On 7 September 1695, the 25-ship Grand Mughal fleet was returning through the Red Sea after its annual pilgrimage to Mecca when it was attacked by five pirate ships. In the ensuing battle, the pirates’ leader, an Englishman variously known as Henry Avery, Henry Every, the King of Pirates and Long Ben, seized precious jewels
Blake Morrison’s previous memoirsAnd When Did You Last See Your Father? (1993) and Things My Mother Never Told Me (2002) examined his parents with the clear-eyed appraisal that only adulthood brings. In the first, he evoked the vigour of his father, Arthur: his sense of fun when rule-breaking for thrills, and the selfish entitlement which
‘This is a book about how you don’t get over it,’ You Are Not Alone begins. If you’re new to bereavement, looking for a way through the death of a loved one, perhaps this doesn’t scream of optimism. But Cariad Lloyd’s warmth, generosity and gentle pragmatism makes her book one of the most reassuring I
The most important thing to know about ancient Greek mathematics is how little anyone knows about it. The scant evidence available today is tremendously indirect: reconstructions from unrepresentative survivals of fragments of translations of transcriptions of commentaries on compilations of summaries of allusions to refutations of excerpts of documents produced as part of an oral
Around dinner time on 21 November 2000, a nervous 19-year-old man knocked on the door of Maria Joel Dias da Costa’s house, located in the backcountry Amazonian town of Vila Rondon. The unknown man asked to see her husband Dezinho, a union leader, but he was out. She invited the visitor to wait, which he
‘Islands of stone’ would have been a good name for the Orkney archipelago, George Mackay Brown once wrote. The salt Atlantic winds mean that very few trees grow there, so stone provides for the dead – in the burial chamber at Maeshowe, for example – and the living. Less than a century ago, there were
Janet Malcolm’s formulation that a ‘journalist is a kind of confidence man, preying on people’s vanity, ignorance or loneliness, gaining their trust and betraying them without remorse’ comes to mind on page two of the darkly refulgent One Hundred Saturdays. That’s when the author Michael Frank mentions it was his idea to accompany his new
Most people know something about Florence Nightingale’s nursing expedition to Scutari and the Crimea during the Crimean War, and the ‘kingdom of horror’ that she and her nurses found there: unsanitary conditions in the hospitals, a broken-down supply system and British soldiers dropping like flies from disease rather than battle wounds. However, as Terry Tastard
In this engaging memoir, Natasha Lance Rogoff recounts the experience of bringing Sesame Street to Yeltsin’s Russia. A Russo-phile who changed her name from Susan to Natasha as a teenager, Lance Rogoff had been working in Moscow for more than a decade as a reporter and documentary filmmaker when she was approached to be the
One of Joseph O’Connor’s strengths is his magpie-like approach to history: he plunders it for stories that he can rework as fiction. His new novel is based on the exploits of Monsignor Hugh O’Flaherty, a senior official at the Vatican, who, together with colleagues, was responsible for saving the lives of 6,500 Allied soldiers and
Did you know that the elephant was the most written about animal in the Roman world? Pyrrhus of Epirus, of victory fame, was the first to introduce it to Italy as an engine of war when he invaded in 280 BC. Roman soldiers could not decide whether it was an animal or a machine. Eventually
At what point did the ponderous autobiography get edged out by the slinky elliptical memoir? Perhaps around the stage we all realised that, as Stephen Hough puts it, ‘a complete autobiography is usually boring or indecent. It’s the person at the dinner table who just won’t stop talking’. There’s certainly no holding forth (though perhaps
Bret Easton Ellis’s novels were my literary gateway drug when I was young, the stylised bleakness of his debut Less Than Zero a model for my own writerly aspirations. He was a wunderkind. The fact that he’d written his first novel while still a teenager seemed incredible to me as I read and re-read it:
It is Hollywood, in perpetual summer, and Ludwig Bemelmans has driven past some unusually well-groomed eucalyptus trees for a meeting with Elsie de Wolfe, Lady Mendl, interior decorator to the stars. In her salon is a footstool that once belonged to Madame de Pompadour. Lady Mendl’s husband comes into the room and trips over the
Marion Turner has written a superb biography of a woman who never lived. Alison, the Wife of Bath in Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales, is one of the most famous of all medieval women, even though she has only ever existed on the page. But Turner’s beautifully written, rewarding and thought-provoking book about this imaginary woman shows
Insofar as every reading of a book is a retelling of it, a writer needs a very good reason for doing a ‘contemporary retelling’ of a classic. In giving Becky Sharp the fleshed-out backstory denied her in Vanity Fair, Sarah May more than meets that requirement, though her novel still suffers by its proximity to
Mario Vargas Llosa wasn’t always a liberal. From his youth until his early thirties the Peruvian writer, born in 1936, was enthused by the utopian promises of socialism. He joined a communist cell at university, and in the 1950s spent half his salary on a subscription to Les Temps Modernes, the leftist journal founded by
In January 1804 the West Indian island of Saint-Domingue became the world’s first black republic after the slaves toiling in the sugar fields rose up against their French masters and, at the end of a 13-year insurgency, proclaimed independence. Saint-Domingue was renamed Haiti (an aboriginal Taino-Arawak Indian word meaning ‘mountainous land’) and the Haitian flag
Imagine a Stephen King thriller hijacked by Proust. Clammy-handed suspense, nerve-shredding tension, but related in serpentine, elegant prose, each climax held suspended – deferred gratification. What Javier Marías did for the spy story, Laurent Mauvignier does for terror. It begins quietly, with an ominous sense of something waiting to happen. An isolated hamlet in deep
In February 1939 Edouard Daladier, the French premier, told the US ambassador William Bullitt that ‘he fully expected to be betrayed by the British’, whose prime minister was ‘a desiccated stick, the King a moron and the Queen an excessively ambitious woman’. The British had become so feeble, he said, that they would betray all