Francis Haskell (1928–2000) was one of the most highly regarded art historians of the second half of the 20th century. A student of Pevsner, he was professor of art history at Oxford from 1967 until his retirement in 1995, during which time he pioneered an approach to art through social history that led him to […]
In an essay of 1990 entitled ‘The Baronial Context of the English Civil War’, John Adamson raised a banner of rebellion against some of the citadels of modern British historiography. For more than a hundred years, the Civil War had been painted as a battle for constitutional government against royal absolutism, a fight by the […]
I stood peacefully with my sign, protesting Beijing The first people to come were the police They looked at me as a scabrous dog I fell down, they lift me up Their punches again landing on my face Yet, they’re my compatriots Sharing with me this arid land of rocks and sand This is an […]
On a hilltop overlooking Jerusalem, a rock garden terraced like the surrounding landscape leads up to the white-stone tomb of Mahmoud Darwish, the bestselling poet of the Arab world, a world in which poets fill stadiums. Five years after his death at the age of 67, the bard from Galilee is still revered as Palestine’s […]
Computing was born of necessity. To win the Second World War, the Allies urgently needed to crack the complex codes used by the Axis powers. Fortunately, they had Alan Turing on their side. In a breathtakingly elegant paper, Turing laid out the principles of a machine that could tackle any computable problem. Seven decades later, […]
In recent years, the Catholic Church has been hit by a series of scandals, the likes of which haven’t been seen for centuries. The damage done has been so great that it’s overshadowed genuine Catholic accomplishments in education, charitable endeavours, interfaith relations and peacemaking. As the number of scandals has increased, so too have cries […]
Many years ago I was in the same creative writing class as an eccentric would-be novelist who explained to the rest of us how a novel should be written: first, all the relevant locations should be described, then one should provide detailed portraits of the novel’s protagonists, and only after all this had been got […]
English architectural history has long been dominated by a taxonomical bias – we happily and perhaps torpidly accept a fluid chronology of isms, idioms, schools, movements, trends and fashions as a sort of universal foundation. Writers of entirely different ambitions and humours – Nikolaus Pevsner and Osbert Lancaster, say – employ kindred methods of classification. […]
Halfway through The Maltese Falcon, the villainous Kasper Gutman introduces Sam Spade to the convoluted history of the titular jewelled bird, explaining how it was captured from the Knights of Malta in the 16th century by corsairs and taken to Algiers, only to be stolen a hundred years later by Sir Francis Verney, ‘the English […]
‘When I consider this great city in its several quarters or divisions,’ wrote Joseph Addison in 1712, ‘I look upon it as an aggregate of various nations distinguished from each other by their respective customs, manners and interests.’ Three centuries later the French ‘nation’ has become so numerous that London is now effectively France’s sixth […]
Personae, Sergio De La Pava’s second novel, would make more sense as his first. Slim, anxious to amuse, awash with irony and knowing pastiche, it seems like the preppy precursor to A Naked Singularity, his debut. Where the latter, an expansive and frequently hilarious portrait of the New York criminal justice system, showed blithe and […]
What a brilliant idea this book is. By writing essays about the (often deeply unlikely) careers of ten extraordinary women in Britain in the Fifties, Rachel Cooke throws new light on a whole society. In fact, she blasts a high-beam spotlight onto a repressive, secretive yet in some ways forgiving culture where, as long as […]
Here is the favourite joke of Ruth R Wisse, Harvard Professor of Yiddish Literature and the author of this book, in its entirety: ‘Jews are a small people, but rotten.’ There follow about 25 lines of explanation, turning at length on the ‘but’, which denotes ‘reversal’. To this kind of exegesis I can mutter only, […]
For George Steiner, ‘the most acute, most concentrated commentary anyone has offered on the business of translation’ was Jorge Luis Borges’s short story and mischievous piece of literary criticism, ‘Pierre Menard, Author of the Quixote’. In it, a narrator surveys the various approaches of Menard, a maverick translator, as he attempts a ‘total translation’ of […]
A magisterial mix of history, biography and travelogue, Snake Dance grew out of the author’s obsession with a seemingly incidental historical detail: the uranium used in the Manhattan Project was excavated from a mine in the Belgian Congo by the same company that had employed Joseph Conrad half a century earlier. The stage is set for […]
Boarding schools in fiction, however perilous, are usually enjoyable and exciting places, but there has always been a shadow side to the genre: some people, in life and literature, are just not suited to these establishments. Charlotte Mendelson’s teenage heroine, Marina Farkas, is one such. She has made a terrible mistake in coming to Combe […]
‘It is a déformation professionnelle: all spymasters go mad in the end,’ observes the hero of Robert Harris’s An Officer and a Spy, in what is clearly a warning from history. No dossier was ever as dodgy as that used in 1894 to convict Captain Alfred Dreyfus of treason; a barefaced collection of dud forensics and […]
Reading Taipei, I was reminded of a long video art installation in a gallery, which you’re not reasonably expected to watch from the beginning or, indeed, to the end, but are asked implicitly to experience for, say, ten minutes before going on your way. The affect of the work is predicated not on its narrative […]
Some short stories are self-contained wonders with no room for improvement, where tinkering would be akin to tampering. Others are fine as working miniatures but hint at better things if spread out on a greater canvas. NoViolet Bulawayo’s short story ‘Hitting Budapest’ was published in the Boston Review and won the Caine Prize for African […]
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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
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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