Rose Tremain’s 15th novel begins with a favoured schmaltzy image of high Victoriana: it is a night (if not dark and stormy, then certainly dark and wet) in the year 1850, and a baby has been left at the gates of Victoria Park. Then we have an uncanny detail: the baby is sniffed out by
It is, as you’ve possibly noticed, a tricky time for old-school American liberals, now caught between increasingly extreme versions of their traditional right-wing adversaries and the new Puritans on the left. In Our Country Friends, Gary Shteyngart sets out to explore their resulting confusion — but ends up inadvertently exemplifying it. Like his creator, the
Stuart England did not do its anti-Catholicism by halves. In the late 1670s and early 1680s, a popular feature of London’s civic life were the annual Pope-burning pageants which took place every 17 November to commemorate the accession of Elizabeth I and the nation’s historic deliverance from the forces of international Catholicism. In 1679, one
Important historic gardens fall into two main categories: those made by one person, whose vision has been carefully preserved down the years, sometimes for centuries, and those that are altered and developed by succeeding generations. Rousham, in Oxfordshire, is an example of the first and Bodnant, in the Conwy valley in north Wales, the second.
‘Victorian’ stuck, and ‘Edwardian’ too. But ‘Georgian’, as an adjective associated with the next monarch in line, never caught on. It was already assigned, of course, but George V very strikingly didn’t embody his time in the way that his father and grandmother did. The adjective only really succeeded in one specific instance: as the
In the 1964 film My Fair Lady after Colonel Pickering has secured the help of an old friend to pull strings at the Home Office (plus ça change) in the hope of finding the absconded Eliza Doolittle, Professor Higgins snaps: Why is thinking something women never do? And why is logic never even tried? Straightening
A Tatler photographer once told me that the secret to taking a good photo was the three Ts: tum, tits, teeth. Suck it in, push ’em out, show your pearly whites. Leaving aside David LaChapelle’s portrait of Pamela Anderson, there’s a shortage of Ts in Phillip Prodger’s Face Time. This looks likea coffee-table book but
Bernardine Evaristo’s Manifesto — part instructional guide for artists, part call to arms for equality, part literary memoir —shimmers with unfailing self-belief and a strong vein of humility. When Evaristo won the Booker Prize in 2019 for her magnificent seventh novel Girl, Woman, Other, the first black woman to do so, it was the pinnacle
As humans, we are supposed to have an aversion to slime. It should repel us. Objects and organisms that might be harmful trigger feelings of disgust which keep us away. And, according to the biologist Susanne Wedlich, the common denominator of ‘wide-ranging microbial threats, covering sickness, sex, death and putrefaction’ is their sliminess. It is
Whatever your favourite theory of creativity, Paul McCartney has a cheery thumbs-up to offer. You think the secret is putting in the hours? ‘We played nearly 300 times in Hamburg between 1960 and 1962.’ Or could it be a wide range of cultural inputs to assimilate and remix? The Arty Beatle hoovered up Shakespeare, Dryden,
Those for whom Dave Eggers’s name evokes only his much praised memoir A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius (2000) may be surprised at just how much straight fiction he has written. ‘Those for whom’, here, is code for me. I confess it, the pros and cons of transparency being one of the themes of the
Pan’s name is thought to derive from ‘paean’, the ancient Greek verb meaning ‘to pasture’. His half-man, half-goat form reflected his role in protecting flocks of goats and those who herded them among the wild hills of Arcadia. Panic was his superpower, freaking out mortals in the woods with distorted sounds, even neutralising hostile armies.
If you were to glance only briefly at the title of the Irish poet Doireann Ní Ghríofa’s prose debut you might be forgiven for assuming that A Ghost in the Throat was a story about demonic possession — and you wouldn’t be entirely wrong. Demonic? No. Possession? Certainly. This spectral, arresting and at times disorientating
If you’ve only heard one thing about Peter Thiel (and many have heard nothing at all) it is that he is a believer in the power of young blood. The tech multibillionaire and founding investor of the surveillance company Palantir is a public advocate of parabiosis, an experimental field of biology investigating whether transfusions of
For many in the West, Albania remains as remote and shadowy as the fictional Syldavia of the Tintin comics. The country came into existence only in 1912, with the decline of the Ottoman Empire. Its first ruler, King Zog, was ousted by Mussolini when he invaded in 1939. Hitler used Albania as a springboard for
In 1536 there were 850 monastic houses in England and Wales; just four years later they were all gone. The romantic remains of many of them still grace our landscape, Shakespeare’s ‘bare ruin’d choirs’ receiving more visitors today than the living communities did half a millennium ago. Now these visitors are primarily tourists and heritage
In my mother’s final days we had a long conversation about the second world war. I asked if she’d ever thought we might lose. ‘No,’ she snapped. ‘I knew we were too clever for them.’ The chief of the imperial general staff, Sir Alan Brooke, had been less sanguine. On 31 March 1942 he confided
Louis MacNeice once wrote that if you want to know what chasing the Grail is like, ask Lancelot not Galahad. Because failure helps you see — the successful types are too busy succeeding. Two recent books on tennis put this theory to the test. The Master, by Christopher Clarey, long-time tennis correspondent for the NY
To many people Tony Wilson was a bigmouth Mancunian, brash music impresario and jobbing television presenter. But to the generation that came of age in the late 20th century he was a guide to the future. We have him to thank for ushering in the strangest, most revelatory pop music to the cultural mainstream. Wilson
In the months before the outbreak of the first world war, Anton Heideck arrives in Vienna. Family life offered him the prospect of a job in his father’s meat factory, but he goes to the big city to start a career as a writer. What he finds is Delphine. They fall in love, move into