In 1856 the Reverend Henry Tindall addressed a Cape Town audience: ‘He has no religion, no laws, no government, no recognised authority, no patrimony, no fixed abode … a soul, debased, it is true, and completely bound down and clogged by his animal nature … morally, as well as physically, his aspect is dark and […]
Venice presents a spectacular example of the city as a continuing story of ingenuity, involving first a challenge to the forces of nature, then a perfect harmonisation with them. As generations of travellers have perceived, it ought not to be there but somehow, astonishingly, is. Resting on the most fragile of foundations – basically matchsticks […]
In truth, Khartoum has never been much to write home about. It has none of the history, architecture or charm of Cairo, Cape Town or Dakar, to name just a few cities in Africa, let alone anywhere else, to compensate for its drabness, poverty and parochialism. Given its majestic location, at the confluence of the […]
Isaiah Berlin liked to recall an encounter at a party in the 1930s with the Zionist leader Chaim Weizmann. A fellow guest challenged Weizmann’s devotion to the ideal of a Jewish state: ‘You are a member of the most cultured, brilliant, and cosmopolitan people in history and you want to give it all up to […]
Donald Trump is a satirist. He knows he’s preposterous and annoying, and he uses these qualities to troll his opponents. For example, when thousands of women marched on 20 January in protest against the misogynist-in-chief, Trump tweeted that he was grateful for their support. His fans laughed: the old man was playing the fool again. […]
Paul Kix, an American journalist with a fine narrative gift, begins his book about a hero of the French Resistance with a prologue centred on Bordeaux in 1998. Maurice Papon, after a distinguished career in which he had been prefect of the Paris police and a Gaullist minister, had been on trial since the previous […]
Which part of Robert Irwin’s new book would you choose for the opening scene of a film of Ibn Khaldun’s life? Would it be the description of bodies, including those of Ibn Khaldun’s own parents, struck down by the Black Death in 14th-century Tunisia, or of the storm at sea that took the lives of […]
English critics have a long and distinguished record of writing about Claude Debussy. To a list ranging from Martin Cooper and Edward Lockspeiser to Roger Nichols, Roy Howat and Paul Roberts one must now add Stephen Walsh, who, in the wake of his magisterial studies of Stravinsky and Mussorgsky, has published this wonderfully warm, wise […]
Question: do you know what the minimum wage is? In 2016 James Bloodworth went in search of low-wage Britain. He found it working as an order picker for Amazon, a care worker for Carewatch, a call centre operator at Admiral and a cabbie with Uber. Bloodworth is a man of the hard Left and he […]
Goodness, this is an angry book, and seemingly justifiably so. Fluently and engagingly written by an understandably anonymous junior barrister (and frequent blogger) specialising in criminal law, it is a truly shocking account of the working of the English courts today. It tells tales of underfunded, dilapidated buildings, ever-lengthening trial delays and miscarriages of justice. […]
The tentacles of intense, evangelised belief have reached into scores of families across Europe. The young – inspired, excited and, above all, committed – have headed into a hellish conflict, leaving everything behind. The cauldron of violence in the Middle East has lured in not only the typical young men desiring action, but also a cohort
The eagle ‘clasps the crag with crooked hands;/Close to the sun in lonely lands’. The nightingale, that ‘light-winged Dryad of the trees’, sings ‘of summer in full-throated ease’. The skylark ‘from the earth … springest/Like a cloud of fire’. The pigeon? Well, the great poets have generally been less inspired by the humble pigeon (Columba […]
When the RAF was in its infancy just after the First World War, the government had to decide on the names of ranks in the new service. Among the suggestions were the prosaic ‘Air Warden’, the exotically Celtic ‘Ardian’ and the faintly sleazy ‘Grouper’. Thankfully, none of these proposals was adopted. The RAF chose much […]
In his Commencement Address at Amherst in 1993, John Updike told the students that they were graduating at a time when history was more like a short-story collection than a novel. The Cold War that he and his generation had taken for granted had given history both drama and shape; now, with the fall of the Berlin Wall, history had been left largely shapeless
In 1605, Robert Dallington published his Survey of … Tuscany, which was based on an early grand tour undertaken in 1596. Dallington’s account concludes with a critical pun: Qui sub Medicis vivit, misere vivit (‘Who lives under the Medici [or doctors], lives wretchedly’). In her beautifully illustrated and scholarly survey of five centuries of the […]
In 1525, with the end of one of Henry VIII’s seemingly interminable wars with the French approaching, a letter writer turned his thoughts to the coming peace. The English, he wrote, with no little excitement, ‘schorttle shalle have goode cheype merchaundyes’. Corn and linen would become affordable again, as indeed would ‘all maner wynes’: red, […]
Charles I is not quite the most recognisable of English sovereigns. Henry VIII, Elizabeth I, even Queen Victoria are more immediately familiar. But Charles is the connoisseur’s king, the man who brought to the benighted British Isles the light of the Italian Renaissance, the monarch whose court nurtured a mode of portraiture that, refined in […]
Suffering from rheumatic fever and wounded in the backside by a sniper’s bullet, Joseph Gray, the author’s great-grandfather, was invalided out of the army in 1916. A private in the 4th (Dundee) Battalion of the Black Watch, he returned to Dundee, where – after art school in South Shields – he had worked as an […]
Clients who visited the Mayfair studio of society photographer Hugh Cecil in the 1930s found themselves in a curiously exotic room. The walls were silver and the ceiling was black. Where the fireplace had once been, there was an alcove of black marble and glass. It held a statuette of a Pierrot in black and […]
Pierre-Auguste Renoir lived long enough to see himself canonised. In 1911, he was the first Impressionist artist to be accorded a full monograph study, penned by Julius Meier-Graefe. In 1915 he was filmed at home in Cagnes-sur-Mer by Sacha Guitry for the series The Great Ones Among Us, in which the 74-year-old artist appears heroically applying paint to canvas
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The Political Unconscious: Narrative as a Socially Symbolic Act by Fredric Jameson - review by Terry Eagleton via @Lit_Review
for the new(ish) April issue of @Lit_Review I commissioned a number of pieces, including Deborah Levy on Bowie, Rosa Lyster on creative non-fiction, @JonSavage1966 on Pulp, @mjohnharrison on Oyamada, @rwilliams1947 on Kind of Blue, @chris_power on HGarner