Daisy Dunn

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 her training a woman had told the young, bilingual agent, ‘We girls have an advantage over the men. We can always carry items – messages and the like – where no gentleman will ever see them. You might call it inside information.’ Heeding her advice, the spy (Marian is her natural name) takes a pair of radio crystals, wraps them in a condom, and buries the package inside herself. She’s good to go. Mawer is a masterful storyteller.

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 his native town in Georgia from fighting in the Korean War, and discovered that he has no true home. He’s always known he has no money. He tries to overcome the wartime memories he’s carried with him from Korea, but when does a coping mechanism become just a lie? And a lie yet another thing to cope with? Morrison’s book becomes, in part, a document for Frank Money’s thoughts and confessions.

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 minute walk from St. Hilda’s College to the Master’s Garden of Christ Church, where William Boyd is preparing to appear at the Oxford Literary Festival. He’s visibly bracing himself. It’s quite a walk from there to the stage - the kind of walk you’d make at a school prize-giving. A formal path for such an unassuming man. I imagine him making the journey I’ve just done over the bridge from St.

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 one another. Tom Holland (who is, incidentally, in the process of translating Herodotus’ Histories) evokes more than a little of this spirit in his new book, In the Shadow of the Sword, an intrepid history of the evolution of the Arab Empire. From Rubicon to Persian Fire and Millennium Holland has hurtled through ancient history like a runaway horse on a hippodrome.

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, and in whatever form, ‘we need stories’, she explained. The curiously nomadic Dr. Shafak was born to Turkish parents, raised by her mother (a diplomat) and grandmother, and only acquired English after moving from her birthplace in Strasbourg to Madrid as a child.

Ninety per cent of the population of Florence is Roman Catholic. Apparently that’s common knowledge, but sometimes it’s the little things that hammer home the big statistics. In my case it was a recent tour of the city’s bookshops, which reveal far more besides about Florentine reading habits relative to British ones. Many of the general bookshops in the city centre double as stockists for theologians and are consequently rammed full of browsing monks. The other curious thing about these shops is that several are thence divided again into two halves, one dedicated to novels and non-fiction printed in Italian, the other to the same books printed in English.

‘How we perceive the past, what we see in it and what we ignore, depends on our current perspective’, writes Faramerz Dabhoiwala at the end of his hotly-anticipated The Origins of Sex. Well, quite. In seeking words to describe Dabhoiwala’s history of sex, though, none could be more appropriate. The book resounds with sundry modern truths, so much so, in fact, that when Dr. Dabhoiwala finally poses the question, ‘How far, then, have we come?’ The answer, ‘Not very, sir, since 1800’, springs to mind.

While the V&A is ever the place to move with the times, it values its traditions and knows what it does best. The museum’s major forthcoming Autumn exhibition, Hollywood Costume, promises to be a crowd pleaser. In many ways it will hark back to the groundbreaking 1979 V&A exhibition, The Art of Hollywood, which focused on film set — as opposed to fashion — design. Orson Welles wrote the foreword to the earlier exhibition’s catalogue: 'Dear John Hambley, Thanks, but I don’t think I’m a good choice for the foreword to your catalogue. Menzies is the only name on your list I could enthuse over.

The dowdy Queen Anne is back in fashion. Anne Somerset’s new biography of Queen Anne, that most enigmatic of monarchs, is published today. It is nearly 300 years since Anne’s death, and a popular account of her life is well overdue. She assumed the throne of a frankly second-rate power and left it a dominant force in global politics and commerce. That transformation is hugely important to the history of Britain as a nation state; and it merits widespread discussion because Anne’s crowning achievement, the Union of Scotland and England, is under threat. The book is timely; and it is also exhaustive — covering both the general political picture and Anne’s intimate history.

The English National Ballet’s performance of the Nutcracker was especially enchanting this year, but I left wondering what the story’s original author, E.T.A. Hoffmann would have made of it all.   Hoffmann was long dead when his short story, Nussknacker und Mausekönig (The Nutcracker and the Mouse King) (1816) came to inspire the ballet a generation later. Even if he had lived to see it set to Tchaikovsky’s magical score, he’d have found his own credit severely diminished. For in fact it was the more established and popular author Alexandre Dumas’ adaptation of Hoffmann’s tale that was, and still is, popularly recognised as the ballet’s main source of inspiration.

‘Castrati were even said to know the ‘secret des Lesbiennes’ when it came to giving women sexual pleasure, cheerfully making up for their cruel loss with improvised dildos made of wax.’ Helen Berry’s The Castrato and His Wife, a broadly biographical study of a castrated Italian opera singer named Giusto Ferdinando Tenducci, describes the sexual potency a eunuch could pose, or at least be considered to pose, in eighteenth-century England. While castrati (castrated men) were hardly rare in Italy at this date — it was estimated that 4,000 Italian boys were castrated each year to keep their voices juvenile for operatic training — in London they remained a curious, if not entirely rare, exotic import.

