‘In my beginning is my end’, says Eliot in Four Quartets, and (to cut a long story short) vice versa. Those of a poetical bent might choose to see this cyclical structure reflected in the Cyclopean glass eye of the communal washing machine in Karl Ove Knausgaard’s apartment building, into which he must regularly shovel a hecatomb of soiled children’s clothing
We should not be surprised that The Iliad, the definitive war epic, has attracted Pat Barker’s attention. She won the Booker Prize for The Ghost Road (1995), the final novel in her First World War trilogy, a monumental achievement that also included Regeneration (1991) and The Eye in the Door (1993). In their scale and […]
Stylisation – the fatal awareness that one is writing just as one used to, only a touch more so – gets us all in the end. With Kingsley Amis it led to a series of late-period novels that threatened to snag their readers on clumps of syntactical barbed wire. With Anthony Powell it meant ellipsis […]
In 1992, Joseph Brodsky published Watermark, a book-length essay that brings together his impressions of Venice in winter – he refused to go there in any other season – and a series of powerful and moving meditations on the writer’s vocation. A lifelong Brodsky fan, I had read Watermark several times since then, but never, until […]
In 59 BC, the Roman consul Bibulus pronounced that adverse omens invalidated the radical legislation proposed by his consular colleague Julius Caesar regarding the distribution of agricultural land. Such incidents, which appear to have been relatively rare, were seized on by 19th-century scholars, who characterised Roman religion as a complex, legalistic system, cynically manipulated by elite individuals for their own ends and serving as a means […]
When the wife of King Minos of Crete developed an unhealthy passion for a bull, she clambered inside a mechanical cow fashioned by the craftsman Daedalus and promptly conceived the Minotaur. The monster was placed inside a labyrinth of Daedalus’s design and fed a tribute of Athenian youths once every nine years until, finally, Theseus […]
Jan Morris, at the start of her tenth decade, has written a 188-day ‘thought diary’, ‘having for the moment nothing much else to write’. It is a splendidly quirky confection that mixes the trivial with the serious, like life. Some of the entries have been published before, as pieces in the Financial Times or the […]
Entertaining, well researched, intelligent and easy to read, this book, as the author explains, is about the private lives of royalty from Elizabeth I to Elizabeth II, and about how the business of looking after royalty has changed and yet in some respects remained the same over the past five centuries. In the 21st century the size of Elizabeth’s
No matter how hard doctors try to measure it, pain is a subjective experience. None of us really knows what someone means when they say they’re in pain, given that what is agony for one person might be bearable for another. But it is clear from this memoir that Abby Norman has endured extraordinary levels […]
Marianne Power attempted to follow one self-help book per month for a year. I actively avoid them. I felt a particular grinding horror when at the end of a yoga practice (yes, it’s called a practice), my instructor went to a bag, pulled out a book and started reading to us about ‘the law of attraction’ and ‘sending positive vibrations into the universe’. Prone on the deck
Readers will be familiar with Gloucester Crescent, that handsome terrace of Victorian villas in Camden Town. It has been much satirised since the 1960s, when it was rescued from decay thanks to an influx of the intelligentsia, clustered in villagey togetherness. They were soon pilloried in a cartoon strip in The Listener by Mark Boxer, […]
‘The future stalks us,’ begins Jamie Susskind’s rigorous and thoughtful book Future Politics: Living Together in a World Transformed by Tech (Oxford University Press 514pp £20). The future, he argues, is coming – and fast. The reason the danger is so pressing is that, as Susskind correctly states, ‘while time passes linearly, many developments in […]
Andrew Adonis recently tweeted that he has started another book on Britain and Europe, having just published two – the first entitled Saving Britain and this one, a series of essays on postwar British prime ministers and Europe. He has fitted all that in while campaigning vigorously for a people’s vote on the UK’s final […]
The populist earthquake that began with the 2014 European elections and produced the twin shocks of Brexit and Trump has been followed by a tsunami of books purporting to diagnose the phenomenon. Two welcome and highly readable additions to this genre are Amy Chua’s Political Tribes and William Galston’s Anti-Pluralism. As members of the American […]
Both of these books are directed to the strange political times in which we live. The Monarchy of Fear, indeed, is subtitled ‘A Philosopher Looks at Our Political Crisis’. They could hardly be more different, however. Martha Nussbaum’s book is highly personal in all sorts of ways: it begins with a substantial autobiographical preface in […]
Moneyland is everywhere and nowhere. It does not exist on a map, but if you’re rich enough it’s not difficult to find – and once you have been inducted into this evanescent, shape-shifting, offshore–onshore fiefdom, your wealth is extraordinarily well protected from those who might tax it or return it to its rightful owners. That […]
Alan Rusbridger has a claim to have been the most successful editor of The Guardian since C P Scott, who edited the paper from 1872 to 1929 and is still in a way its presiding spirit. During his editorship (1995–2015), Rusbridger steered the paper, often showing real courage, through a series of stormy stories and, […]
Nell Stevens is the go-to writer for accounts of not getting on with writing, a state with which many writers will be excruciatingly familiar. Fresh from a creative writing degree, she published her first book, Bleaker House, in 2017. It is a chronicle of spending three months in the Falklands on a generously funded Boston […]
James Buchan gives his life of John Law the subtitle ‘A Scottish Adventurer of the Eighteenth Century’. ‘Adventurer’ is a more polite term than some that have been applied to Law: fantasist, scoundrel, con man and crook, for example. Others, more generously, have called him an idealist, a financier of genius and an economist ahead […]
Thomas Cromwell has lately been enjoying a renaissance. Prior to 2009, if people had heard of him at all, they most likely thought of the brutish and cynical fixer in Robert Bolt’s play A Man for All Seasons (memorably portrayed by Leo McKern in the 1966 film version). Or they might have remembered something from A-level history about an important, if rather grey figure in Tudor governmental
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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
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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