Julian Bell’s Mirror of the World naturally invites comparison with E H Gombrich’s The Story of Art, now in its sixteenth edition and reprinted every year but one since it was first published by Phaidon in 1950. The Story of Art has sold more than seven million copies, but in spite of its continued popularity […]
Like the American actress Tallulah Bankhead, the Australian-born Coral Browne was celebrated not only for her mastery of any role, however feebly written or demanding, but also for her imperious elegance and savage wit. As with Bankhead, the edge of that wit was continually sharpened by the word to which the subtitle of this biography […]
DeMille is not a name that has lived on, like Hitchcock, Welles or Ford. Yet in his time Cecil B DeMille was the most commercially successful showman-autocrat in Hollywood, whose films by 1942 were estimated to have sold 800 million tickets. An unashamed vulgarian, he capitalised on subjects that one is supposed to avoid in […]
To Guardian readers, the premise of State of the Nation will come as no surprise. A history of British theatre since the war, it makes no mention of theatre in its main title, following Michael Billington’s belief that a nation and its theatre are inseparable. I share that belief, though always with relief that I […]
‘Have you ever taken anything out of the dirty clothes basket because it had become, relatively, the cleaner thing?’ Katharine Whitehorn’s memoir begins with this quotation from what she describes as the most remembered article she ever wrote. We have become so used to confessional lifestyle journalism that it’s difficult to believe how liberating such […]
‘Many enemies, much honour’, Sigmund Freud thought. It is an opinion that Craig Venter undoubtedly shares, for he quotes with relish a remark once addressed to him by a government functionary: ‘This is Washington, and we judge people by the quality of their enemies, and son, you have some of the best.’ The grand plan […]
I hated this book. Not because it’s a poor, badly written load of tosh about something of no significance – it isn’t. It’s a fine book. I hated it because it’s like a smack in the teeth. Arkady Babchenko’s prose is raw and uncut and his subject matter is one of the most terrible wars […]
Like those Japanese soldiers who would occasionally show up in the jungles of East Asia twenty-five years after the end of the Second World War, Fidel Castro is a lonely warrior today, lost and thrashing about in the dense foliage of history. While his former communist comrades in Moscow and Beijing are making fortunes for […]
Ever wondered why ancient prostitutes used to smear vinegar on the organs of prospective clients? Or where Roman generals sourced their underwear? Or what the Praepositus Camelorum did for kicks? Or why the Greeks had a verb for ‘to stick a radish up the fundament’? Chances are, probably not. The study of Classics, as a […]
I did warn the Editor that I have, on principle, little time for books like this, but she insisted. This review, therefore, may not be up to LR’s typically cool and Olympian standards of objectivity. Maria Wyke, Professor of Latin at University College London, has written a ‘metabiography’ of Julius Caesar. Using ancient sources to […]
A few years ago Mary Beard and Keith Hopkins wrote a fascinating book about that most famous monument of imperial Rome, the Colosseum. They asked just what exactly went on there. Now Mary Beard has turned her attention to the most celebrated ritual in Roman life: the Triumph granted to a victorious general. It’s not […]
At this summer’s Festival del Mondo Antico in Rimini, I was struck by an Italian don from Bologna University reading out Virgil. He wasn’t your normal English don material – thin white blouson jacket, white drainpipe trousers, candy-striped shirt open to navel revealing a wiry chest tanned the colour of brown furniture by the Adriatic […]
Love the unconquered warrior, Love who falls on the flocks, Love who keeps vigil in the soft cheeks of a girl, you roam over seas and in the halls of savages; no immortal nor any of the men whose life is a day can escape you: he who is touched by you goes mad. You […]
From September to November, no fewer than four major productions of Greek drama have been mounted on London stages: David Greig’s much acclaimed The Bacchae (the highlight of this summer’s Edinburgh Festival) at the Lyric Hammersmith; Seamus Heaney’s version of Sophocles’ Antigone, The Burial at Thebes at the Barbican (the Nottingham Playhouse production, also touring […]
Biographies may be more popular than ever, but finding the right subject is never an easy business. Publishers prefer old favourites, and are reluctant to invest in unfamiliar names; biographers who struggle to earn a living are easily seduced into writing another unnecessary life of Churchill or Conan Doyle. Simon Courtauld has bucked the trend: […]
Sylvia Brooke, the third Ranee of Sarawak, was mad, bad, and dangerous to know: a liar, racist, destructive mother, procurer and vetter of her husband’s women, a cock-tease self-styled as ‘frigid’ – in short, awful. But if anyone deserves posthumous forgiveness, it is Sylvia Brooke. Consider her father, Reggie Brett. Seduced at Eton and himself […]
We know, or think we know, two things about Jean Sibelius even if we cannot hum more than a bar or two of his music. He is the man who for the last thirty years of his long life – he died exactly fifty years ago, at the age of nearly ninety-two – wrote virtually […]
Arthur Balfour is a daunting prospect for the biographer because of his openly expressed doubts about the whole genre. As he once confided to a friend, he could tolerate criticism and was vain enough to enjoy a little praise from time to time, but he had ‘moments of uneasiness’ when he was ‘explained’. As an […]
So action-packed are the four decades that shaped modern South Africa – from the discovery of the main diamond field in Griqualand in 1871 to the formation of the Union in 1910 – that it is a mystery this book was not written earlier. Perhaps it is just as well, because Martin Meredith, the author […]
One recent literary trend has been a raft of books that supply a history (or, more archly, a ‘biography’) of such things as foodstuffs and items of manufacture. Patrick Wright operates at the politico-military end of this fashionable field. After publishing a successful book in which he examined the strange history of the Dorset village […]
India's 'festival of democracy', or general election, begins next month. Like every good festival, it looks likely to have its fair share of murders and arrests.
@OwenBennettJon probes the state of democracy in India:
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Tiffany Jenkins - The Smartphone Pandemic
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India's 'festival of democracy', or general election, begins next month. Like every good festival, it looks likely to have its fair share of murders and arrests.
@OwenBennettJon probes the state of democracy in India:
Owen Bennett-Jones - New Delhi Confidential
Owen Bennett-Jones: New Delhi Confidential - The Incarcerations: BK-16 and the Search for Democracy in India by Alpa Shah
literaryreview.co.uk
Where is the world's newest narcostate and why is it thriving?
@AdamBrookesWord investigates Asia's meth mecca.
Adam Brookes - Meth Comes to Myanmar
Adam Brookes: Meth Comes to Myanmar - Narcotopia: In Search of the Asian Drug Cartel That Outwitted the CIA by Patrick Winn
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