Peter Conradi is a retired academic best known for his critical work on Iris Murdoch and, more recently, as her authorised biographer. The biography, though painstaking and full of interesting material, exemplified the difficulty of constricting a linear portrait of a thinker who not only wrote obsessively about mages and the electric currents — for
Anyone who gave themselves the pleasure of reading Death and the Penguin should certainly treat themselves to this sequel. And if you missed it, never mind, read this one anyway: it’s delicious; it will not detain you long and you can always go back and catch up later on its predecessor. The earlier book left
A hundred and twenty years ago, the global hyper-power invaded a strategic Middle Eastern country. It talked of self-government but imposed its own rule. Other powers were excluded. Despite repeated promises to leave, its troops did not finally do so until 74 years later. Egypt under British occupation at the end of the 19th century
When Hans Blix first became the UN’s chief Iraqi weapons inspector, journalists joked that his name made him sound like one of those sinister baddies who lurked in elaborate underground headquarters in Seventies James Bond films. (‘Choose your next witticism carefully, Mr Hussein. It may be your last.’) Much to the frustration of the British
Autism is in the air. Newspaper articles, television programmes and new books abound. It was not always thus; when Liam Nolan’s son, also called Liam, was diagnosed in the mid-Sixties, the term was almost unheard of by the general public. The condition was only identified at all in 1943. During Liam’s childhood, his behaviour was
To be fair to him, George C. Schoolfield, of Yale University, does admit in his opening sentence that ‘movement’ may be too strong a word to describe the collection of writers on whom his Baedeker focuses. So, I think, may ‘fashion’. Links between authors in these 23 cross-global chapters are certainly thin — here an
William Russell was a young American who worked as a clerk in the US embassy in Berlin at the time of the German invasion of Poland in September 1939. When Berlin Embassy, his account of those epic times appeared in 1941, it was acclaimed on both sides of the Atlantic. Little is known of what
Putin’s Progressby Peter TruscottSimon & Schuster, £17.99, pp. 370, ISBN 0743240057 Vladimir Putin will be re-elected President of Russia on Sunday with a thumping majority. This is the safest prediction it is possible to make in the New World Order where the word democracy can have many different definitions. In Russia the word means whatever
‘SCIENCE’S GREATEST DISCOVERY.’ So ran the front-page headline of the Reynolds’ Illustrated News on 1 May, 1932, the article underneath reporting that: ‘A dream of scientists has been realised. The atom has been split, and the limitless energy thus released may transform civilisation.’ The Sunday Express struck a more sombre note: ‘The Atom Split. But
Where are the songs of Spring? Well, certainly not in these short stories about people in crabbed old age or looking hard at death. Only in the last one, ‘The Silence’, where an ancient composer who believes that ‘the logic of music is eventually silence’, is any longing expressed to see ‘the cranes fly south
Colm T
‘For his part, she filled a significant void in his human intercourse (he had been happy when he found the intimacy of their letters was at once transferred to the vocal).’ Further down the page: ‘He had had Emma Lucie promise to keep watch on her … and to take whatever measures were necessary, in
This book, which presents itself as a no-holds-barred account of Joe Eszterhas’s reign as the toughest and most highly-paid screenwriter in Hollywood, is doubly misleading. To begin with, it’s heavily censored; and, secondly, he isn’t the fierce defender of his work that he purports to be, at least not judging from the way he’s allowed
I have a fantasy of returning to ancient London and finding the way to my Camden home, just using the Thames and various hills and hollows for navigation. What fun it would be to track down the hunting grounds of Wardour Street ringing to the cry of ‘Soho!’, the exclamation used by hare coursers that
Of the hundreds of books I have reviewed in the last half century only two could be classified as definitive. Margaret Smith’s three volumes of Charlotte Bront
In 1795, John Evans, the son of a Methodist preacher, set out from St Louis across the unchartered plains of North America in search of a lost tribe of ‘Welsh Indians.’ He had heard reports of a pale-skinned people speaking a language that sounded like Welsh inhabiting the area that is now North Dakota. Rumour
Richard Ford is now a forgotten figure and we must be grateful to Ian Robertson for bringing him to life in this scholarly biography. His Handbook for Travellers in Spain was published in 1845 by John Murray as one of his guides for the middle-class tourists who had replaced the aristocrats of the Grand Tour.
Two things about this book — the first on the artist for over a century — are immediately off-putting: intermittent mustard-coloured pages, which make it look like a magazine, and the insistence of Robyn Asleson, a fledgling American historian, that Albert Moore’s paintings transcend words. Nonetheless she manages to hold the reader’s attention, despite the
In its brief, action-filled history of 109 years the cinema has recapitulated the history of art from cave painting to Picasso, and conveniently for historians each decade has had a distinctive character. After the primitive but increasingly sophisticated fumblings of the first decade of the 20th century, the teen years saw the dominance of Chaplin
Judging from his publications, since semi-retiring from his hedge fund empire George Soros has sorted out the world’s problems at the rate of about one a year: George Soros on Globalisation, Soros on Global Capitalism, Soros on Democracy, Soros on the Soviet System. Does the man have hobbies? Can we expect Soros on Pigeon-fancying, or