Augustus John, walking down the King’s Road in Chelsea, patted the head of any child he passed in case it was one of his own. Something you learn on the side as an art historian is that intense creativity in a male artist often coincides with promiscuity. ‘I’ve got four more children,’ Lucian Freud said […]
We’ve long had the words for the being, doings, writings and career of Christopher Isherwood, eminent 20th-century man of letters. From his early twenties until two or three years before his death in the summer of 1983, he was an unstoppable producer of ‘fact-fics’, memoirs, autobiographies, confessions, travelogues and film scripts. In the words of […]
For Jacob Burckhardt, Leon Battista Alberti was the original ‘Renaissance man’. He seemed to excel at everything. He could jump over a man’s head from a standing start and ride even the wildest horses. He taught himself music, mastered physics and mathematics, and lived in such intense communion with nature that the sight of ‘waving […]
Shortly before his death, R C Zaehner observed that young Westerners who had turned away from Christianity were more often drawn to the religions of India and the Far East than to Islam. ‘The young’, Zaehner stated, ‘are not interested in switching from one dogmatic monotheistic faith to another: hence they are little interested in Islam except when Islam itself is turned upside down and becomes Sufism, which in its developed form is barely distinguishable from Vedanta.’ ‘Indeed,’ he went on, ‘that egregious populariser Idries Shah has gone so far as to claim Zen as a manifestation of Sufism.’ This, Zaehner declared, was historical ‘nonsense’. Zaehner was referring to Shah’s The Sufis, which, since its publication in 1964, had become the most widely read book on Sufism in English.
Few modern political leaders have been more versatile than Zhou Enlai. A journalist and recruiter in Paris in the early 1920s for the infant Chinese Communist Party (CCP), he reappeared repeatedly over the next few decades: as director of political affairs for the National Revolutionary Army set up to rid China of its warlords; as the spymaster managing the CCP intelligence network after the rift between the CCP and the Chinese Nationalist Party in 1927; as the Red Army’s chief decision-maker
Biography, like any other literary form, adapts to meet the changing fads of readers. Currently we like our biographers where we can see them, commanding almost as much significance as their subject. This is certainly Mark Bostridge’s approach in In Pursuit of Love, a biography of Adèle Hugo, daughter of 19th-century France’s most admired writer. […]
H G Wells and Rebecca West are standing in front of a bookcase, talking frantically at each other about matters of literary style, moving closer and closer until they kiss. The physicist Leo Szilard is somewhere near the British Museum, staring down the street and watching the traffic lights change. A man in a Japanese prison camp is waiting to see if he will die of hunger or exhaustion, or be murdered by his guards when American forces invade. Post-kiss, an overwhelmed Wells darts off to Switzerland
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 […]
‘I do not know how suicide would play with them and I do not have the bravery to find out,’ writes Natasha Walter, bravely, of the refugee women with whom she was working at the time of the death of her mother, Ruth, by suicide six years ago. Her memoir describes how Ruth, at seventy-five, […]
The life that stretched ahead of the newborn Margaret Lucas in 1623 should have been as unmemorable as it was comfortable: marriage, children, genteel household management. But even as a girl, the future Margaret Cavendish, Duchess of Newcastle, self-styled princess and hopeful ‘authoress of a whole world’, looked for something a little more exciting. Events […]
If he’d lived another six months, Nick Drake would have joined the ‘27 Club’, the sad elite of popular musicians who died at twenty-seven, more or less by their own hands: Brian Jones, Jimi Hendrix, Janis Joplin, and so on. His talent, fragility and reliance on non-prescription props were almost certainly equal to theirs. In […]
I’ve felt a little guilty about Arnold Schoenberg all my adult life. If, as a pretentious teenager, I was claiming to be a serious music lover, shouldn’t I have been getting more out of his most ‘advanced’ works? It’s all very well having developed in my later years some faint understanding of the aesthetic manifesto […]
George Weidenfeld was, in one respect, the saddest of men. There was never any joy for him in solitude. As an only child, he found it intolerable to be alone. Thereafter, he stayed in lifelong flight from the threat of a solitary moment or a placid hour. Even when working at a desk, he could […]
‘I lack both the natural aptitude and the experience to deal properly with people,’ Albert Einstein wrote in 1952. Having lived the previous three decades as a global celebrity, he could hardly have lacked experience; yet judging by Samuel Graydon’s intriguing, mosaic-like portrait of the great physicist, he was woefully lacking in aptitude. Graydon says […]
The ‘One Boy’ is Wes, of course. The ‘Two Bills’ are his grandfathers, Bill Crowley and Bill Streeting, the first a career criminal who carried a rubber mask and a shotgun, the second an ex-Royal Navy stoker. Burglar Bill wasn’t much use to anybody, but his wife, Nanny Libby, won Wes’s affection and showed him […]
‘Frederic Raphael is too clever by one quarter,’ Gore Vidal said. The two men had once made a radio programme together about the ancient world. ‘I suspect,’ Raphael admits in Last Post, ‘I was a little grand with him when it came to the detail.’ The broadcast must have been startling: two highly competitive men, […]
This was never likely to be, in any sense, a critical biography. Roger Deakin – the former ad man who rebuilt a tumbledown house in rural Suffolk, wrote a book, Waterlog, that redefined a genre and died too soon, at sixty-three, from a brain tumour – is still seen as a reverend godfather to the […]
Hitler, Stalin, Mum and Dad: the title of Daniel Finkelstein’s book does not do justice to the impressive breadth of its scope. For this is both a memoir embracing several generations of two families tossed about in the worst that history has to offer and a scholarly account of the events shaping the lives of […]
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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