Doing the Lord’s Work

Posted on by Frank Brinkley

‘I would fain know what the soldier hath fought for all this while?’ That question, posed by the Leveller Thomas Rainborowe during the Putney Debates of 1647, hangs over Paul Lay’s enjoyable and erudite new book, just as it hung over the several efforts to create a new society in England in the 1650s following the […]

History Boys

Posted on by Frank Brinkley

The uncomfortably intense manner, the thick foreign accent, the dropping of the names of influential friends, the ostentatious spending with no obvious sign of steady income, the insistence to anyone willing to listen – and some who are not – that the speaker is about to revolutionise his academic field: those who spent any time […]

How the West was Lost

Posted on by Frank Brinkley

‘Populists are rebelling not only against a specific (liberal) type of politics but also against the replacement of communist orthodoxy by liberal orthodoxy,’ write Ivan Krastev and Stephen Holmes. For Krastev, a Vienna-based political scientist who witnessed the communist collapse in his native Bulgaria, and Holmes, an American political theorist who has written widely on […]

One Land, Two Peoples

Posted on by Frank Brinkley

Rashid Khalidi enjoys a well-deserved reputation as one of the greatest living historians of the Palestinian people, an honour he shares with his cousin Walid Khalidi, a pioneer in the same field. His latest book is an impressive addition to a body of scholarship that peaked with his study of Palestinian identity as it evolved […]

Murder on the Mind

Posted on by Frank Brinkley

Heidi Blake is a former assistant editor at the Sunday Times who now works for BuzzFeed. Her book does two things, one badly, the other well. On the positive side, Blake has written a pacy, fact-based thriller about the locals who tend to the needs of rich Russians in London. If you want to read […]

Imprisoned Souls

Posted on by David Gelber

Ever since Romulus and Remus were suckled by a she-wolf and Semiramis, the founder of Babylon, was brought up by birds, legends of feral children have fired the imagination. But fable turned to fact only with the Age of Reason. As science supplanted faith, answers to the question ‘What is it to be human?’ began […]

Atrocities that Should Not be Forgotten

Posted on by David Gelber

‘The hope is that this body of law will serve as a barrier against the collective wickedness, greed and folly of any nation’, wrote Martha Gellhorn as she watched the twenty – one German leaders being sentenced at Nuremberg. That it singularly failed to do so is only too clear from Elizabeth Neuffer’s very readable […]

A Taxi Driver Writes

Posted on by David Gelber

I read in Cab Driver magazine that the Public Carriage Office has issued a warning that a number of fulcrum pins, which are fitted to the front suspension of cabs, have recently fractured. ‘Such failures could result in a very serious situation leading to a total loss of control of the cab,’ says the PCO. […]

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A Taxi Driver Writes

Posted on by David Gelber

In 1977 I bought a new motorbike for the first and almost certainly the last time. It was a Honda 400/4. I think it was the best-selling motorbike the company ever made and I bored a lot of people by explaining why it was so good. It was beautiful to look at, sparsely furnished with […]

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A Taxi Driver Writes

Posted on by David Gelber

I drove through Kensington Mall into Kensington Church Street and found myself looking at a police van with its lights flashing. I waved it on but it soon became clear that it was flashing me. I was asked to turn off my ignition and stand on the kerb. The officer driving the van asked me […]

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A Taxi Driver Writes

Posted on by David Gelber

Ten years ago Alan Watkins hailed my cab in Fleet Street. ‘It’s Alan Watkins,’ I exclaimed with great fervour. ‘I’ve been waiting to meet you all my life!’ Or something like that. During the course of our journey, I quoted a line he’d used repeatedly in a television interview following Mrs Thatcher’s election to the […]

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Martyn Halcrow Suffers Spasms of a Toothache

Posted on by David Gelber

Ten years ago I spotted Professor Eysenck crossing Denmark Hill. I stopped and asked him what contribution he thought the Behaviourist B F skinner might make to the fact that I had recognised him from a photograph the size of a postage stamp. Eysenck smiled and said: ‘Not much.’ We should have left it there, […]

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A Taxi Driver Writes

Posted on by David Gelber

I’ve been asked to write a column with some anecdotal bent. This is a cruelly ill-timed request. For the past year I’ve been trying to cultivate an anecdote-free environment in my cab. To this end, I have fitted a radio/cassette player on which I play classical music throughout the day. For the purposes of minimising […]

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Any Time, Any Place

Posted on by David Gelber

The title of Edmund White’s new novel is the only phrase in the book which doesn’t quite trip off the tongue, and this is probably because it is a quotation. Every other line of this exquisitely written, cheeringly humane novel conveys its gladdening sentiments, compulsive narrative and precise wit with elegance and virtuosity. The narrator […]

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All That Bla Bla Bla

Posted on by David Gelber

Burning Patience is an energetic, charmingly ribald folk-like tale, the third novel by expatriate Chileno, Antonio Skármeta. Set in a small Chilean fishing village, it is the story of the village postboy’s passion for the local bartender’s nubile daughter. To woo his Beatriz, Mario enlists the aid of the village’s most illustrious inhabitant (the only […]

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Driven to Abstraction

Posted on by David Gelber

Boldly going where no art historian has gone before, Frank Whitford attempts a double; the first book exclusively on abstract art, and the first to explain it in everyday language. Understanding Abstract Art treats its elusive subject matter like a primer for a difficult new language. Its liberal brief is to clarify and open up […]

Nothing but the Trews

Posted on by David Gelber

A life may well be too short; the same cannot always be said of a book. This is the first volume of Nicholas Fairbairn’s autobiography. The front cover shows a shock haired figure with wild eyes wearing an opera cloak and a wing collar. It might be a mad nineteenth century composer, or a magician. […]

Enid Sounds A Bit Odd

Posted on by David Gelber

In an age when child abuse is one of the most talked about subjects (after AIDS) and Esther Rantzen is able to rebuild a fading career out of her concern for the problem, it is not surprising to find that novelists are turning enquiring eyes and pens in the same direction. You Must Remember This, […]

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The Nature of Celebrity

Posted on by David Gelber

One Morning Scrope Davies called on Byron and surprised him in bed. Davies found the poet wearing paper curlers in his hair. Byron stirred and admitted that curlers were a foolish habit. When Byron indulged in Thought, it sometimes led to a tumultuous confusion of ideas. Believing himself to be very possibly the most remarkable […]

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She Adored Children

Posted on by David Gelber

Timebends: A Life is not the usual autobiographical account of when, where and with whom. It is a voyage of self-discovery across dark, interior seas aboard Arthur Miller’s own personal Argo. Indeed one gets the impression that it was never really intended for publication at all; that he wrote it behind locked doors, at night, […]

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