The Peckham Experiment was a radical, if earnest, initiative begun in 1926 in which working-class families were given access to physical activities, such as swimming, as well as workshops and a shot at cultural betterment. It’s into this rather worthy scheme that identical twins, the subjects of Guy Ware’s novel, are born: Charlie and JJ,
As a teenager growing up in Cheshire I had a metal detector. Although I was slightly ashamed of it, I found all sorts of intriguing things: shrapnel, a French coin, a Khartoum Racing Club key ring, an adze and a silver brooch in the shape of a lobster. All went well until I found a
The standard complaint of anyone doing a Christmas gift books guide is that the books aren’t up to much. I myself may have moaned to this effect in the past. But either they are getting better or my critical faculties are beginning to fail. I think it’s the former, but if I’m wrong don’t be
Do you ever think about the ground beneath your feet? I do. Having read a number of popular science books on this most precious of natural resources, I am now obsessed. So much has recently been discovered about the invaluable symbiotic relationships that form between microbes, fungi and plant roots in the soil that it
Even if notions of beauty are treacherously fugitive, and even if interpretations of history are nowadays subject to revision by class, gender and race, there can be no civilised argument against the preservation and enjoyment of great architecture and art from the past. But ‘heritage’ is not quite that simple. There’s something else going on.
The text of this well illustrated book is mostly John James Audubon’s, from journals unpublished in his lifetime. Part I describes his 1826 voyage from America to England to set in motion the great task – which would take 11 years – of fundraising for the printing of his mighty double elephant folio book in
Nowhere in this extraordinary prison memoir do we find out why Fatos Lubonja was sentenced to imprisonment in Spaç, the Albanian jail where some inmates worked the copper mines. He’s written about it elsewhere. His first seven years there were for ‘agitation and propaganda’, after police found his diaries, with criticisms of the Albanian tyrant
This profound and emotion-laden book ends, as did the first world war, in hope, and no little catharsis. It begins, though, in overpowering grief, not just that of the Western Front’s bereaved, but the author’s. In 2016 Sir Anthony Seldon’s wife died of cancer, diagnosed five years earlier. They had met at Oxford, she was
At Tate Britain this year, for the first time since 1926, nine of John Singer Sargent’s brilliantly painted and affectionately characterful portraits of the Wertheimer family have been displayed together in their own room. This was what the wealthy London art dealer Asher Wertheimer had always intended when he bequeathed these paintings to the nation.
Novels about art are often strange, vain affairs. After all, writing about artists, especially fictional ones, can seem like a strained exercise in trying to yoke together two irreconcilable mediums. It is to Anthony Quinn’s credit that his ninth novel, Molly & the Captain, not only succeeds admirably as a centuries-spanning account of the influence
‘In Argentina,’ Mariana Enriquez writes in Our Share of Night, ‘they toss bodies at you.’ It is an arresting, chilling image; one that Gaspar, the central character, experiences both literally and figuratively. Bodies are everywhere in this novel – whether dead, undead, dying or decomposing, at swim or making love – and what they feel
It is hard to imagine why anyone should want to write one, but if there has to be a history of the whole world then Simon Sebag-Montefiore must be as good a candidate to write it as anyone. He would seem to have read pretty well everything that has ever been written, visited everywhere of
The 14th century was ‘a bad time for humanity’. In the words of the Pulitzer prize-winning historian Barbara Tuchman: If [those years] seemed full of brilliance and adventure to a few at the top, to most they were a succession of wayward dangers; of the three galloping evils, pillage, plague and taxes; of fierce and
Thrice nominated for the International Booker prize, the Argentine author Samanta Schweblin is part of a wave of Latin American writers whose work has been dubbed ‘narrative of the unusual’. While Seven Empty Houses is less fantastical than Schweblin’s previous collection, Mouthful of Birds, the unease of the uncanny persists. Written as she was moving
One test of how famous a writer has become, I’d suggest, is what jeux d’esprit they’re allowed to publish. By this criterion, Nick Hornby still has some distance to go before he matches Haruki Murakami, who in 2020 gave us Murakami T – a fully illustrated guide to his own T-shirts. Even so, Dickens and
Paul Newman explains at the beginning how this book came about: ‘I want to leave some kind of record that sets things straight and pokes holes in the mythology that’s sprung up around me… Because what exists on the record has no bearing at all on the truth.’ Fair enough – but how come the
People no longer moan about most of the things that bothered them during my childhood. You don’t hear old folk at bus stops ridiculing the ‘new pence’ of decimal currency. Students no longer care about Vietnam. Retired wing commanders have finally stopped writing to the newspapers about the misuse of that fine old English word
‘To my mind,’ Renoir once wrote, ‘a picture should be something pleasant, cheerful and pretty. There are too many unpleasant things in life as it is.’ What would he have made of Edward Brooke-Hitching’s The Madman’s Gallery? Of the 100-plus artworks it examines, few are cheerful and fewer pretty. Often you turn the pages of
During the years between school and my first job on a newspaper I worked briefly in Paris in an antique shop in the septième, owned by an ancient White Russian who had fled Petrograd at the end of 1917. She was a charming old woman, impeccably turned out and with beautiful manners. She was prone
In Folk Music, Greil Marcus has captured an entire world of the creative and cultural development of the artist known as Bob Dylan in a single book. He not only tells a Dylan biography in seven songs but creates an autobiography of his own long career as a writer on music and America, as well