Richard Bradford has written more than 20 books of literary criticism and biography. This latest one is a compendium of writers’ feuds and resentments. Reading Literary Rivals is a curious experience; from the quotations and bare facts you can just about make out a version of reality, but it’s fighting so hard against the author’s
‘There are the Alps. What is there to say about them?/ They don’t make sense. Fatal glaciers, crags cranks climb, /Jumbled boulder and weed’, was Basil Bunting’s 1949 opinion of Pound’s Cantos; but as the sometime friend of Pound continued: ‘There they are, you will have to go a long way round / If you
One of the easiest mistakes to make about history is to assume that the past is like the recent past, only more so. It’s a natural human tendency to project the outcome of events backwards, ignoring the fact that the arc of history really doesn’t work like that. In the case of Ireland that tendency
Sir Winston Churchill did not invent the prefab, but on 26 March 1944 he made an important broadcast promising to manufacture half a million of them to ease the new housing emergency caused by enemy bombs and the continued growth of inner-city slums. He went on to claim that these easy-to-assemble, factory-made bungalows would be
In the world of Gaito Gazdanov, a Russian émigré soldier turned taxi driver who began writing fiction in the 1920s, doublings abound, though their meanings are rarely resolved. As with his great contemporary Nabokov, this hall-of-mirrors effect provides a pleasant means of exploring the fragmentary and illusory self. But it is Dostoevsky, and his novel
I have come late to Nora Ephron — a little too late for her, anyway, as she died in 2012. Indeed, it was just after she breathed her last that I read her only novel, Heartburn, a copy of which had been pressed on me by a writer friend with a mad glint in her
Depending on your approach, home is where your heart is, where you hang your hat, or possibly where you hang yourself. Our homes reflect our characters, social milieux and finances, but we also reflect them. Leonard Woolf wrote that a house ‘has an immense influence on its inhabitants’, and contended that Monk’s House (where he
The lefty hereditary peer has few equals as a figure of fun, in life or literature. The late Tony Benn comes inevitably to mind here, as does the Earl of Warminster — ‘Erry’ — in Anthony Powell’s A Dance to the Music of Time. As his name would suggest, Francis John Clarence Westenra Plantagenet ‘Jack’
Philip Marsden’s book is about place. He makes a distinction between place and space. In his mind ‘place’ is something resonant, evoking a connection with the land and its meaning. Marsden is obsessed with pre-history and the beliefs and practices of the earliest inhabitants of Cornwall. He cites with approval someone’s judgment that written history
Oblomov, first published in 1859, is the charming tale of a lazy but lovable aristocrat in 19th-century Russia. The novel’s eponymous hero cannot see the point of doing anything at all, and spends his time lying in bed or wandering around his St Petersburg flat in his beloved oriental dressing gown, bickering about the dusting
Writing to a god seems a presumptuous thing. Who are we, feeble mortal creatures whose lives pass in the blink of an eye, to address the great immortal deities? The Dutch writer Cees Nooteboom, now entering his ninth decade and never knowingly lacking in chutzpah, is not one to be deterred by such considerations. Nooteboom
There are hundreds of resounding ideas and shrewd precepts in Adam Zamoyski’s temperate yet splendidly provocative Phantom Terror. This is the history of European ultra-reactionary repression and police espionage in the half-century after the overthrow of the French monarchy in 1789-93. The instability of popular opinion, the destructiveness of angry, ignorant populism and the wretchedness
In London, I remember the indignation. Surely the Nobel prize should have gone to Zbigniew Herbert, the Polish poet we loved – dissident, charismatic, much translated – not some woman we had barely heard of? I thought Polish poems should resemble films of Wajda, charged with the electricity of war. Szymborska’s poetry held no such
On 5 August 2010, 33 men entered the remote San José mine in Chile’s Atacama desert to begin their 12-hour shift. They came out again 69 days later, to be greeted by the country’s president in front of a worldwide TV audience of around 1.2 billion. A group of workers who, in many cases, had
Nearly 50 years ago we made our way into an inner place, a semi-subterranean room, in a peculiar college. A smallish, round-faced man was beginning to give tongue. Each week he drew multi-coloured patterns in the air, words flitting about like luminous bats in a night sky. We sat bewitched. There was suspense too, since
First, a confession. I have never cared much for Hercule Poirot. In this I am not alone, for his creator felt much the same way, describing him as a ‘detestable, bombastic, tiresome, egocentric little creep’, albeit a creep with remarkable commercial staying power. Fortunately, my prejudice doesn’t affect enjoyment of the brilliantly constructed plots and
Aficionados of detective fiction have long known that the differences between the soft- and hard-boiled school are so profound that, as P.D. James observed, it seems stretching a definition to place both groups in the same category. Over here we have, or used to have, a comforting story concerned with restoring order to the mythical
Some years ago I met the Swedish crime writer Henning Mankell at the Savoy Hotel in London, where he was staying. A waitress came up to our table. ‘I think, Belinda,’ Mankell said to her suavely, ‘that I would like a glass or two of your red wine!’ Momentarily confused, Belinda asked Mankell to repeat
The Lawrence books are piling up, aren’t they? I don’t mean the author of The Rainbow, though as I write this the eremites at Cambridge are plugging away at a definitive edition of his works. (Their most recent yield, the Poems in two volumes, runs to over 1,400 pages and costs £130.) The English leader
Anyone thinking of bringing out a book on Waterloo at the moment must be very confident, very brave or just plain daft. Over the last month there have been at least five new books on the battle, and so unless a writer is in a position to bring the equivalent of whole divisions of loyal