Philip Hensher is professor of Creative Writing at Bath Spa University and the author of 11 novels including A Small Revolution in Germany.
42 min listen
In this week’s Book Club podcast we’re talking about Brideshead Revisited. Evelyn Waugh’s great novel is 75 years old this week, and I’m joined by our chief critic Philip Hensher, and by the novelist’s grandson (and general editor of Oxford University Press’s complete Evelyn Waugh) Alexander Waugh. What made the novel so pivotal in Waugh’s
We live at a time of universal polymathy. We don’t know everything, but there’s not much difficulty in being able to discover any given truth. But it’s worth remembering just how hard it used to be to find things out. Thirty years ago if you wanted to research off your own bat it meant a
In these circumstances there’s a temptation to reach for the longest novel imaginable. If you’re not going to read Proust now, as the days stretch ahead and the horizons shrink to an hour’s walk a day, when is it going to happen? But it seems much more likely that reading is going to contract, and
I like a book that can put its point in four outrageous words and use it as its title. Diana Souhami might be right. Without the women her book is devoted to, literary modernism would have looked very different. A consciously new approach to writing met a body of women who were being heard for
A kind of gigantism took hold of the European mind in the years before the first world war. It shaped everything, from empires to poetry. In the confidence of new technology and new ideas, things could be attempted on a larger scale than ever before. The mental power of the age could be measured in
Probably most of the world is bilingual, or more than bilingual. It is common in many countries to speak a national language alongside an international lingua franca such as Arabic, Spanish or English. On top of that, there may be a mother tongue that is not the same as a national language. A Nigerian, for
A good indicator of just how interesting and alluring Lydia Davis’s Essays proved might be my recent credit card statement. It was hard to read very far without being introduced to an unfamiliar author, and the terms of the introduction were frequently so seductive that I found myself breaking off to order several secondhand books.
Not every novelist has opinions. Some of the greatest have a touch of the idiot savant, such as Adalbert Stifter, Ronald Firbank and Henry Green. And those novelists who do have opinions aren’t always worth listening to. But Vladimir Nabokov’s views are of compelling interest — paradoxically, because he regularly insisted that his novels sent
This outstanding biography comes to an end, not in an atmosphere of triumph and achievement, but in a welter of frustration, division, anger and conspiracy. There is a widespread view that Margaret Thatcher’s first two administrations, from 1979 and 1983, were huge personal successes; the third, from 1987, was her mad period. That is unfair,
Kafka wrote a novella, The Metamorphosis, about a man who finds himself transformed into a beetle. Now Ian McEwan has written one about a beetle that is transformed into a man. He’s not the first writer to have thought of doing this, but he might be the first one who thought it was a good
Towards the end of this tale of imperial intellectual expansion, Susan Sontag’s publicist goes to visit his shrink and, dealing with some appalling professional trauma or other, mentions her name. The psychiatrist bursts out laughing. The publicist asks what is so funny and is told: ‘You can’t imagine how many people have sat on that
Novelists will always be interested in enclosed communities — or the ‘total institution’, as sociologists say. When you separate a group of individuals from larger society with a wall and a controlling mechanism, all sorts of interesting facts about the way people interact become apparent. Convents, hospitals, asylums, schools, universities and prisons all serve the
Imagine you’re a gay man living in the year 1950. Not unnaturally, you would like to meet another gay man. How to identify yourself to a potential partner? A confession might bring the police; dressing and carrying yourself in distinctive ways will invite ridicule or violence in the street. The solution is this: you casually
I must have seen hundreds of opera productions in my time. Out of these, hardly any made a lasting impression on account of their design: the great Tarkovsky Boris Godunov for Covent Garden; Hockney’s Rake’s Progress for Glyndebourne; Es Devlin’s Les Troyens; the Richard Peduzzi Bayreuth Ring preserved on film. Very few others. For many
Despite efforts to prevent them, British women formed a part of the Indian empire almost from the start. Although the East India Company warned them off, citing difficulties of climate, disease, morality, religion and culture, a few managed to travel there all the same. By the late 18th century their numbers had increased considerably, making
Running the entire course of the 20th century, Michael Tippett’s life (1905–1998) was devoted to innovation. He was an English composer who worked within established forms —symphonies, oratorios, string quartets, piano sonatas — to startlingly new effect. But his innovation was not just as a composer. He was also a political and social radical, embedded
Walter Gropius (1883–1969) had the career that the 20th century inflicted on its architects. A master of the previous generation in the German-speaking lands, Otto Wagner, could create his entire oeuvre without venturing outside the city limits of Vienna. Gropius found himself thrust into one unprecedented role after another, uprooted and exiled repeatedly. His work
Whenever I find myself visiting some great historic house, I always like to break off from gawping at tapestries to ask the tour guide: ‘How did the family make its money in the first place?’ For some reason, this almost always astonishes and bewilders. It’s as if the devotion of capital to bricks and mortar,
Whenever I find myself visiting some great historic house, I always like to break off from gawping at tapestries to ask the tour guide: ‘How did the family make its money in the first place?’ For some reason, this almost always astonishes and bewilders. It’s as if the devotion of capital to bricks and mortar,
Nobody has ever quite known what to do with the German-language novelist Hermann Hesse. Born in 1877 and living until 1962, he rather deliberately refused to experience most of the traumatic events of his culture. His tiny home town was Calw, in the Black Forest, and he lived mostly in backwaters, and latterly for decades
