The cliché ‘eagerly awaited’ seems appropriate for The Welsh Girl, by Peter Ho Davies, a debut which finally appears four years after its author’s inclusion on the Granta ‘Best of Young British Novelists’ roster. It is set in 1944, in a North Wales village so quietly traditional that many locals speak English only haltingly. The […]
Veins of hostility and menace run through Gerard Donovan’s fiction. Whether one thinks of the baker digging his own grave in the Booker long-listed Schopenhauer’s Telescope, a novel animated by dialogue that reads like a litany of human barbarism, or the paranoid Sunless in the author’s second outing, Dr Salt, the lives of Donovan’s characters […]
Lawrence, the protagonist of Matthew Kneale’s new novel, is a charming seven-year-old. He is alert and interested in the sort of things we like little boys to be interested in – ancient Romans, soldiers, astronomy. He natters on, in his perky, off-beat first-person voice, about everything from his own domestic details to the biography of […]
Darkmans is a very strange novel; and, I should admit upfront, a very hard one to review. I began this book in a state of contemptuous irritation, and ended it with a sneaking feeling that the author might be a genius. I read the first 100 pages thinking that the author was as lazy and […]
At first glance this book looks like a heartbreaking work of staggering worthiness. A prefacing note explains that all the author’s proceeds are going to Sudanese refugees, and the novel comes garlanded with a quote from a human rights organisation. When did you last read a novel endorsed by the International Crisis Group? Whatever you […]
Before reading this book I knew of only two other all-women bands. One was The International Sweethearts of Rhythm, a swinging big band in America during the Second World War; the other was the immortal, if fictional, Sweet Sue’s Syncopators in the film Some Like It Hot. The Cuban band Anacaona is a worthy addition […]
Susan Sontag’s reputation stands high in both her homelands – the United States of America and the republic of letters. She was a writer of choice skills, she was absolutely sincere in her commitment to ideals of justice and right in politics and international affairs, and all her work is animated by a strong controlling […]
Shelley Rohde made an award-winning TV documentary with L S Lowry (1887–1976) and in the process became ‘an intemperate admirer of both the man and the artist’. Now, with the benefit of subsequently released private papers, she adds this compact picture-book tribute to the canon. Lowry, an only child, had a reasonably privileged upbringing in […]
The volume of Sir Nikolaus Pevsner’s Buildings of England series that covers Essex has long been one of the more inadequate titles in the series. Though famed for its atrociousness, Essex actually has more listed buildings than any but six other counties. Once one gets away from the hideous dormitory towns, and especially from the […]
These two books both describe, in passing, the origins of the West End of London that grew up in the late seventeenth century around St James’s Square, but in every other respect they are in contrast to one another. Anthony Adolph’s is a passionately committed and scholarly study of one of the Stuarts’ more illustrious […]
Channel-hoppers may recall the 1994 Hollywood action comedy True Lies, in which Islamist jihadists purloined nuclear warheads stolen in Kazakhstan (a state which has actually decommissioned its nuclear arsenal) and used them to menace America. Capably assisted by wife Jamie Lee Curtis, agent Arnold Schwarzenegger saved the day, using a missile fired from a Harrier […]
At a low ebb last summer between chemotherapy sessions, I was dozing underneath a mulberry tree in Regent’s Park when, as if in a dream, I heard the magical sound of a fruity voice warbling ‘It’s Never Too Late to Fall in Love’, with orchestral accompaniment, wafting towards my deck-chair. On investigation through the undergrowth, […]
In 1733 a disgruntled but extremely rich Whig minister and one-time military man named Richard Temple, First Viscount Cobham, lost his political position and retired to his country estate in Buckinghamshire. What he chose to do then gives a whole new meaning to the expression ‘gardening leave’, for in his exile from power Cobham completed […]
For five days the sergeant kept the letter in the inside pocket of his uniform. There was something hard in the letter but his desire to open it was matched by his fear of what it might contain. Her letters, in recent times, without ever changing course, had taken on a different tone and he […]
Throughout the enforced idleness of his exile, Charles II lived on credit, which became increasingly difficult for him, and harder still for his companions and suppliers, to obtain. All the time, however, he showed a patient determination to regain the throne, rejecting various plans to return to an England which was not yet ready for […]
AD 410, and the lamps were going out all over Europe. German tribes had finally broken through the Rhine frontier; Alaric and his Goths were about to sack Rome itself, 1,163 years after its foundation. The Roman Emperor Honorius, in his safe retreat among the marshes of Ravenna, had enough to do to guarantee his […]
This magisterial volume, a sequel to Britain’s Imperial Century, 1815–1914 (1976), is the distillation of a lifetime’s learning and teaching about the British Empire. The earlier work, Ronald Hyam explains, was a kind of ‘user’s handbook’. The present study, based on mountains of documentary evidence, concentrates more specifically on the politics of decolonisation. Such a […]
Wars displace people. The ‘exodus’ – the flight south in May and June 1940 of a good part of the population of northern France, including Paris – was remarkable. But it was not unique. Less than five years later there would be a comparable exodus in eastern Europe, as Germans – many belonging to families […]
Given the endless stream of books on the Second World War that appear on the bookshelves every year, I must confess that I think it might be time for historians to call an armistice. Indeed the story is so familiar that I must confess also to a sneaking sympathy for Don DeLillo’s Morehouse Professor of […]
In the smoky, tumbledown north of a sprawling city, where governesses duel with umbrellas and the gap between poor and rich is vast, lives a young lad called Barnaby Grimes. Dapper, self-assured, and handy with a sword-stick, he races around the roofs of the city – ‘highstacking’, as it is called – running errands as […]
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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