One of the pleasures of reading, often looked down on in literary circles, is when one warms to an author’s characters. Among the many delights of Mrs Calder and the Hyena, Marjorie Ann Watts’s second collection of short stories, was my feeling that here were people with whom I would get along. Ostensibly, they are
In the early 20th century, the world went ‘raving mad on the subject of radium’, according to George Bernard Shaw. The newly discovered element was considered a miracle cure, used to treat about 150 medical complaints. And it was fashionable: society ladies drank afternoon tea in rooms filled with radium vapours, and cosmetic companies developed
Interviewed on television for his 80th birthday in 1959, E.M. Forster said that one of the reasons he was so fond of King’s College, Cambridge, where he had lived as a Fellow since 1946, was ‘a very precious tradition, that the old people and the young can meet here very easily and without self-consciousness’. In
Susan Barker’s Old Soul opens with pages from a diary: ‘T’ records a late-night conversation with a woman known as ‘E’ as they watch Venus rise. While they talk, we learn that Venus ‘spins slowly, at the pace of a walking man’, so one day is longer than a year. E imagines she is there,
Arms outstretched, head thrown back, flounced skirt rippling over a raised leg. The 1942 photograph of Sophie Maslow dancing in her own creation Folksay makes her look as if she is performing in Seven Brides for Seven Brothers or some MGM musical spectacular. Yet Maslow was a radical artist, who asserted that modern dance was
Who would you invite to your ideal dinner party? Plato answered that question centuries ago with his sublime Symposium, a gripping, novel-like account of a gathering of Athenian notables, which is also a powerful philosophical exploration of the force of Eros, or love. We know that the feast is supposed to have taken place in
In late 2018 a Saudi journalist living in exile in Canada, who liked to work out in between recording YouTube critiques of his government, ordered some protein powder online. When a text message landed on Omar Abdulaziz’s smartphone notifying him of a DHL delivery, he clicked on it without hesitating. The portrait Deibert paints is
In his closing pages, Chris Evans delivers his verdict on his subject: That’s what Gary Lineker is: human. As his story shows, it’s possible to accomplish seemingly impossible things while staying grounded and true to your roots. I hate to be cruel about a diligently researched book by a freelance journalist. But unthinking writing cannot
What does it take to bury an outdated argument? The thought occurred while reading Motherland, one of a series of recent books seemingly haunted by the ghost of Hugh Trevor-Roper. Back in 1964, Trevor-Roper, an expert on the English Civil War and the Third Reich, made the mistake of opining on African history. There was
It is rare to read a book about Cicero that likens its hero to a demagogue. Rome’s prosecutor of conspiracy and corruption in the last years of the Republic is seen more commonly as a toga-draped crusader for virtue. Was he also a ranter steeped in violence, crude character-assassination, tendentious storytelling and racial stereotypes? Yes,
London, June 1877. Beneath a cloudy sky, the celebrated art critic John Ruskin strode along Bond Street towards the newly opened Grosvenor Gallery. Inside, he viewed a smash-hit show of beautiful and progressive art. At least that was the popular opinion. With a few exceptions, Ruskin dismissed the works on display as eccentric, impertinent and
Whenever a new study of the Nazi regime appears, it is taken as a given that after Adolf Hitler seized power and became dictator of Germany in 1933 an egalitarian society emerged, very different to previous decadent, backward-looking generations. In this modern era, it is assumed, the concerns of the Kaiser and the German elite
My cat can smell depression. Another family cat could smell my stepfather’s dementia. They both became more affectionate and tactile: the dementia-smelling cat would gently paw my stepfather, when he hadn’t even liked her when he had been well. My cat comes in close when my mood is darker. Perhaps both cats were using other
Winston Churchill hoped and expected his autobiography, My Early Life, to be read as much as literature as history, and also as an adventure story. He dedicated it ‘To a New Generation’, and it was especially intended to inspire people in their early twenties. ‘Twenty to 25, those are the years,’ he wrote. ‘Don’t be
Maeve Brennan (1917-93) was a supremely gifted Irish/American writer, whose work is periodically rediscovered, only to vanish again. It’s as if her literary reputation (she has been compared with Joyce, Flaubert and Chekhov among others) won’t stay fixed and is as homeless as she herself became. Arriving home to Dublin, Anastasia expects a warm welcome
When José Saramago denounced the Bible as a ‘catalogue of cruelties’ at the launch of his novel Cain in 2009, the response from the Catholic church in Portugal was fast and frosty. The country’s conference of bishops labelled his comments ‘offensive’, adding: ‘Insults do no one any good, particularly from a Nobel prizewinner.’ Saramago might
A.J. Ayer and other thinkers linked to the Vienna Circle famously contradicted themselves. A claim such as ‘all truths are scientific truths’ cannot itself be verified scientifically. So whether the assertion is true or false, it follows that there is at least one fact which isn’t a physical fact. Thus metaphysics buries its own undertakers.
A commercial publisher bringing out a book of old academic essays on Austrian writers, some completely unknown to English readers, might need an explanation. In this case the author is W.G. Sebald, who produced a series of cogitative books that made his name in the 1990s. Before he acquired the worldwide authority of The Emigrants,
At around 9 p.m. on 5 March 1953 Sergei Prokofiev died of a brain haemorrhage on the sofa of his Moscow flat. He was 61, and had struggled for years with ill health. He had long complained of pain in his soul. Less than an hour later, the source of that pain, Joseph Stalin, died
I was on the phone to a friend recently, who asked me what I was reviewing. ‘It’s a book by a lady intellectual,’ I began. ‘Oh my God,’ she said, ‘I hope you don’t put that in your review.’ ‘I’m not that stupid,’ I replied, ‘but it is very important that she’s a woman.’ A