying conventionality, one with an arrow-narrow silhouette, the other
So Basque is an ergative language! Well, I never. I couldn’t have told you that a week ago. I even know now what that means (more or less). And, well… so much for Basque. Moving along, then… In Lingo, Gaston Dorren speeds around Europe, giving each of his chosen 60-odd languages three or four pages’
Geoffrey Parker is a product of Nottingham and Christ’s College Cambridge, and I think was once a pupil of the unforgettable Jack Plumb. He went to Urbana-Champaign (Illinois) in 1986, Yale in 1995 and since 1997 has been at Ohio State University. Against that improbable background he established himself years ago as the world’s outstanding
Phil Rickman isn’t unusual among crime writers for mingling supernatural elements with earthly crimes. What makes him different is his way of grounding his novels in the real world, and of bringing a wry sense of humour to his other-worldly themes. His latest novel, Night After Night (Atlanti, £18.99, Spectator Bookshop, £16.99) is a wonderful
The moment Waterloo Bridge was planned across the Thames, a new theatre to serve the transpontine coach trade was inevitable. The Old Vic opened in 1818. Originally called the Royal Coburg, it could seat a whopping 3,800. Kean was the first great actor to perform there. In 1831 he played Richard III, King Lear and
A surprise! I took this book from its envelope expecting a fresh collection of Wendy Cope’s poems, and opened it to find prose — a variety of memoirs, reflections, articles and letters. There are literary pieces on poets such as Anne Sexton and George Herbert, and her reviews from The Spectator when she was television
Skulls, femurs, ribs, pelvises, piled on top of each other in a chaotic heap: this, Denise Inge discovered, was what she and her husband John were living on top of in their pretty house in Worcester Cathedral Close, into which they had recently moved when John became the diocesan bishop. The house is on top
‘The meaning of life’, announces Simon Barnes in the opening pages of his new book, ‘is life, and the purpose of life is to become an ancestor.’ Simple really. Yet it is hard to imagine a title launched this autumn that has a more all-encompassing theme or a larger moral purpose. Ten Million Aliens is
By 1940 Irène Némirovsky, who had arrived in France at the age of 16 as a refugee from Kiev, had become a prominent and successful novelist. In March of that year she celebrated what was to be her final publication day. She was Jewish, and for French publishers under Nazi occupation she had ceased to
One could have endless fun setting quiz questions about Georges Perec. Which French novelist had a scientific paper, ‘Experimental demonstration of the Tomatotropic organisation in the Soprano (Cantatrix sopranico L)’ included in a scientific festschrift at the Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique? (The article charted the ‘yelling reaction’ — YR —of singers pelted with
If you were still alive You would be ninety-six tomorrow. I think of you most days. Just now, for example, I heard you Defending the word ‘folk’ When, sometime in the Eighties, I said it was twee. Another day, I see you doing the weeding At my sister’s wedding And another day still You’re at
It is a truism that writers of all kinds often find inspiration and solace in their gardens, as well as protection from the outside world and its demands. After all, writing is a supremely solitary business and outside influences must be subtle and uplifting, not noisy and distracting, if writers are to flourish. The Writer’s
The unforgettable moment a quarter of a century ago when the Berlin Wall came down was the most vivid drama in that dizzying year of revolutions in 1989 when the Soviet empire fell to its knees. But another event a month later and 250 miles away in Prague was equally poignant. As the playwright/philosopher Václav
Italo Calvino, the Italian arch-fabulist, wrote a foreword to this celebrated wartime diary when it appeared in Italy in 1956. (The author displays an ‘ironic modesty’ and ‘simplicity’ in the writing, Calvino wrote approvingly.) The act of keeping an anti-Fascist diary of this sort during the German occupation carried an automatic death penalty. The author,
They start to say autumnal in the forecasts, And on the Northern Line the shifting panels Look bleached already. I think less about The low-cost rivieras than the remedies At the ends of small pale almanacs for afflictions Acquired by the old, or suffered by loners In the margins of respectable families — Ailments with
Unchosen is the journalist Julie Burchill’s account of how she — a bright and bratty working-class girl from Bristol — fell in love with the Jewish race. It’s an exhilarating and exasperating mix of the utterly brilliant and the totally bonkers. Poor Julie — she thought that her teenage dream of marrying a Jewish man
Funny Girl is the story of the early career of the vivacious, hilarious Sophie Straw, star of the much-loved BBC situation comedy Barbara (and Jim), the television programme that ran for four series in the mid-1960s, helped define its era and, crucially, does not exist. The imaginative kernel of Nick Hornby’s new novel is a
I picked up this book with real enthusiasm. Who cannot be entranced by those 20 years after the second world war when New York supplanted Paris as the cultural capital of the world? One thinks of the Beats, of Dylan and Greenwich Village, of Sontag and Trilling. Well think again, for none of the above
Early on in this ‘Biography in Conversations’ we’re told that the Chilean novelist Roberto Bolaño ‘continued to see himself throughout his life as a literary character, a fictional person.’ It’s a dubious claim: we might believe that about any number of Hollywood actors, pop stars, or historical monsters, but not of the author of books
Phrases such as ‘Some aspects of…’ are death at the box-office, so it is not exactly unknown for the titles of scholarly works to promise far more than they actually deliver. Most unusually, the actual reach of Ruth Guilding’s mighty and compelling new study is far wider than the already large subject of ‘Why the