Nick, the central character in Alan Hollinghurst’s wonderful new novel, is a young, alert middle-class boy with precociously refined aesthetic sensibilities and a gift for endearing himself to others. ‘He liked to be charming, and hardly noticed when he drifted excitedly into insincerity.’ He has come out as gay shortly before the novel’s opening, but
What does it mean to be human? The many possible answers to this question and their rejection form the cornucopian content of this book. Is language, for example, a defining characteristic of being human? It can’t be because other species have forms of communication which qualify as a sort of language; dolphins whistle, bees dance,
We had all probably agreed by now that the whole memoir thing was getting out of hand, and a UN-negotiated ceasefire between memoirists and suffering readers was urgently needed. We have had more than enough, surely, of whiny books about alcoholism, rape, criminal pasts, drug addiction, all of which culminate, for some reason, in a
The Priest Who was Never Baptisedby Nikolai Leskov, translated by James MuckleBramcote Press, 81 Rayneham Road, Ilkeston, Derbyshire, DE7 8RJ, £13.95, pp. 216, ISBN 1900405121 In 1936 Stalin walked out of the opera Lady Macbeth of Mtsensk which for two years had been performing with great success in Moscow and Leningrad. He objected that it
Sir John Keegan’s account of the origins and conduct of the war in Iraq is at once striking for its succinctness. In a comfortable but pacey afternoon and evening’s read we have the long cultural and historical background to the region’s instability, the course and legacy of the 1991 Gulf war, the diplomatic build-up to
Employed by Reuter’s in the early 1930s, the author’s father introduced him at six years old to a typewriter. The empty office that weekend was soon filled with ‘the noise of a he-man at work’. The damage done Patrick Skene Catling in that moment of parental lapse led to ‘a twisted psyche’, moods that ranged
If you’ll excuse the pun, Paul Delany’s biography of the man commonly dubbed ‘the greatest British photographer’ brings one thing sharply into focus. For Bill Brandt was not, as it happens, British at all, but was born in 1904 to German parents of Russian extraction — a fact he denied vehemently all his adult life.
If you were talking to a group of particle physicists and mentioned the word ‘fundamentalism’, they would assume that you were referring to Isaac Newton (who kept his belief in alchemy a well-guarded secret). To stem-cell researchers fundamentalism would mean going back to Harvey’s discovery of the circulation of blood. Post-Darwinians wouldn’t pass the time
There could scarcely be a more delightful way to remind oneself of the British and French statesmen who created the Entente Cordiale, signed on 8 April 1904, than to read this book. Ian Dunlop’s method of composition is unfashionable. It consists largely of the skilful selection of amusing passages from diplomatic memoirs and other works
The Voyage Home is the third book I’ve read about Africa recently. Like the others it captures and distills the unique texture and smell of Africa, the touching sense of being a decade or two out of time. Both The No. 1 Ladies Detective Agency by Alexander McCall Smith, so wonderfully tender and funny, and
A preliminary riffle through this novel is not all that encouraging. Three pages of spoof Acknow- ledgments (‘some of them are dead; most of them are strangers; the famous are not friends’) range from Graham Swift to Jonathan Swift and from Stevie Wonder to Ralph Vaughan Williams. There is a spoof Preface and a spoof
There are hundreds of references to Molvania on the Web, and one airline shows passengers a video about the place, but it is not on the maps. Michelin does not mention Molvania. However, this book locates it ‘north of Bulgaria and downwind of Chernobyl’. A new Mittel-Europa republic emergent, Slovakia-like, from the fall of the
‘Gays are cowardly.’ ‘Capricorns are self-confident.’ Both prop- ositions are (pace astrologers) simply untrue or, as the author puts it, spurious. ‘Gays are more likely to get Aids than non-gays.’ There is plenty of evidence for this, although of course not all gays get Aids. So this is what the author calls a non-universal but
My Ladybird book of The Story of Napoleon had two pages to illustrate 1812. Napoleon sits on a white horse and watches Moscow burn, torched by fleeing Russians. Then the Grande Armée retreats, a column winding into a blurry, white oblivion. ‘With the thermometer seventy degrees below freezing’, read the text, ‘few of those who
This provocative, titillating and seductive novel is about upper-class affectations and ‘the mystery of unearned greatness’. It focuses on a network of rich, blue-blooded and slightly dim grandees which apparently stretches ‘far beyond national boundaries’. Snobs describes in forensic detail a world where duchesses are ‘taken in’ to dinner and desperate, social-climbing women feel deeply
The epic survival story of the SAS patrol known as Bravo Two Zero during the first Gulf war until now, has largely overshadowed a darker story of incompetence and worse on the part of some of those who sent eight brave men into the desert on foot, on a Scud-hunt that was doomed from the
This is a sad little story of the author’s annus horribilis as a pupil barrister in the late Nineties. Today the Bar bends ever deeper before the winds of modernisation — an all-graduate profession which subordinates even the best and brightest to the continuing rigours of further training and examination, piling acronym upon acronym —
Who would have thought of Harrow as ‘the heathen temple’ or suburban Penge as Celtic pen ced, ‘head of the wood’? This new dictionary, the better part of 20 years in the making, re-enchants the prosaic and gives historical resonance to the timelessly English. We are reminded of the mixed Celtic, Roman, Scandina- vian, Germanic
Have we had enough Irish childhoods, lackadaisical days remote from English stresses, charming eccentrics, amusing turns of speech, rain, religion, nostalgia? Well, no, not if they are as acute and funny as this tale of a Protestant boyhood in County Meath. Homan Potterton is the youngest of eight children of long-established farming stock. He grew
Available from Heywood Hill, 10 Curzon Street, London W1J 5HH Producers of ‘period dramas’, on film or television, go to tremendous trouble to create the right ‘period look’. In the late Victorian town house, everything is late Victorian; in the Regency rectory, everything is Regency; and so on. All of which is, of course, absurd