The last time all five James children were in the same room was at their mother’s funeral, in 1882. It must have been a strange gathering. Even by then, their lives had followed such extraordinarily different paths that, to the reader of their collective biography, they seem to have become randomly assembled strangers. Henry James,
William Cecil, Lord Burghley, would be delighted that in his historical afterlife he remains the old man he died as, after 40 years of power. The frail flesh and white beard projects the image of the dull bureaucrat we remember: ideal cover for an ideologue who makes Donald Rumsfeld appear warm and fuzzy, and a
There is a moment in the introduction to this book, when, after the grand statement of its aim ‘to encapsulate a country’s material, natural and cultural essence’, you come on this, amongst the usual thanks being extended to archivists and professors: ‘To Roy Morgan of Mertec Evesham Ltd., Swansea, who kindly loaned the project a
On 29 May 1989 Brigadier Tariq Mehmood, formerly head of Pakistan’s Special Forces, was taking part in a freefall demonstration in Gujranwala. His parachute failed and he crashed to his death in front of a large crowd that included his wife. TM (as he was always known) was the arche- typal Special Forces officer, almost
Douglas Hurd on James Fergusson’s new book Des Browne, our Defence Secretary, has recently returned from another visit to the British Army in Afghanistan. Once again he issued an optimistic statement on military progress. He should read the devastating account in James Fergusson’s book of his previous visits. The purpose of this excellently written book is to
You may have caught Jonathan Dimbleby on television recently travelling across Russia, picking potatoes with doughty Russian women, baring all for a steam bath in Moscow, looking alarmed as a white witch from Karelia promised to heal his bad back with a breadknife, etc. Here is the book of the series, in which Dimbleby, drawing
Mary Lefkowitz is a distinguished (i.e. no longer young) classicist who taught for over 30 years at Wellesley College. She has been particularly bold and articulate in promoting the role of women in antiquity. Married to Hugh Lloyd-Jones, a famously rigorous ex-Regius Professor of Greek, she can be presumed not to advance lazy arguments or
Jane Ridley on a history and a fiction of Leningrad The siege of Leningrad is the ultimate nightmare: what happens when you push humanity to its utmost limits. The German armies advanced on Leningrad and besieged it in September, 1941. The siege lasted for almost 900 days, but the first winter was the worst. Bread,
In 1939, the six-year-old Eva Figes escaped Nazi Berlin for London. Her family were secular Jews and her father, who had been arrested after Kristallnacht, had spent some months in Dachau. Left behind were grandparents and two maids, Edith and Schwester Eva, both Jewish: by 1939, it was forbidden for Jews to employ Aryans. Schwester
One evening in November 1763 the splendidly named Sir Wellbore Ellis Agar passed a middle-aged Venetian man on Westminster Bridge who, he thought, looked a little glum. Sir Wellbore knew what the stranger needed: ‘a drink, a woman, beef and Yorkshire pudding’. And so he took the 38-year old Casanova to a tavern on Cockspur
In 1926, Tessa Codrington’s maternal grandfather, Jack Sinclair, once British Resident in Zanzibar, decided to buy for his wife a house on the ‘New Mountain’ in Tangier. One of Muriel Sinclair’s many eccentricities was that she had no wish to see her grandchildren. In consequence it was not until the old woman’s death that Tessa
Callimachus (fl. 4th century BC), admired by Catullus, Ovid and Propertius, was the author of some 800 books, including a 120-volume catalogue of the Greek writers whose works were to be found in the famous library of Alexandria. Of his own work, only six hymns, 64 epigrams, the fragment of an epic, and a description
In Sybille Bedford’s book, Jigsaw, a woman who is suffering from insomnia asks for books. ‘Oh, not real books, I couldn’t look at those. Detective stories only.’ So Sayers’ Wimseyland and Christie’s Poirot are required. How would she get on today? Ruth Rendell and P. D James would do excellently but none of these books
It was the late Lord Deedes who once succinctly explained to me what it was like to live through the second world war. I had said to him, ‘Those Battle of Britain boys were so brave’.And he had replied, almost impatiently, ‘No, it wasn’t bravery we felt. It was a strange, deep, primitive compulsion that
Lorenzo de’ Medici was proverbially ugly. Machiavelli, describing an encounter with a particularly hideous prostitute, compared her looks to his. He was tall, well-made and physically imposing but contemporaries dubbed his features ‘homely’, his face was bony and irregular with a long crooked nose, a jutting pugilistic jaw and dark piercing eyes. In compensation, ‘his
The ‘entirely fresh view’ of childhood in England presented by Anthony Fletcher in 414 pages of text and apparatus may come to some as a bit of an anti-climax. Although material conditions changed enormously, and children by the end of his period had more toys and books and birthday presents, his 12 years of research
If anyone ever wondered why Marlborough has so seldom enjoyed the reputation his abilities warrant he could do a lot worse than start with Richard Holmes’s new biography. England’s Fragile Genius is probably as comprehensive an account of Marlborough as a single volume can hope to be, and yet at the end of 500-odd closely
This is the story of a very unusual man. ‘Wilhelm von Habsburg,’ Timothy Snyder tells us, ‘wore the uniform of an Austrian officer, the court regalia of a Habsburg archduke, the simple suit of a Parisian exile, the collar of the Order of the Golden Fleece, and, every so often, a dress. He could handle
The title of Isabel Fonseca’s first novel is promisingly witty: an ‘attachment’ is both a supplement to an e-mail, and a bond of human intimacy; and the main plot of the novel revolves around how the first may destroy the second. Jean Hubbard is a freelance health correspondent, living on a tropical island, from which
Gideon may or may not have overcome the Midianites by superior intelligence. The Book of Judges is a little obscure about that. But there is still something in the old adage that espionage is the second oldest profession. The rules of the game were set out more than six centuries ago in the advice given