For Rose George, no subject is off limits. An award-winning British journalist and author, she has lifted the lid on toilets and human waste in her acclaimed book The Big Necessity, written on life as a refugee, and explored the hidden world of shipping. Now George focuses her investigative spotlight on the subject of blood, […]
Insularity is a professional vice among academic philosophers. It is not so much that the British read British philosophers (and some ancient Greeks), the Germans read German philosophers (and some ancient Greeks), and so on across the world. It is rather that we become trapped in little bubbles of problems and approaches, and find it […]
When I received my copy of this book, or, rather, when I saw its title, I had a slightly queasy feeling that I was going to have to read a couple of hundred pages of hagiography about a young soldier killed before he had the chance to reach fulfilment, or some such worthy drivel. I […]
Neil MacGregor is one of the most prominent art historians of our age. He has not only proved to be a formidable museum director (he ran the National Gallery for fifteen years and the British Museum for thirteen); he is also a charismatic communicator. Only someone with a truly quirky imagination could have realised that […]
In 1978, aged twenty-one and still drunk from the night before, I was put in a line of about thirty itinerant grape pickers. At either end of the line was an old French peasant woman. Stretching away before each of us was a long row of vines hung with bunches of fat black grapes. The foreman directed us to start snipping our way down our row. He said our line should aim to keep up with the old women. Secateurs were distributed
Travelling by train from Calcutta to Assam in 1979, John Zubrzycki found himself unavoidably delayed at a small, out of the way station. Wandering into a dusty square, he came across one of India’s most confounding mysteries. Surrounded by a crowd of curious onlookers, an old man was helping a small boy clamber into a […]
It takes a lot to stir up sustained national outrage in a country that has been ravaged by more than 200,000 murders and 30,000 disappearances in the last decade. Mired in a disastrous drug war, Mexico’s population has grown so accustomed to news of decapitations and bodies dissolved in acid that only the most nightmarish […]
Canterbury Cathedral reeks of tradition. The home of the Church of England and Anglicanism, it may have a 21st-century Twitter handle, @No1Cathedral, but behind that lies more than a thousand years of history. When I was asked to become chancellor of the University of Kent, based in Canterbury, I was, I admit, daunted by the […]
There is a video on the Tesla website that shows something magical: a car driving itself through a foggy Silicon Valley suburb. The man in the driving seat, we are told, is there only ‘for legal reasons’. He is a lumpen spectator as his car manoeuvres through junctions, around traffic cones and back to its […]
In 1939, sociologists Robert Faris and H Warren Dunham published an epidemiological study of mental illness in Chicago. Using admissions data from Cook County psychiatric hospitals, Mental Disorder in Urban Areas demonstrated that schizophrenia was highly associated with the poor, transitory and chaotic neighbourhoods of the inner city. No matter what your race, gender or […]
To succeed as an 18th-century musician you needed to be ready to travel. Not just as far as the next town or across an adjacent frontier, but for hundreds of miles along miserable roads, staying at verminous inns, a prey to bandits or drunken soldiery, between extremes of heat and cold and never quite knowing […]
Long before Vincent van Gogh was an artist, he was an art dealer. In 1869, young Vincent, aged sixteen and unsure of what he wanted to do in life, obtained an apprenticeship with the art dealer Goupil & Cie through his uncle, a major shareholder. In 1873, he was sent to work at the firm’s […]
The last time I saw V S Naipaul, on the stage of the Royal Festival Hall during the hoopla surrounding the so-called Golden Booker, for which I’d nominated his In a Free State, he was in a wheelchair and wore the ageless mask of Tiresias, seeming not to know how and why he was there, […]
With The Real Lolita, Sarah Weinman might be said to have invented a completely new genre: true-crime literary criticism, which is not to be confused with truly criminal literary criticism, which, of course, is most literary criticism. The Real Lolita is, by any measure, a unique and very peculiar book. The sad real-life story of Sally Horner, as recounted by Weinman, goes like this
Do we really need another biography of Oscar Wilde? Actually, despite what you might imagine, there have not been so many books that aspire to provide a definitive womb-to-deathbed account. There are three major contenders: Hesketh Pearson’s of 1946, H Montgomery Hyde’s of 1975 and Richard Ellmann’s of 1987. The last is not recent, taking […]
Sue Prideaux’s biography tells a familiar story. Born into a religious family, Friedrich Nietzsche is a brilliant young student of philology, not philosophy, and soon becomes a professor in Basel, bewitched by Schopenhauer’s philosophy and by Wagner’s music, personality and wife. He breaks with Wagner to commence a nomadic life, especially in the Mediterranean and […]
Always be suspicious when politicians use a quotation from a source you are certain they have not read personally. Thatcher told us earlier this year how affectionately she remembered that postwar chart-topper, ‘How much is that doggie in the window? The one with the wagg-ely tail.’ I dare say that, if pressed, she could repeat […]
Letters can be the most ordinary of documents, but a skilled letter-writer can adopt many guises. Faber’s second published volume of Sylvia Plath’s letters provides more evidence that much of the delight of writing letters for Plath was the opportunity to practise tones and registers, voices and attitudes, political and private personae. From the age […]
Patrick Leigh Fermor had the most famous case of writer’s block of the last century. Before he died, aged ninety-six, in 2011, he spent years in agony, trying to finish the third volume about his ‘Great Trudge’ across Europe in the early 1930s. He never did finish it. In the end, the last volume, The […]
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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