‘’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 […]
Alan Coren confesses that he ‘habitually photographs like Kafka’s glummer brother’. As snapped by Oscar Wilde, he might have gone on to say, possibly in a brooding daguerreotype. For this selection from his Times diary prompts the suspicion that Coren keeps in his Cricklewood attic not only his amusing journal, but also an alternative, literal, […]
Paul Scofield said recently in an interview that whenever he hears the words ‘Paul Scofield’ mentioned he has to pause a while to consider who is meant. Presumably this is not a condition that afflicts Kenneth Branagh at this time. His face has appeared recently as often as that of Richard Branson. Besides their healthy-sounding, […]
Sir Peter Parker sets out to disarm. He had a happy childhood, has been ‘happily in love’, all his married life and therefore has ‘no right to write an autobiography’. He boasts of knowing ‘zilch’ about the railways, moving from private industry to take over as BR chairman in 1976. William Blake, cited as mentor […]
As its founding Chief Executive, Jeremy Isaacs was almost single-handedly responsible for the distinctive style of Channel 4 from the time it came into being in 1982. The new channel broke the lowbrow stereotype of lTV that all television ought to be family viewing. This attitude persisted not because of an endearing regard for the […]
Some time before 1973, when Richard Crossman was still editor of the New Statesman, I ambled along to Mr Benn’s substantial residence in Holland Park. My purpose was to talk to him about his proposed referendum on British membership of the Common Market. The visit was not, I confess, greatly to my taste. My practice, […]
This is rather an odd book, diffuse as well as discursive, deliberately non-chronological for reasons I cannot fathom, and with different sections written not only at different times but in distinctly different styles. At one point, again for reasons I fail to understand, Sisson becomes a soldier called Pearce. But it needs to be accepted […]
Barbara Skelton has two remarkable literary qualities; she tells the truth and has no illusions about herself or her lovers. She was also attractive. The combination was found irresistible by many talented and devious men. This second volume of her diary/memoirs, gives the reader a fascinating account of her marriages to Lord Weidenfeld and Professor […]
Such is the empathy elicited by Eva Hoffman’s intimate, exploratory prose that, reading Lost in Translation, I was filled with a powerful sense of tesknota – the Polish word for nostalgia which Hoffman uses, presumably because it conveys better than our word that sense of longing for something understood but unreachable. I wanted to share […]
Nobody could accuse Frank Zappa of courting popularity. He has hardly even achieved it accidentally. Instead he has something which was once even more highly esteemed in the murky world of pop. New Musical Express called it ‘credibility’. Today’s popsters strain for ‘street credibility’, but it is a poor relation, flashier and more artificial. ‘Bros’, […]
Reading Taki’s High Life column in The Spectator is like being given the key to the door of the secret garden. Once inside you are confronted by all sorts of exotic flora and fauna; ‘Avocato’ Gianni Agnelli, ‘Ruby’ (Portfirio Rubirosa), Aly Khan, Darryl Zanuck, Ari Onassis, a raft of Rothschilds and a Volpe or two […]
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. […]
The life of actress and amateur philosopher Joanna Lumley is like those dramatic conversations you half-hear from the next table in a restaurant – considerably less fascinating, and slightly disappointing, when you give them your full attention. Lumley’s doings have covered many inches of salacious newsprint, and now her autobiography promises to tell all. We […]
I called my mother in the USA and happened to mention Michael Jackson. ‘Oh him – that weirdo. He’s funny.’ Not funny ha-ha either. So much for American Grassroots Opinion. It is true that Michael Jackson gets more than his share of unsavoury media attention, but it isn’t easy to ignore the tabloid sensationalism of, […]
I used to meet Frank Giles from time to time when he was editing the Sunday Times and I was editing the Sunday Telegraph. He always made an agreeable impression – unstuffy, humorous and civilized – as indeed does this book. Yet he seemed a most improbable man to be the conductor of that particular […]
THOUGH ESSENTIALLY un homme sérieux, I have, as is widely known, from time to time engaged myself in the act of humorous composition. The light-hearted essay containing the jocular (and occasionally waspish!) aperçu has long been a forte of mine, and the list of my contributions to Punch magazine in my Who’s Who entry – […]
Of all the many and wretched women processed through these pages, the luckiest is surely Mildred Martin, who supervised Roth in ‘independent reading’ at Bucknell University. She admired him and has obligingly supplied diary entries as testimony to the boy’s genius in discussing Yeats. She also remained resistant to Roth’s hubris, self-preoccupation and, presumably, his […]
In conversation at a recent literary do with two eminent Oxbridge professors of Eng Lit, past and present, I felt moved for some reason to drop the name of Frank Kermode. ‘Ah,’ said one of the profs, ‘writing a memoir, I gather.’ ‘Really?’ mused the other. ‘A memoir?’ The word was held in the air between […]
Muriel Spark is the kind of novelist around whom myths and legends abound. My favourite is that Mrs Spark was convinced T S Eliot was communicating with her from beyond the grave, via the clues in the Times crossword puzzle. An alternative version of this, found in the memoirs of her former lover, Derek Stanford, […]
Imagine a philistine England; imagine a country estate in Northamptonshire, an Eden encumbered by debt; imagine the conversation of women, dominated by ‘the three dreadful D’s of dress, domestics and disease.’ Then imagine a little girl of sixteen or eighteen who desperately wants to be good, and has the duties of her time and class: […]
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Knowledge of Sufism increased markedly with the publication in 1964 of The Sufis, by Idries Shah. Nowadays his writings, much like his father’s, are dismissed for their Orientalism and inaccuracy.
@fitzmorrissey investigates who the Shahs really were.
Fitzroy Morrissey - Sufism Goes West
Fitzroy Morrissey: Sufism Goes West - Empire’s Son, Empire’s Orphan: The Fantastical Lives of Ikbal and Idries Shah by Nile Green
literaryreview.co.uk
Rats have plagued cities for centuries. But in Baltimore, researchers alighted on one surprising solution to the problem of rat infestation: more rats.
@WillWiles looks at what lessons can be learned from rat ecosystems – for both rats and humans.
Will Wiles - Puss Gets the Boot
Will Wiles: Puss Gets the Boot - Rat City: Overcrowding and Urban Derangement in the Rodent Universes of John B ...
literaryreview.co.uk
Twisters features destructive tempests and blockbuster action sequences.
@JonathanRomney asks what the real danger is in Lee Isaac Chung's disaster movie.
https://literaryreview.co.uk/eyes-of-the-storm