Raising Awareness

Posted on by Jonathan Beckman

To date – perhaps fortunately – no evidence has emerged to suggest that we share the universe with other intelligent beings. But what of our inner mental space, teeming with private thoughts, images, memories, beliefs, aspirations and anxieties: the products of individual conscious awareness? Although superficially discernible through our words and actions, most of our […]

Glossed in Translation

Posted on by Jonathan Beckman

‘I wouldn’t have said Balthus was naive. I’d have said on the contrary that he’s very sophisticated.’ ‘It’s the same thing,’ Alberto stated flatly.   This exchange, from James Lord’s A Giacometti Portrait, could serve as an epigraph to this collection of J M Coetzee’s essays, which move uncomfortably between the interestingly complex and the surprisingly […]

Portrait of the Author

Posted on by Frank Brinkley

Claire Tomalin has uncovered many secrets during her long career as a biographer. She shed light on the life of Dickens’s young mistress, Nelly Ternan, and also revealed the clandestine liaison between the future William IV and the actress Mrs Jordan, who bore him ten children. Now she turns her attention to her own life. […]

The Needle & the Damage Done

Posted on by Frank Brinkley

I once went to an AA meeting in Gstaad. That’s the resort for the super rich where, as the joke goes, Roger Federer can’t afford to join the tennis club. Lindt chocolates and espresso coffee were served in a clubhouse setting. The very rich people there munched, sipped and shared. What came out of their mouths […]

Affairs to Remember

Posted on by Jonathan Beckman

‘Dream Record: June 8, 1955’ was almost the last poem Allen Ginsberg ever wrote. In it, he interrogates the ghost of William S Burroughs’s wife, Joan. Burroughs had shot her dead in Mexico City in 1951 during what was, according to legend, a pie-eyed game of William Tell. (Instead of an apple, she supposedly had […]

Life as Art

Posted on by Jonathan Beckman

Kathy Acker is a difficult subject for a biography, largely because, as Chris Kraus notes at the outset of her book, she ‘lied all the time’. Every bit of Acker’s life tended to be fed back through the creative mill, becoming a part of either her experimental writings or her other great project, the invention of Kathy Acker: a pixie-cropped, tattooed, muscle-strapped

Brought to Account

Posted on by Jonathan Beckman

The Old Lady of Threadneedle Street has been waiting for a biographer who could do justice to the richness of her story. Scholarly volumes by Sir John Clapham and R S Sayers, covering her first 250 years, gather dust on library shelves. Forrest Capie’s chronicle of the postwar era, published in 2010, was long on […]

King of Kowloon

Posted on by Jonathan Beckman

Arguably the two most successful former British colonies are Singapore and Hong Kong. Not only are they strong and prosperous in their own right, they also showed Deng Xiaoping how the Chinese might transform their own economic fortunes if they embraced capitalism as well. Lee Kuan Yew, the first prime minister of Singapore, advertised his […]

Origin of the Species?

Posted on by Jonathan Beckman

In Dürer’s etching they stand with their heads bent, about to take the fatal bite. In Masaccio’s fresco they flee, Eve’s mouth gaping in agony. The Fall of Man has fascinated many: it’s when we become mortal, knowing and sexual all at once. In this new book, Stephen Greenblatt turns his attention to Adam and Eve. In a departure for Greenblatt, this is an attempt at a full cultural history of the kind we might associate with Marina Warner. It was triggered by a visit to a pairadaeza, an old Persian garden, in Iran. He describes reaching, after driving for hours through desert, ‘a relatively small, dusty, square space with very old cedar trees lined up in rows along very straight paths

File Bodies

Posted on by Jonathan Beckman

Intelligence gathering and intelligence analysis are distinct and complementary skills. It is not enough for agents to collect informative material if there are no desk officers able to interpret the data. The Secret Twenties exemplifies the perils of a mismatch between copious, accurate information and less reliable analysis. Timothy Phillips has delved into the MI5 […]

Rogues’ Gallery

Posted on by Jonathan Beckman

Simon Heffer has assembled in this book a cast of hundreds, which forms a sort of linear pageant. Like a puppet master he makes the most important (or retrospectively important) figures of the long prelude to catastrophe pop up and flit out of his thematically configured, temporally jumbled chapters in endlessly mutating roles. Thus, here […]

Knight Fever

Posted on by Jonathan Beckman

Thank God this book is sane. As Dan Jones observes in his introduction, ‘Templars have featured in numerous works of fiction, television shows and films where they have been presented variously as heroes, martyrs, thugs, bullies, victims, criminals, perverts, heretics, depraved subversives, guardians of the Holy Grail, protectors of Christ’s secret bloodline and time-travelling agents […]

Norse to Be Reckoned With

Posted on by Jonathan Beckman

In recent years the Vikings have become ubiquitous. Making up for decades of confinement at the more academic end of the publishing spectrum, they have now colonised great swathes of our bookshops. A succession of popular works has revised and reoriented our view of these great Scandinavian raiders. It is a bold author who enters […]

Water World

Posted on by Jonathan Beckman

Simplify – but not, please, in the manner of, say, Liam Fox – your image of Europe. Envisage its elementary geometry as an arrowhead pointing into the ocean from Asia. The Mediterranean and Atlantic mark the edges. Roughly bisecting the angle is a long watershed of highlands and boglands, from which almost all major rivers flow

The Big Chill

Posted on by Jonathan Beckman

The most difficult question posed by the Cold War is why it did not end in hot war. Odd Arne Westad, a professor of history at Harvard, argues persuasively that it very nearly did: ‘On a couple of occasions, we were much closer to nuclear devastation than anyone but a few people realized. Nuclear war […]

Meeting of Minds

Posted on by Jonathan Beckman

Aristotle argued that there were three kinds of friendship – those motivated by utility, by pleasure and by virtue. According to the political scientist Dennis C Rasmussen, the bond between David Hume and Adam Smith was a ‘textbook model’ of the last kind, ‘a stable, enduring, reciprocal bond that arises not just from serving one […]

Evolving Ideas

Posted on by Jonathan Beckman

‘A biography of Darwin must, chiefly, be the biography of an idea.’ A N Wilson’s observation, made nearly a third of the way through this longish work, may be well founded. But it is belied by the content of his book, which abounds in incidental detail about Darwin and his life without offering any clear statement […]

Deifying Gravity

Posted on by Jonathan Beckman

Albert Einstein famously quipped, ‘Do not worry about your difficulties in Mathematics. I can assure you mine are still greater.’ In 1940 he had major difficulties, but they had nothing to do with mathematics. An acquaintance of his, the polymath and collector Abraham Yahuda, had four years earlier acquired a huge swathe of Isaac Newton’s […]

Let It Blow

Posted on by Jonathan Beckman

This extraordinary work is a prime example of that contemporary genre, the ex-travel book. Travel writing as such being a bit obsolete now, since so many readers have been everywhere, the form has evolved into something more interpretative or philosophical. Where the Wild Winds Are is a work of this sort – a thoughtful

The Last Comrade

Posted on by Jonathan Beckman

It is one of the paradoxes of Soviet history that Mikhail Gorbachev, who did more than any other Kremlin leader to show his ‘personal’ side to a watching world, has eluded his biographers. Nobody before William Taubman has achieved an in-depth psychological portrait. Political accounts have been two a penny; economic and ideological studies have come at a discount. But what made Gorbachev tick

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