When a child dies, the bereaved torture themselves with asking: Why did someone so young have to die? What kind of life might they have gone on to experience? If the child has disappeared, presumed murdered, there is yet more speculation: How did they die? Where is the body? Who killed them? On such questions […]
The long period of turmoil that enveloped Europe in the wake of the fall of Rome was so devoid of recognisable written records that historians lazily dubbed it the ‘Dark Ages’. Modern archaeological discoveries, and a reassessment of the scanty written evidence that does survive from Europe’s big sleep, have, excitingly, enabled contemporary historians to […]
Pat Barker’s new novel begins in the life class at the Slade School of Art in London, where a young artist, Paul Tarrant, is struggling to draw a naked female model to the exacting standards of Henry Tonks, a teacher obsessed by anatomy. It is spring 1914, a few months before the outbreak of the […]
Tom Spanbauer’s literary career seems back to front. The natural sequence for a gay writer from the baby-boomer generation, you’d imagine, is a thinly disguised autobiography, followed by an Aids novel, then an exploration of homosexual history. Yet he started with the period piece and has only now, sixteen years later and aged sixty, got […]
If there is a theme running through William Trevor’s brilliant new collection, it is reticence. Again and again, lives are altered, or ruined – or, less often, saved – by things that are left unsaid. Such silence goes against the grain of a culture obsessed by disclosure and personal revelation, but that is not to […]
Will Eisner’s Contract With God trilogy, reprinted in one volume, is the foundation of the modern graphic novel. First published nearly thirty years ago, the three books have been celebrated for their literary ambition and autobiographical sincerity: John Updike is a fan, as was Kurt Vonnegut, and with good reason. While Eisner’s artwork betrays its […]
It says much about the spirit of the times that these three fine books sing from the same hymn-sheet: the need to take a long hard look at how and what we eat by examining the lessons of the past. Making the case for the ancestral hearth is Martin Jones, author of Feast: Why Humans […]
What’s so great about tea? The surefooted William Cobbett saw nothing in tea beyond idleness and ruin; he described its effects in the 1820s as similar to dependency on foreign oil. Thousands of tons of dried leaf were being shipped around the world; governments grew fat on taxing it, smugglers were lured into criminality to […]
It is the question all modern economists dread. Every couple of months we are asked, usually by a well-meaning colleague, what we think of the Wealth of Nations. To which, if we were honest, we would reply that we never really managed to plough through the entire 900 pages of Adam Smith’s sometimes dense, occasionally […]
John Derbyshire’s Unknown Quantity is everything a popular mathematics book should be: gentle, chatty, anecdotal and full of mind-aching equations. It is a history of algebra – the study of number systems, things such as quadratic equations, and of everything that is the bane of schoolchildren’s lives. Babylonian tax inspectors liked quadratic equations, which are […]
Gino Segrè has found a new way of telling the story of the pioneers of quantum physics, a way that is gripping and absorbing. Faust in Copenhagen is written with a style and skill that make it the early contender for science book of the year. In truth, it is a book about scientists rather […]
‘There are words nobody likes to be associated with in public, such as racism and imperialism. On the other hand, there are others for which everyone is anxious to demonstrate enthusiasm, such as mothers and the environment. Democracy is one of these.’ So writes Eric Hobsbawm, who has spent much of his long and distinguished […]
For a book that consists so largely of summary accounts of political madness and murder, Black Mass is surprisingly exhilarating. That may be the result of its almost equally surprising organisation. Two or three very large and very general claims frame the book: that politics is a form of religion, that apocalyptic fantasies have been […]
Every generation thinks that it has a monopoly on virtues that were sadly and pathetically absent in previous times. The baby-boomers are perhaps more guilty than most, with their smug assumption that the world was born anew in 1963. John Sutherland, the writer and critic, has the advantage over most other memoirists of the period […]
You can learn everything you need to know about Alfred Douglas by reading a decent biography of Oscar Wilde. Well, almost everything. From a glance at the photographs in Richard Ellmann’s book, for example, you can see that Douglas, in his twenties, had a kind of boyish, petulant prettiness. (It still isn’t immediately obvious to […]
In August 1820, at the age of forty-two, William Hazlitt moved into a lodging house on Southampton Row. Three days later, the nineteen-year-old daughter of the house, Sarah Walker, brought him breakfast in his room and turned in the doorway to look at him; in that instant, Hazlitt fell desperately in love. Over the next […]
What fun the young activists had during the early years of women’s lib. Michèle Roberts, poet and novelist, describes ‘heady, astonishing, exuberant times’. Political agitation was exciting, sex even more so – talking about it and having as much of it as you possibly could, both gay and straight. Roberts belonged to a street theatre […]
The Way It Wasn’t is a very strange object. Grossly over-produced, printed on glossy stock so heavy it could be used to shingle a house, filled with gulfs of white space amid a disorienting collection of typefaces, snapshots, reproduced documents and book jackets, it seems to be a gesture towards new-style autobiography (or, as James […]
There is a short story by Henry James called ‘The Private Life’, in which a celebrated writer, Clare Vawdrey, is invited to a weekend house party. His company, it turns out, is less illuminating than his writing and one evening, while Vawdrey is boring his fellow guests downstairs, the narrator goes upstairs and sees through […]
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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