‘’Whatever other mistakes you make,’ my maternal grandmother warned her daughter, ‘never marry a poet.’ My mother consequently set aside her doubts and started her twenty-two years of wedded blisters cherishing my poet father. It seems Caitlin Macnamara received no such encouragement before or after she first found herself in bar-clinging proximity to Dylan Thomas […]
‘Strip me with the wrought end of a wallaby’s dong!’ Jonathon Green has done it again, his latest compilation being a ‘rookery nook’ nearly a million and a half words long; and although I’m no ‘wajank’ (Trinidadian for ‘expert’, thanks very much), I can assure you this essential tome is ‘the true marmalade’. But let […]
The story of Vivien Leigh and her marriage to Laurence Olivier is already well known from numerous books, not least those written by Olivier himself. Vickers’s account – predictably elegant and stylish – is written very much from Vivien Leigh’s side. Lord Olivier is unlikely to enjoy it at all. Indeed, Vickers makes a point […]
Unless the Autumn smites us with a study of his mother by John Osborne, Ackroyd’s book must be the finest piece of imaginative biography of the year. I use the word imaginative in a cautionary sense because Peter Ackroyd, in order to achieve this book, has perforce had to tackle some unusual obstructions which no […]
‘This book began in wonder,’ declares Caspar Henderson in its opening sentence – and what better place to begin? This exploration of the ‘auraculous’ world of sound – the word is Henderson’s own coinage, conflating the aural and the miraculous – is full, almost indigestibly so, of wonders. The author suggests ‘jumping to whatever catches […]
In 2008, Peter Bellerby wanted to give his father a globe for his eightieth birthday. What seemed a simple enough task set off an almost obsessive, decade-long journey, marked by a litany of mishaps that would have deterred anyone less determined. It ended with his establishing the world’s only bespoke globemaking company. The first surprise […]
As the person who is currently most likely to be the first female Chancellor of the Exchequer, the Labour MP Rachel Reeves has had a seriously good idea. She has written a book about the contributions that women have made to economics. She has worked into it enough references to theory and practice to convince […]
For a while, I had a doppelganger of my own. When I first glimpsed her, among the commuter crowds, I felt a shock of recognition, but not because my double wore the face I see in the mirror. Instead, she was the exact image of how I believe others see me. Naomi Klein has a […]
You’re at a gathering. A stranger snaps a photo of you with a smartphone, then proceeds to tell you your name, your employer, where you live and perhaps your political affiliation. If this party trick sounds like the stuff of science fiction, it’s not. Face-recognition technology is nothing new. It’s widely used to unlock phones and other devices, and in a growing number of settings involving identity authentication, like airport security. You voluntarily register an image
Academic and former sex worker Chris Belcher’s memoir explores how she went from being the winner of a regional ‘pretty baby’ contest as a child to becoming a highly paid professional dominatrix in Los Angeles, able to support herself through an expensive postgraduate humanities education. Billing herself as ‘LA’s Renowned Lesbian Dominatrix’, she finds that […]
Was there ever a group of men so wealthy and powerful as the American robber barons of the 19th century? Their names and the dynasties they founded, the ostentatious palaces they built for themselves on Fifth Avenue and the country mansions they stocked with European antiques on Rhode Island still make you gasp. They may […]
The opportunity to spend two years shadowing Elon Musk, the South African-born entrepreneur behind Tesla cars and SpaceX rockets and owner, since October last year, of Twitter (now renamed X), would be a fascinating but daunting prospect for any writer. The veteran biographer and journalist Walter Isaacson, whose previous subjects have ranged from Leonardo da […]
For those of us who still start the magazine by scanning the contents for David Remnick’s name, this collection of New Yorker essays on the later years of the great popular musicians may seem a redundant addition to the nightstand. However, the time-distorting accelerations of one’s own later years mean that the New Yorker now […]
A love affair took Benjamin Moser from New York to the Netherlands twenty years ago. He was twenty-six and an aspiring writer. Two well-received books followed: a biography of Clarice Lispector and Sontag: Her Life, which won the Pulitzer Prize. All the while he sought to understand the country he had made his home, which was […]
To succeed in the musical world of the 18th century, you had to be ready to travel. The life led by composers, singers and instrumentalists was a kind of cultural nomadism, with nowhere counting as home for long and an existence dominated by continued journeying in rickety coaches over atrocious roads, with no firm guarantee […]
You long for sublime artists to be sublime people. Or, if they’re bad, to be magnificently so. Possessing ‘a vanity born of supreme egoism’, Claude Monet ‘believed his art conferred a right to good living’ and that ‘his welfare must be … the immediate concern of others’, writes Jackie Wullschläger, chief art critic of the Financial Times. With great honesty, Wullschläger records her subject’s wearisome scrounging letters and his propensity for petty and often pointless mendacity. At the end of his life, when he was
On 29 September 1923, the addition of Mandatory Palestine increased the British Empire to its greatest size: nearly fourteen million square miles (150 times the size of Great Britain, a quarter of the world’s land area). It now contained 460 million people, a fifth of the world’s population. Yet, as this book’s subtitle makes clear, […]
This is an important book. A new translation of the only Mongolian account of the rise of Genghis Khan, written soon after his death in 1227, it is a contemporaneous record of one of the most astonishing and significant events in history: the creation by horse-borne herders in an obscure region of Central Asia of […]
Few authors, academic or otherwise, come bedecked with as many glittering prizes as does Christopher Beckwith, distinguished professor in the Hamilton Lugar School of Global and International Studies at Indiana University Bloomington. He took his PhD in Inner Asian studies in Indiana’s Department of Uralic and Altaic Studies as long ago as 1977. This means […]
For much of the 20th century, economists lost interest in history. That was particularly true of neoclassical economists in the West during the Cold War. Beguiled by the notion that theirs was an absolute science amenable to pure mathematical abstraction, they turned their backs on the record of experience. ‘Economics became the science of the present, slightly related to the future … but fully disconnected from the past’, Branko
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‘He has become a kind of global guru, public intellectual and consultant to the great. He is the ultimate geopolitical gerontocrat.’
From July 2022: Piers Brendon on Henry Kissinger.
Piers Brendon - Margaret Thatcher As I Knew Her
Piers Brendon: Margaret Thatcher As I Knew Her - Leadership: Six Studies in World Strategy by Henry Kissinger
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‘Even setting to one side the historically neuralgic relationship with ... Ireland, Britain’s insular periphery has from at least the time of the Romans presented difficulties for authorities wishing to centralise.’
Peter Marshall on Britain's islands.
Peter Marshall - Notes from the Atlantic Archipelago
Peter Marshall: Notes from the Atlantic Archipelago - The Britannias: An Island Quest by Alice Albinia
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