Sir Henry Raeburn’s exquisite nineteenth-century portrait of Sir Walter Scott hangs — magisterial, but unfamiliar — in an ordered sea of Scottish portraits, of Scottish subjects, in the renascent Scottish National Portrait Gallery. As the stock picture question of University Challenge well attests, putting a face to a famous name, especially that of a writer like Scott, is no easy feat. Having succeeded, there’s always something satisfying about staring into the eyes of an illustrious figure formerly visualized in the mind’s eye alone. The Edinburgh gallery provides well for innate curiosity, making familiar the unknown faces behind great novels, philosophical tracts, paintings by those more accustomed to residing on the other side of the canvas.

It took ten attempts, nine rejections, one brave publisher, but ultimately only a handful of revisions before the late Sir William Golding finally saw his debut novel, Lord of the Flies, in print in 1954. To mark the centenary of Golding’s birth the Bodleian Library in Oxford recently unveiled the original manuscript. The book’s text, instantly familiar, is displayed alongside a collection of Golding’s other, less celebrated books, highlighting the true paradox of his literary career.   While there’s no shame in growing fat off the royalties of a single masterpiece, one of the many things John Carey’s magnificent biography of William Golding made clear is that he never wanted to be a one-hit wonder.

As Leonardo da Vinci: Painter at the Court of Milan opens at the National Gallery, Daisy Dunn looks at his famous Renaissance biographer, Giorgio Vasari. Giorgio Vasari’s book The Lives of the Most Eminent Artists, Sculptors, and Architects, commonly abbreviated to The Lives is not what one might expect of a history, or a biography, or an art book of any kind. Its sixteenth-century Italian audience probably found it equally genre-defying. Discursive, inaccurate, shot through with an agenda that corrupted objectivity, Vasari’s Lies, as it is often called, is nonetheless indispensible, especially to students of Leonardo da Vinci.   Vasari was an artist before he was an artists’ biographer. He was good but never great, and he probably knew it.

This clip, about a Luddite monk's discovery of the book, has been circulating YouTube. How do you use it? If you close this ‘book’, will all the text inside be saved, or will it just disappear? Plus ça change…  On a separate but related point, there was a particularly well-documented case of a vanishing text in 2009. Following an ownership dispute, Amazon erased George Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four from the Kindle, and all the users’ annotations. Readers could appreciate the irony, if little else. This was a vanishing act worthy of Airstrip One.   For a whole text to disappear like that is a rare hiccup, but to lose a single word or part of a text during digitization is a constant danger.

Oh what a tangled web she weaves! Victoria Hislop’s third novel, the appropriately titled The Thread, is pleasingly complex. The story traces several generations of a fictional Greek family called Komninos against the historical backdrop of the rise and fall of Greece’s second city, Thessaloniki, in the 20th century. To make things even knottier, most of the characters have some connection to the textile industry, and while for some this is booming, for others it remains a labour of love. The most fascinating element of the book develops out of the history of Thessaloniki itself. Historically, the city has an impressive heritage at stake.

'They were afraid. Brave men are always afraid. Courage isn't the absence of fear, it's the willingness to face fear. They faced their fears.' The words are familiar. Euripides rehearsed them, Seneca upheld them, Mark Twain perpetuated them. But never have they seemed as relevant as when former SOE [Special Operations Executive] agent Noreen Riols spoke them of her former fellow agents in an auditorium of stunned Guildford Book Festival goers last Sunday afternoon. That's the thing about spies, they're practical, resourceful people, not idle dreamers. Compare Franklin D.

As part of the Guildford Book Festival, Lynne Truss spoke last Saturday evening to an audience gathered in Watts Gallery – the spectacular space once owned by the Victorian artist G.F. Watts that now houses the largest collection of his works. Truss was discussing her novel, Tennyson’s Gift, which imagines what it could have been like to belong to Watts’s set at Freshwater Bay on the Isle of Wight in the 1860s. It’s difficult to know what to make of G.F. Watts. As an artist he was, indeed is, much admired. Hope: World Icon (1885-6), a delicate rendering of a blindfolded lyre-player probably remains his best-known work, prized across the generations for its enigmatic symbolic value.

It is Guildford’s turn to pick up the literary baton and kick off its 10-day Book Festival. Here is the first of our dispatches from Surrey. At the summit of the sprawling city of Guildford, with its cobbled streets and quaint hideaways, looms the Cathedral famed for featuring in The Omen.  Last night its bells tolled to the sound of Martin Bell reciting from his new book of light-tongued but ominous verse (he prefers to call it ‘verse’ than ‘poetry’), For Whom the Bell Tolls.   ‘The Man in the White Suit’ is sitting in his dressing room prior to his Guildford talk dressed, predictably, in his ‘white suit’, which is actually cream.  Does he have John Donne or Ernest Hemingway in mind with this title?