In 1959, the public (i.e. private) schools were responsible for 55 per cent of the Oxbridge intake. By 1967 they were down to 38 per cent, with the majority of places going instead to the grammar schools. Four years later Anthony Sampson welcomed how ‘the trickle of grammar school boys to Oxbridge has turned into
One of the more daft but enduring spin-offs of the science fiction genre is steampunk – fiction fashioned with a retrofuturistic love of 19th-century industrial technology. Think of an ironclad of the air, shaped like a fantasy submarine, with six or more propeller engines powered by cogs and levers, funnels pumping out coal smoke from
Jane Smiley has form with mining classics for plots. Her 1991 Pulitzer winner A Thousand Acres was based on King Lear. Boccaccio’s The Decameron and Mark Twain’s The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn also inspired two of her previous 15 novels. In A Dangerous Business, which is set in a brothel in lawless 1850s California, she
The most influential Native American visitor to Europe in colonial times was a fiction. The protagonist of L’Ingénu, Voltaire’s novel of 1767, and of a dramatisation by the sage’s acolyte Jean-François Marmontel, was the very model of a noble Huron. He fought the British with distinction, fell in love with an imprisoned French lady and
In the penultimate entry of Toby Litt’s A Writer’s Diary, an autofictional daily record of a writer named Toby Litt (which first appeared from Substack), he admits he began the project wanting to write ‘the best book that has ever been written about writing – about the physical act of writing, and the metaphysical act’.
Edi is dying of ovarian cancer and she’s craving the lemon cake she once got from Dean & Deluca deli in New York in the mid-1990s. Her forever best friend Ash is keeping vigil by Eli’s bedside in the Graceful Shepherd Hospice in western Massachusetts, trying to track down that elusive cake and keep Edi
‘James Bond is just a piece of nonsense I dreamt up,’ the former naval intelligence officer Ian Fleming once said. ‘He’s nota Sidney Reilly you know.’ Sidney Reilly was not really Sidney Reilly either; but he was certainly a James Bond. Born Sigmund or Schlomo Rosenblum (this is a book full of caveats), he spoke
If you read only the title of Charlie Taverner’s book Street Food you could be forgiven for assuming it was an exploration of the stalls that line the trendier streets of our cities, offering bibimbap and bao, jerk chicken and jian bing. But the author’s focus predates brightly coloured gazebo hoardings and polystyrene packaging and
Explaining how she managed to kick her cocaine habit, the singer Fiona Apple recalled ‘one excruciating night’ she spent trapped in Quentin Tarantino’s home cinema with Paul Thomas Anderson listening to the two Hollywood directors brag competitively, and apparently indefatigably, about their professional achievements. ‘Every addict should just get locked in a private movie theatre
In the 1964 Hammer film The Devil-Ship Pirates, a privateer of the defeated Spanish Armada escapes the English fleet and puts in for repairs at an isolated coastal village whose inhabitants have not received news of the battle’s outcome. There the Spanish convince the villagers that Spain was victorious, and so impose submission on them.
In Jawaharlal Nehru’s final will and testament he asked for most of his ashes be taken in an aeroplane and scattered ‘over the fields where the peasants of India toil, so they might mingle with the dust and soil of India and become an indistinguishable part of India’. Taylor C. Sherman says this ‘request was
The name Lalla Romano is not familiar to English readers. Despite being much acclaimed during her lifetime (and the recipient of Italy’s Strega Prize), works by the novelist, poet and painter have rarely made it out of her native language. Prior to A Silence Shared, masterfully translated by Brian Robert Moore, only one of Romano’s
Senior judges are often seen as being cloistered and aloof, carrying the heavy responsibility of incarcerating hundreds of people every year without having heard the clang of prison doors themselves. Lord Woolf is an exception. The former Lord Chief Justice (2000-5) was not only banged up as a student – after protesting over the banning
Nothing is less animate than a stone. There is little of significance in the random compounds that make up the Earth’s surface. They are useful, yes – for building, for metals and chemical yields – but they’re just stones. Yet throughout human history, the pebbles at our feet have exerted a fascination that goes far
The writer of contemporary history has a number of advantages over his colleagues who deal with the more distant past. It is not only that the profusion of media in recent decades supplies abundant first drafts of that history. There are also the twin forces of living witnesses and the author’s own memory. In this
One of the most beautiful spots I know in Britain is a steep-sided gorge in Devon where the River Dart carves through the Dartmoor rock on its way to the sea. The trees on either side are small, twisted and covered in ferns, mosses and lichens, so that even on a dull day the colours,
A man is driving alone across America, under the passenger seat is an envelope containing a large chunk of cash. For reasons unclear, he’s desperate to erase himself; he avoids surveillance with the inspired agility of the truly paranoid. His urge to disappear, ‘to leave as illegible a mark as possible on the Earth’, leads
Biblical scholars, one of the greatest of them once remarked, go looking for Jesus only to find themselves staring at their own reflection down the bottom of a very deep well. As with scholars, so with cultures. The Victorian Jesus was meek and mild and proper and principled. There’s a rather good sketch of ‘GOP
A few years ago I was feeling peckish at Catania airport. I wandered over to the main café and spotted – beyond the stacks of panini stuffed with wilting prosciutto – a sign promising pasta. I assumed they’d be doling it out ready-made from a hulking pot, school-canteen style. But no: they were carefully blanching
This is a short book, but it carries a punch, as does its subject, the exclamation mark – or shriek, or bang, as it is occasionally and graphically called. I use the word ‘graphically’ advisedly, for the punctuation mark falls into an ambiguous territory overlapping orthography and illustration. I say to myself that I don’t
