If any single person was the creator of the myth of the American West, it was James Fenimore Cooper. But he was far more than that. He was the founding father of the American historical novel; he helped develop and popularise such widely diverse literary forms as the sea novel, the novel of manners, political […]
This book about the pernicious effect of religion throughout history has shaken my faith – my faith, that is, in my journalistic idol, whom we believers know by the name of ‘Hitch’. In God Is Not Great, Christopher Hitchens transubstantiates his erudition into lovingly crafted but cheap jibes, which he directs at his targets in […]
It is now generally assumed, as part of modern intellectual culture, that the Bible was always interpreted literally until scientific knowledge and historical relativism began to dispel its authority. Then people of reason, and Biblical scholars themselves, began to subject the sacred texts to the same kind of critical analysis as other repositories of traditional […]
Biography is a difficult genre to define. Some have tried to simplify matters by excluding from it any autobiographical writing, on the loosely Freudian ground that the accounts which people give of themselves can never be accurate. Others have insisted that texts such as the often cited but rarely read Lives of the Saints should […]
Serialisation, which tends to be equally crass and sensational whether in broadsheet or tabloid form, often seems something of a mixed blessing. Certainly the treatment given to this book – which appeared to aim at provoking the crude reaction, ‘Blimey! Batesy was a bender’, and to be stuffed with ‘exploded quotes’ along the lines of […]
This is an odd book. Not a bad one: but odd. It isn’t really about Schumann’s music, which is the first oddity, since his life without it is rather tiresome and not really the stuff of a serious biography. Odder still, it isn’t really about Schumann’s life either, though all the key facts of that […]
‘We are a nineteenth century people. Our minds are our great, great mother’s minds. We aren’t a twentieth century people. Our ideas are inherited ideas.’ (Dean Acheson, This Vast External Realm) In 1989 George Kennan was eighty-five years old. His prestige had reached its zenith. He was awarded the Presidential Medal of Freedom. The head […]
This biography ends just the way I hoped it would, with Max Perutz’s closing comment on Desert Island Discs. When in June 2000 Sue Lawley asked the Austrian-born Nobel laureate, then in his late eighties, what luxury he would take to his desert island, he replied: ‘A pair of skis. You never know – it […]
The name John Pendlebury will be familiar to admirers of Dilys Powell’s marvellous account of the Villa Ariadne at Knossos, where for a while he was curator in succession to Sir Arthur Evans. But the photograph on the jacket of this book shows him – inescapably English – proudly wearing a many-layered ancient Egyptian necklace, […]
On 24 July 1917, in the darkest days of the First World War, Margarethe Zelle MacLeod (dite Mata Hari) was found guilty of espionage by the Troisième Conseil de Guerre in Paris and condemned to death by firing squad. Nearly three months later, just after dawn on the morning of 15 October, in a clearing […]
The great Duke of Marlborough, when asked what was his authority for some historical statement, is said to have answered: ‘Shakespeare, the only history of England that I ever read.’ Shakespeare has cast a long shadow over England’s late medieval history. Even today, when we look for different things to admire in the great men […]
Millions of Americans insist that the earth was created on a particular day thousands of years ago, that evolution is rubbish, and that the Bible is the literal truth. But even haters of Darwin, who may include President Bush, would be surprised by the central contentions in The Fourth of July and the Founding of […]
The publisher’s hype for Call the Midwife does Jennifer Worth few favours. ‘Appeals to the huge market for nostalgia … Jennifer is a natural-born storyteller. She’ll be perfect for publicity … Misery memoir meets a fascinating slice of social history.’ Increasingly convinced that sentimentality is the bane of writing about the recent past, I approached […]
When she asked what grandpa Ernst did in the Third Reich, Katrin Himmler’s father used to tell her that he was basically an apolitical man who was prodded into joining the Nazi Party by his elder brother, Heinrich, and took an innocuous job in German radio. Apart from that, Heinrich, the powerful head of the […]
Since Richard Crossman first spilled the beans on his Cabinet colleagues back in the 1960s, political diaries have become a rich resource for historians and a potent new weapon in the internal warfare that is modern democratic government. For scholars and interested observers, subsequent publication of the contemporaneous observations of policymakers offers a chance to […]
Time was when writers were expected to write, and not much else. The particularly confident or clubbable might appear on the occasional BBC radio show, but mostly it was considered infra dig to tart yourself around like a travelling salesman offering a nice line in printer cartridges or ladies’ underwear. How different it is now. […]
I am a Patricia Cornwell virgin, so to speak. Narrated by her celebrated heroine Dr Kay Scarpetta, a Chief Medical Examiner and consulting pathologist, the story’s end makes evident how many false clues have been planted and left dangling. An all-consuming fire devastates media mogul Kenneth Spark’s Virginia farm and racing stables. The horses’ screams […]
In the run-up to the Beijing Olympics, campaign groups are preparing to increase the pressure on the host country to release prisoners of conscience and clean up its human rights record. As China’s international political and economic strength intensifies, freedom of expression continues to suffer, with the authorities restricting the work of the media and […]
In 1770, the court of Empress Maria Theresa of Austria-Hungary was held spellbound by the first demonstration of the Turk, a revolutionary automaton which could not only play chess against a human opponent, but usually won. Soon afterwards, however, the machine’s creator, Wolfgang von Kempelen, became strangely reluctant to exhibit it, and the Turk was […]
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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