During the Second World War both Germans and Allies routinely shot civilians in reprisal for attacks on their armed forces. One shudders to think that a ratio could even be set at which such killings could be considered legitimate. In 1941 Hitler set the bar at 100 civilians per soldier. How high is too high?
Some say it’s the walk there that does it. The promenade down a rambling city path and through a crowd of coffee-swigging commuters that fuels the inspiration that can only be spat out when one is positioned at a desk before a blank library wall. In the fourteenth century in Italy the poet Petrarch rekindled
The Roman orator Quintilian offered some practical advice to the budding politician: don’t move too languidly, flick your fingers, or tilt your neck in a feminine way if you want to master the art of rhetoric. Doing all or any of these things could make you seem unmanly. You might have been born a man,
In 1842, a wealthy heiress called Sarah Losh built a church in Wreay (rhymes with ‘near’, apparently), close to Carlisle. Coupling carvings of caterpillars with turtle gargoyles and a spattering of pinecones, she was, stylistically, half a century before her time. As a female architect and builder, she was still more precocious. The Pinecone by
Among the new words which entered the English Dictionary last year was ‘overshare’, def: ‘to reveal an inappropriate amount of detail about one’s personal life’. If that detail pertains to common experience, though, is it inappropriate to share it, or just unnecessary? Unmastered, I think, will divide on that question. It will divide readers, in
A fascinating case was recently brought before the Italian courts. After six years of conjugal submission to her padrone (far better than master, give it that) a woman has filed for divorce with accusations of abuse. The slight snag is that prior to marriage she signed a contract with her lover agreeing to offer herself
The real shock of the new came in 1991. It was sobering, and it was reverent, which aren’t exactly the first words one would associate with The Shock of the New art critic Robert Hughes. No wonder it went largely unacknowledged when he passed away last month. While Hughes’ seminal art history series continues to
Somehow, sex is less appealing when it’s characterised as ‘equitable return’. Though I’ve heard the phrase used in a similar context a dozen times since, I wasn’t quite sure what it meant when I first encountered it three years ago. I’d been drafted in to persuade a wealthy businessman at an art auction that taxidermy
This review will not be kind. But let’s not start that way. Ground lies between. Rewind. Am I the only person to find being addressed like this intensely irritating? China Mieville’s new book Railsea is full of it. Some books are so wrought with references, intertext, allusion that can only manifest itself through repeated syntactical
Metamorphosis, a temporary exhibition at the National Gallery, London, showcases a range of contemporary artistic responses to Renaissance painter Titian’s Diana and Actaeon and Diana and Callisto metamorphosis paintings, inspired by Ovid. Daisy Dunn looks at the new poetry inspired by the collaboration. When the hapless youth Actaeon peeled back a curtain dangling in
One of the puns that circulated the cultured elite of Italy during the Renaissance compared the potency of an artist’s paintbrush, his pennello, with his penis, il pene. Raphael, who by all accounts liked his women, perhaps embodied that duality best of all. The artist’s fascination with female kind, Antonio Forcellino suggests in his brilliant
I can’t help thinking that the literary editor is having a little chuckle to himself, in his own private way, as he hands me Walking Home: Travels with a Troubadour on the Pennine Way to review. What he knows is that, for my sins, I have never been anywhere near the Pennine Way, the long
The most obvious — but far from the only — author to read when in Madrid must be Ernest Hemingway. For a man so fond of the laconic line, his rambling, enduring presence in the city is at once ironic and misplaced. It’s not only the guidebooks which are directing me to his erstwhile favourite
Something’s amiss when a nice glass of Rioja in the middle of Madrid costs just €1.90. As Spain’s credit rating approached ‘junk’ status yesterday the country recorded a dramatic decline in house prices for the first quarter. The scale and impact of the problem is everywhere visible on the city’s streets. A rising homeless population
It is a pretty toothy jaw of hell that Philip II of Spain, the Doge of Venice, and the Pope kneel before in prayer in a famous El Greco painting of the late 1570s. Philip and the other rulers of the so-called Holy League might just observe within hell’s mouth the skeletons of those they deemed
In the US, Simon Mawer’s new novel The Girl Who Fell From The Sky is rather more optimistically entitled Trapeze. It opens as a girl with three aliases hurls herself through an aircraft hatch into occupied France. She’s an SOE spy, and the life she’s fallen into has all the surrealism of a circus. During
Some war veterans slip back into civilian life with reasonable ease, stiff of limb, stiff of upper lip. If at first it’s a case of concealment and self-restraint, there’s at least some chance that play-acting can infiltrate reality. The protagonist of Toni Morrison’s new novel, Home, is called Frank Money. He has just returned to
William Boyd is to write the next book in the James Bond franchise. The as yet untitled novel will be published next autumn. To mark the announcement, Daisy Dunn casts her mind back to a recent encounter with Boyd, where he spoke about the art of imagining and writing a thriller. It’s an ambitious eight
In the fifth century BC Herodotus of Halicarnassus set out a history of hostilities between the Greeks and the Persians. For all his quirky non-sequiturs (Ethiopians’ skin is black, so must be their semen…) he fulfilled his not-so-modest objective to immortalize the deeds of Greeks and non-Greeks alike, in particular, the reason they warred against
Elif Shafak, the most widely read novelist in Turkey, was in advocatory mood at Oxford Literary Festival last Saturday. Lamenting the demise of the kind of oral tradition former generations once extolled in Turkey, she illustrated some of the ways in which language in a written culture can be used to address barriers. Above all,