Rose George has had the good idea of spending five weeks on the Maersk-owned Kendal on its voyage from Felixstowe to Singapore via Suez and the Horn of Africa. The Kendal is one of the 6,000 container ships that ply international waters. Together with super tankers, these are the giants of the world’s 100,000-strong merchant […]
There is an entire genre of publishing devoted to ‘The Last of This’ and ‘The End of That’. Within this, there is a further subgenre predicting the end of democracy, and one democracy – America – in particular. Happily, Philip Coggan’s book doesn’t fit into that bracket. Despite the alarming title it is largely a […]
‘I was born in a corner of central London … known as Little Venice,’ begins David Boyle in Broke. ‘This defines me inescapably as middle-class. Not just slightly middle-class, but staggeringly, swelteringly, stratospherically middle-class, as middle-class as you can get.’ ‘I count myself as one of the last of the so-called baby boomer generation,’ begins Stephen […]
In the essays known as the Federalist Papers, published in 1787–8, the American statesman James Madison deplored ‘the blunders of our governments’. What, he asked, ‘are all the repealing, explaining and amending laws, which fill and disgrace our voluminous codes, but so many monuments of deficient wisdom?’ Taking their cue and their title from Madison, […]
‘Some stories never end,’ wrote Don DeLillo in 2005, reflecting upon Libra (1988), his account of the life and death of Lee Harvey Oswald. ‘Even in our time, in the sightlines of living history, in the retrieved instancy of film and videotape, there are stories waiting to be finished, open to the thrust of reasoned […]
Reading George Packer’s account of the shredding of America’s social contract, it becomes clear that the author, a staff writer for the New Yorker, is no John Dos Passos. That’s not too surprising, since Dos Passos, who died in 1970, was always a one-off, whether as the communist-sympathising novelist whose trilogy U.S.A. remains the great […]
For most of its history American foreign policy has been episodic. In the first century and a half of independence, the governing principle was to stay out of foreign affairs altogether. The United States may have chased down Barbary pirates, huffily engaged in border disputes and intervened in one Caribbean island or another, but even […]
It is time for a new biography of Wilkie Collins. The late William M Clarke first revealed the details of Martha Rudd’s relationship with Wilkie Collins and the subsequent history of their three children 25 years ago. My own biography appeared in 1991. A short life by Peter Ackroyd was a welcome addition in 2012, […]
‘This student, though a woman,’ wrote an officer assessing Pearl Witherington’s application to join the Special Operations Executive (SOE) in 1943, ‘possesses a strong and rather dominating personality. Very capable, completely brave.’ She needed all the toughness she could muster. Women were not generally regarded as suitable by SOE’s largely Oxbridge recruiters, whose view of […]
‘I am not an admirer of contemporary biography, and I dislike to be the subject of it,’ wrote Benjamin Disraeli to Thomas Kebbel in 1860. Kebbel was one of the first biographers to attempt to capture Disraeli in print. Since his book appeared many writers have followed his example. Already this year has seen the publication […]
It’s tough being a nature writer. Stuck in the middle of nowhere, you’re openly ridiculed or else lavished with the tenderness reserved for the soft-headed, your crabby handwriting filling journal after journal with minute observations concerning the machinations of every critter within range. You’re stuck in the middle of the intellectual world, too. Not quite […]
It’s a pretty good story. Sometime around 1837 a wandering German émigré named Robert Schomburgk, who had managed to convince the Royal Geographical Society to hire him as an explorer, reported finding an enormous and spectacular species of water lily deep in the Guiana jungle. Of course Schomburgk was not the first European to spot […]
A Manx Shearwater was ringed as a three-month-old chick in its Welsh nest burrow. Fourteen days later the same bird arrived, unaccompanied by any of its kin, in its species’ usual winter quarters off the coast of Argentina, some 8,000 kilometres away. ‘An individual bird may repeat that same oceanic journey, back and forth, 100 times’ […]
‘I went to the woods because I wished to live deliberately, to front only the essential facts of life, and see if I could not learn what it had to teach, and not, when I came to die, discover that I had not lived.’ Thus wrote Henry David Thoreau, in Walden; Or, Life in the Woods, […]
Pity the Angolans: rich in oil but mired in poverty, led by scoundrels, victims of as grim a history as any country in Africa. A Portuguese colony for over three hundred years, scarred by the slave trade, Angola was finally liberated from Lisbon in 1975, only to be traumatised by a 27-year civil war. Ever […]
It’s fair to say that Dr Lewis Griffith Cresswell Evans Pugh was not the most appreciated member of the 1953 expedition to Mount Everest. In The Conquest of Everest, the award-winning film of the expedition, Pugh appeared just twice, once in a catatonic state to demonstrate how oxygen deprivation affected the brain, and once in […]
Danubia: A Personal History of Habsburg Europe is a logical sequel to Simon Winder’s quirky and delightful Germania, an exploration of German history that paid much more attention to the small states within the old Holy Roman Empire than to the large ones such as Prussia, Saxony and Bavaria. It too was a personal history, […]
Between the Woods and the Water, the second volume of Patrick Leigh Fermor’s dazzling account of his ‘Great Trudge’ from Rotterdam to Istanbul, was published in 1986. His frustrated admirers have been wondering ever since why he never published the concluding part, taking him on from the Iron Gates to the city he preferred to […]
Until the appearance of Antony Beevor’s Stalingrad some 15 years ago, big mass-market books on the Second World War tended to be the domain of popular historians and former soldiers but, for the most part, not academics, who remained firmly dependent on university presses and learned journals for the publication of their books and shorter […]
Germany’s redemptive transition makes engaging history – from a militaristic heyday exactly a century ago, when Friedrich von Bernhardi’s Deutschland und der Nächste Krieg was a bestseller, to reunification in 1990, by when democratic probity, pacific internationalism and monetary discipline had long been West Germany’s guiding stars. The country avidly upholds and practises these three […]
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It wasn’t until 1825 that Pepys’s diary became available for the first time. How it was eventually decrypted and published is a story of subterfuge and duplicity.
Kate Loveman tells the tale.
Kate Loveman - Publishing Pepys
Kate Loveman: Publishing Pepys
literaryreview.co.uk
Arthur Christopher Benson was a pillar of the Edwardian establishment. He was supremely well connected. As his newly published diaries reveal, he was also riotously indiscreet.
Piers Brendon compares Benson’s journals to others from the 20th century.
Piers Brendon - Land of Dopes & Tories
Piers Brendon: Land of Dopes & Tories - The Benson Diaries: Selections from the Diary of Arthur Christopher Benson by Eamon Duffy & Ronald Hyam (edd)
literaryreview.co.uk
Of the siblings Gwen and Augustus John, it is Augustus who has commanded most attention from collectors and connoisseurs.
Was he really the finer artist, asks Tanya Harrod, or is it time Gwen emerged from her brother’s shadow?
Tanya Harrod - Cut from the Same Canvas
Tanya Harrod: Cut from the Same Canvas - Artists, Siblings, Visionaries: The Lives and Loves of Gwen and Augustus John by Judith Mackrell
literaryreview.co.uk