‘Life is not always what we want it to be, but to make the best of it as it is – is the only way of being happy,’ Jennie Churchill wrote to her demanding first-born son, Winston, in 1896. A young widow, she was trying to use her influence with Lord Kitchener to enable Winston, […]
The easy way to write a full-scale life of Winston Churchill is to quarry material from the official biography, eight huge tomes completed by Martin Gilbert and accompanied by documentary volumes that continue to thud from the presses. This was the procedure adopted by Roy Jenkins, who never visited the Churchill Archives Centre, where his subject’s papers are stored in 2,500 boxes, and composed a flatulent summary of Gilbert that was absurdly over-praised by the critics. The more difficult way to resurrect Churchill between hard covers is to discover new sources by delving into repositories near and far, and to pen an original portrait of an all-too-familiar figure. This is Andrew Roberts’s method and he
If Helen’s was the face that launched a thousand ships, Arthur’s is the name that has spawned a thousand theories. Scarcely a year passes without someone locating the ‘real’ site of Camelot or the decisive Battle of Badon Hill. In fact, just weeks ago Nick Knowles (of DIY SOS fame) reckoned he could prove that […]
The USA has always been obsessed with traitors, real and imagined, from John Wilkes Booth to the Rosenbergs and beyond. Of all of them, it is the War of Independence officer Benedict Arnold that looms largest, perhaps because the so-called ‘victims’ of his treachery were never able to catch him. The volume of abuse expended […]
Two things should be said at the start about James Hamilton-Paterson. First, he has spent much of his life shunning the UK. In a rare profile in The Guardian fourteen years ago, he spoke of leaving Britain over a quarter of a century earlier and dividing his time between Tuscany and the Philippines. He described himself in those days as a ‘rat-poor literary drifter’ and a ‘professional absentee’. So this
Authors have written thousands of books about the wars for Vietnam that raged between 1945 and 1975. They have argued for and against Western intervention in Vietnam, scrutinised scores of diplomatic efforts to end the fighting and dissected battles in the minutest detail. The conflict pitting the Americans against the Vietnamese led by Ho Chi Minh has received the most attention. Scholars, journalists
I was at a book festival in Phoenix, Arizona, when I heard the news that Kirsty Young would be leaving Desert Island Discs for a time due to a medical issue. My mind went back to my own appearance on that show several years ago and the tough choices I was forced to make. Whittling […]
All politics is, in a sense, about identity: who we are and what we want as individuals and groups in the public realm. But in the past couple of decades, as the main focus of politics has tilted from socioeconomic to sociocultural themes, questions of identity and recognition have become even more central. Many people, […]
In the most commonplace sense, Robert Schumann fits the Romantic stereotype: impatient of rules and conventions, a votary of liberal ideals, motivated by instincts, dreams and passions but beset by melancholy, he ended up in the madhouse and died an early death. He is Romantic in a more specific aesthetic sense too: standing between Beethoven […]
It’s good to admit when you get things wrong. For a start, I assumed I’d hate this book. Jeanne Marie Laskas has combed through the letters sent to Barack Obama in the White House, plus his answers, to compile a history of his administration through the eyes of ordinary people. Yuck. The pitch made me […]
As everyone who has heard of Monte Carlo, Maria Callas and Jackie Onassis knows, Christina Onassis, Bolker, Andreadis, Kausov, Roussel was the much married extremely rich girl who searched for happiness in almost as ruthless a manner as her father went after wealth and power, and her step-mother, Jackie KO chased after the root of […]
‘Fantastic!’ the movie mogul Samuel Goldwyn is said to have exclaimed, on first looking into the collected works of Shakespeare. ‘And it was all written with a feather!’ Greater minds have given birth to more subtle thoughts on the subject, though not all of them as memorable. Wittgenstein, that unacknowledged humorist, worried away at the […]
I once saw the bearded one – el barbudo – and was close enough to touch him. It was at a rally in Santa Clara on 26 July 1968. The murder of Che Guevara was a recent, vivid memory. The Vietnam war, horrifying enough at the time, was to get more ghastly yet. In Angola […]
In this big, rambling, usually interesting, occasionally fascinating, and often irritating book, Fred Inglis attempts two things: a survey of modern journalism (that is, the journalism of the last hundred or so years) and an examination of the lives of a couple of dozen star journalists and a few of the great monster-proprietors. The former […]
‘A shilling life will give you all the facts’, and though Mr Osborne’s life of Auden costs rather more than a shilling it is certainly rich in specific information. Auden’s love-affairs are here (one of them was with a woman), and the poet’s public career is competently surveyed. But essentially the book adds little to […]
I have always feared that Michael Foot and I have at least one weakness in common. Both of us find it almost impossible to accept Oliver Cromwell’s advice and at least consider the possibility that we might be wrong. So it is not surprising that, having been on opposite sides of what Foot calls the […]
Sometime during the 1970s the witch was transformed from a black-hatted crone to a wise medicine women. The spell was cast by radical feminist historians, determined to find their own heroic ‘foremothers’ in the dim murk of the past. The witch was a good place to start. Dunked, splattered and singed throughout the early modern […]
I spent five years as a boarder at the Convent of the Sacred Heart in Surrey. Although the nuns taught us every day in class, a mystique hovered round them and their secret lives. The cloisters, where they slept and ate, were out of bounds. We schoolgirls were particularly fascinated by their hair, or lack […]
Comparing themselves so explicitly with MacNeice and Auden is, for Armitage and Maxwell, a double-edged sword; it could, of course, catapult them into the canon of great twentieth-century poets, but on the evidence here it is more likely simply to point up their comparative shortcomings. When Auden and MacNeice set out for Iceland sixty years […]
The idea of the Victorians taking their clothes off seems quite irresistible to the twentieth century, judging by the numbers of books on the subject. We have had The Other Victorians, Fanny by Gaslight, The Worm in the Bud, The Victorian Underworld, to name but a few. Then we had the ubiquitous ‘Walter’, detailing his […]
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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