Dante has suffered rather too much from his admirers. Barely was he cold in his grave at Ravenna than the process of reinventing him began. The Florentines, who had earlier driven into exile the man they dubbed an instrument of the Devil, hastened to claim him for their own, appointing Giovanni Boccaccio, his earliest biographer,
Listing page content here Plutarch, in his Life of Alcibiades, captures the fascination of the Greek warrior, politician and glamour boy by quoting a line from a contemporary comedy: ‘They long for him, they hate him, they cannot do without him.’ The same words sum up our ambivalent relationship with the cultural world inhabited by
It is easy to get misty-eyed about Renaissance Florence. How gorgeous it was, we tell ourselves, this City of the Lily, with its lissom youths and comely maidens, each one a Gozzoli ephebe or a Botticelli Venus, its humanist scholars poring over the latest haul of Greek manuscripts, Donatello and Cellini fashioning flawless marble and
Proust is rapidly becoming the Mozart of the novel, one of those artistic figures before whom, from time to time, we delight to abase ourselves in various not always dignified postures of idolatrous adoration. One acquaintance of mine, for example, currently devotes his leisure hours to marking up A la recherche du temps perdu in
Published in 1995, John Berendt’s Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil was one of those books whose success could be measured by the fact that dozens of people pretended they had read it when they hadn’t. Was this a novel, we wondered, or just snappy reportage with a few names changed and a
‘Is your autobiography really necessary?’ Something along the lines of that war poster which asked a similar question about railway journeys should be tacked up above the desk of every self-respecting author. Edmund White is one such, and we are already entitled to feel that we know an awful lot about him. He has skilfully
Something very important in the history of England happened on 24 January 1536, when King Henry VIII, celebrating the vigil of the feast of St Paul’s conversion, staged a splendid tournament in the tiltyard of his palace at Greenwich. The monarch, ‘mounted on a great horse to run at the lists’, was unseated by an
The English don’t read German literature. This is not, I suggest, because of our vulgar prejudice towards the Germans for being the people they are and having the history they do. That over-repeated Fawlty Towers episode, those ‘Vorsprung durch Technik’ commercials and endless how-we-won-World-War-II documentaries keep such unselective loathing robustly alive, but in the case
During the mid-17th century the idea gained ground in various parts of Europe that the world was about to come to an end. Bewildered by the effects of widespread war and revolution, bad harvests and a miniature Ice Age taking the form of savage winters, people made ready for the sounding of the Last Trumpet,
Loneliness is a pearl of great price among novelists. Fiction, drawing so much of its inspiration from groups, communities and societies, nevertheless cherishes the idea of solitude, of the hero or heroine outcast and apart, thrown upon their own resources for spiritual endurance. Think Robinson Crusoe among his goats, Jane Eyre roaming the corridors and
In New York in 1920 the writer Hattie Mayer, under her pen name Anzia Yezierska, published her first collection of short stories, entitled Hungry Hearts. Poignant sketches of Jewish family life among the tenements and sweatshops of the Lower East Side, they gain additional impact from the reader’s continuing awareness that English is not the
Philanthropists are a boring lot these days. Your modern seven-figure donor is either resolutely anonymous or else determined to be seen as approachable Mr Average, quiet and unassuming, who just happened to have the chequebook handy. Gone for ever, it seems, is the splashy, domineering article familiar to our great-grandparents, combining a certain Dickensian whiff
Everyone — well, almost everyone — knows that in 1895, while The Importance of Being Earnest was packing in the punters at the St James’s Theatre, Oscar Wilde was foolish enough to take the Marquess of Queensberry to court for libelling him as a ‘posing somdomite’. The noble lord’s spelling mistake occasioned history’s most famous
Crime is a species of performance art. Acts of murder, theft or fraud assume the collusive presence of an audience formed from that law-abiding majority for whom felony on a grand scale holds an inextinguishable glamour. Even a simple mugging possesses elements of street theatre, as if some sort of scenario had been worked out
He was born to a virgin honoured with the attentions of the most high god. He assumed human form and gathered disciples around him who were derided for their adoration. Having performed a variety of miracles and made a journey to the underworld, he ascended to heaven, where he joined his father, president of the
Regrettably history is not among the core subjects now prescribed by the government’s umpteenth overhaul of the national curriculum. The omission is a foolish one, given the nation’s unquenchable enthusiasm for the past in whatever form, serious or ‘lite’. Does the official mind scent potential troublemakers among those inquisitive as to the fate of vanished
Much is made by writers these days of the need for ‘getting distance’, for putting frontiers, oceans, whole continents between themselves and the sources of their inspiration. A spell on a Mediterranean island, a prolonged residence in some foreign capital or a creative writing fellowship at an American university are all supposed to do the