Both these books have been prompted by the recent release of MI5 files on Eddie Chapman, a small-time crook who as ‘Zigzag’ became one of the most successful double agents run by the British against the Germans during the Second World War.
Since his death forty years ago, the soldier and ornithologist Colonel Richard Meinertzhagen, DSO, CBE, has bagged four biographers. The first two, John Lord and Peter Capstick, were worshippers who believed everything their hero said and wrote. The third, Mark Cocker in 1989, had qualms, but gave his subject the benefit of the doubt. And […]
For over 2,000 years, women rulers and aspiring rulers have been vilified in China and, often, in the West. The title of Jonathan Clements’s latest book is indicative of the abuse. From the Han Dynasty’s Empress Lu, to the Qing’s Dowager Empress in the late nineteenth century, to Mao’s wife, Jiang Qing, Chinese women in […]
With China supposedly poised to take over the world, it is worth recalling what happened at a couple of history’s other ‘China moments’. In AD 648, when the Tang empire was at its zenith, a Chinese diplomatic mission crossed the Himalayas into Bengal and was there robbed and incarcerated. The attack may have been motivated […]
In The State We’re In, Will Hutton subjected British society to forensic analysis at a time of disillusionment with the Major government, when there was also the promise of change under New Labour. Change came with Tony Blair, but did not take the direction favoured by Hutton – which was a move towards the European […]
Sofka Dolgorouky’s life was polarised between two uniquely distant extremes. Her father’s family were the epitome of St Petersburg’s court grandees, though he himself was a charming playboy who dabbled in the theatre and was eventually remarried to a gypsy singer before dying at the age of forty-two. Her mother’s family, the Bobrinskis, were equally […]
Venus, Roman goddess of love, was born in the sea and came to earth floating on a scallop shell. The Hottentot Venus, otherwise known as Saartjie Baartman, was born in the Gamtoos River Valley in South Africa, and came to England as a stowaway. She was taken – along with a massive and stinking giraffe […]
This is a curious book. The author, a friend of his subject’s for several decades, writes of Michael Foot occasionally as if he were dead. He isn’t, though in his ninety-fourth year it might be easier to make that mistake than at other times. The natural moments for the publication of such a book as […]
By coincidence, two admirable monographs on Jones have appeared at the same time with almost identical titles. Christy Anderson’s is an academic study which began life as a dissertation at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Not having had the benefit of Yale as a publisher, her book lacks the rich colour of Giles Worsley’s and […]
The nineteenth-century Gothic Revival in Britain is often treated as a purely architectural phenomenon, and a superficial, decorative one at that. The strength of these two books is to show that the medieval revival in architecture was only one aspect of a much wider and deeper cultural, political, religious and social phenomenon which extended from […]
In the last generation, Parmigianino (1503–40) has gradually emerged from comparative neglect and is now seen as one of the greatest Renaissance artists. David Ekserdjian has been looking at the subject for twenty years, publishing widely in specialist journals. He has now treated the general public to a comprehensive monograph. It not only examines the […]
What is it about the experience of whites in Rhodesia that readers and publishers find so fascinating? Peter Godwin led the field with his memoir Mukiwa: A White Boy in Africa. Then came Alexandra Fuller’s Don’t Let’s Go to the Dogs Tonight, which she followed up with Scribbling the Cat: Travels with an African Soldier. […]
This book continues an autobiography, the first part of which, Clouds of Glory, won the J R Ackerley Prize. It is by a man who has been a television reporter, an art critic, a teacher of philosophy at Oxford and a Member of Parliament, though from this slice of his life what you would expect […]
In a few years the last Holocaust survivors will be gone, and memory will begin to hand over to history. Our understanding will change, perhaps for the better. But when you watch children take in the seamed faces and tattooed arms on Holocaust Memorial Day, you know that something important will be missing: the living […]
On 2 November 2004, the Dutch filmmaker Theo van Gogh was murdered on his way to work in Amsterdam. His most recent film, Submission: Part 1, with images of a young Muslim woman raped, beaten and flogged, had raised a storm of protests among Holland’s large Muslim community. On his body, his killer had pinned […]
The Molesworth Self-Adjusting Thank-You Letter (‘Dear Aunt/Uncle/Stinker, Thank you very much for the train/tractor/germ gun. It was lovely/useful/not bad’ and so on) has proved a blessing to schoolchildren for many years now, but the principle is at least 1,700 years old. For the desert sands of an ancient Greek town in Egypt have yielded a […]
‘There was a sound of revelry by night, / And Belgium’s Capital had gathered then / Her beauty and her Chivalry, and Bright / The lamps shone o’er fair women and brave men…’ So begins the ‘Eve of Waterloo’ section of Byron’s Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage. The poet describes how the gallant officers of the Allied […]
In 1999 Geert Mak, a Dutch journalist, was given an enviable commission by his newspaper: to travel throughout Europe in the last months of the century, reporting daily on the condition of the continent. His brief went further, however: he ‘would follow, as far as possible, the course of history, in search of the traces […]
On the rare occasions when I am asked about my position on the present war in Iraq, I reply that I am agnostic. I do not know the answer. That is what research into cultural attitudes around the Second World War has taught me. When I was researching the biography of William Joyce, Lord Haw-Haw, […]
‘Imagine the subject of balloons crops up,’ said the veteran Cabinet secretary Maurice Hankey, illustrating the difference between Winston Churchill and David Lloyd George. ‘Winston, without a blink, will give you a brilliant hour-long lecture on balloons. LG, even if he has never seen you before, will spend an hour finding out anything you know […]
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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