Never was a monarch so undone by water as Henry I. A fruit of the sea killed him in 1135: he ate too many lampreys, a jawless, parasitic fish that sucks its prey to death. But the tragedy of his reign occurred 15 years earlier. At the most ill-fated party of the Middle Ages, his
When I studied anthropology back in the early 1980s, Neanderthals were still largely the bulk-browed brutes of yore, grunting in smoky caves and loping across the tundra. Their vanishing from the fossil record some 40,000 years ago was a result of competition, along with a little interbreeding, with our own forebears. The story, as I
Rose Tremain has followed her masterly The Gustav Sonata with an altogether different novel. In 1865, Clorinda Morrissey, a 38-year-old woman from Dublin, arrives in Bath and sells a ruby necklace in order to set up Mrs Morrissey’s High Class Tea Rooms. Mrs Morrissey believes that ‘the future was going to be perfumed with raspberry
It’s easy to forget that John F. Kennedy lived such a short life. At 43, he was the second youngest president in history; when he died, he was younger than Barack Obama was in 2009. Kennedy’s presidency was brief —‘a thousand days,’ as the historian and Kennedy confidant Arthur Schlesinger Jr memorably put it —
It is often said that the left does not understand human nature. Yet it is difficult to think of anything as antithetical to Homo sapiens as the notion, popularised by free marketeers during the 1980s, that people would willingly evacuate those parts of Britain where ‘market forces’ had decreed that collieries and steelworks were no
Sophie Macintosh’s Blue Ticket is not classic feminist dystopia. Yes, it is concerned with legislated fertility, a world where women’s bodies are monitored like science projects by condescending medics.But the horror here is not impregnation but unwanted childlessness. Blue tickets, dispensed (randomly? It’s not clear) by a machine on a girl’s first bleed, decree a
The West End was always something a little apart. Some years ago, I used to go drinking with a man who had jointly run one of the best Soho live music clubs of the late 1950s and 1960s. He told me that they received a visit in their early days from the Kray brothers demanding
Like Ottessa Moshfegh’s first novel Eileen (2015), Death in Her Hands plays with the conventions of noir. Vesta Gul, a recently widowed 72-year-old, lives in a secluded lake cabin in rural New England. Walking her dog one day in the woods, she finds a cryptic note under a rock: ‘Her name was Magda,’ it reads.
In Money for Nothing, Thomas Levenson brings us into the story of the South Sea Bubble by writing about the development of the mathematics of odds and prediction. These advances were the beginnings of actuarial science: an understanding of risk that underpins insurance. We start with Isaac Newton and his role in attempting to stabilise
Britain’s two most famous legendary figures, King Arthur and Robin Hood, remain enduringly and endearingly elusive, and thus ever-fascinating: Arthur slumbering in the mists of nebulous Avalon, Robin as a hardy perennial somewhere deep in Sherwood Forest. Historians, folklorists, Eng Lit academics and cranks — the list is not mutually exclusive — enter these realms
Staying with Peregrine Eliot (later 10th Earl of St Germans) at Port Eliot in Cornwall, Lucian Freud remembered that the Eliots ‘ate off solid silver plate, even shepherd’s pie’. In 1968, Freud was having an affair with Perry’s wife Jacquetta. According to her, it was an addiction: ‘Completely hooked, a dreadful drug…’ After two turbulent
Parents are always terrified of bad family history repeating itself. Prince Albert dreaded his son Bertie turning into a roué like his own father, and this of course happened. Charles Dickens had fantasised in David Copperfield that the jokey version of his own father — Mr Micawber — would become a success in life by
In 2012, the editors of Vice ran an article aimed at would-be contributors to their self-avowedly edgy magazine headed ‘Never Pitch Any of These Things to Us Again’. Among a list of no-nos that included burlesque dancing and art made of bodily fluids was the principality of Sealand. They wrote: OK, so an independent sovereign
Presumably because a small part of it takes place in Salford, the epigraph to Andrew O’Hagan’s latest novel consists of four lines from Ewan MacColl’s ‘Dirty Old Town’. More fitting, though, might have been six words from the Undertones’ ‘Teenage Kicks’: ‘Teenage dreams, so hard to beat.’ The first half of the book follows a
In 1798, Tipu Sultan of Mysore sent an embassy to Mauritius. At home, he had fought the British and seen his kingdom shrink. Now he hoped to recruit Mauritian republicans in a joint fight. Mauritius had been a base for French troops attacking the British in India in the 1780s. In return for their help,
‘I don’t at all hate lies,’ Elena Ferrante explained in Frantumaglia, her manifesto for authorial anonymity. ‘I find them useful and I resort to them when necessary to shield my person, feelings, pressures.’ Shortly after writing these words, Ferrante, who refuses all interviews and keeps her identity under wraps, was accused by an investigative journalist
Every so often the past makes a pass at you. An old school report, a train ticket, a curl from a first haircut falls out of an envelope and sends you tumbling back through the decades. For most of us these things are flotsam and jetsam, of momentary interest, but for Rachel Morris they are
As Colombia comes out of 50 years of civil war and into a still precarious peace, with some 220,000 dead, this timely book explores one of the few dividends to emerge from such a terrible conflict. Large areas of the country were isolated by the war, and so spared the ravages of modern development. Unlike
Is Boris Johnson a fan of Harry Perry Robinson? If he isn’t, he really ought to be. Reading this absorbing biography, I was struck by how much they have in common — especially in their early lives. Both men went to public school, then on to Oxford, then into journalism, where they proved incapable of
Lissa Evans has been single-handedly rescuing the Hampstead novel from its reputation of being preoccupied by pretension and middle-class morality. Her original black comedy (Crooked Heart) concerned Vee, a middle-aged suburban scammer, and the prodigiously bright but orphaned Noel, who join forces in north London’s urban village during the second world war. Evans then went
