In a second-rate Victorian mystery novel, Fergus Hume’s The Indian Bangle, a young woman captures the fate of John Milton’s Paradise Lost. ‘Everybody talks about it’, she says, ‘and no one reads it.’ This witticism goes unappreciated. The woman’s friend, a Miss Slarge, responds humourlessly: ‘I have read it.’ The exchange is a fitting comment on […]
Certain names carry with them the whiff of brimstone. In the world of bibliophiles and booksellers, perhaps no name is more sulphurous than that of Thomas James Wise. Celebrated in his lifetime as the greatest collector in a generation, an accolade made even more impressive by his humble origins, Wise is today notorious as a forger of Victorian first editions. His signature method of reprinting minor works by major literary authors with imprints antedating the acknowledged first editions had, by the time
Pompeo Batoni’s Colonel William Gordon is among the most striking Scottish portraits of the 18th century. Depicting the Aberdeenshire officer receiving an orb and laurel wreath from the figure of Roma against a classical backdrop, the painting grafts post-Culloden Scottish modernity onto antiquity. The result is a dramatic hybrid with an admixture of incoherence – […]
For the best part of three years now, I have been living with an impossible woman. While it’s a love affair of sorts – why else would I put up with it – her intransigence, snobbery and occasional downright bolshiness have, at times, been a trial. But in return she offers an incandescent appetite for […]
I was a child often distracted by language’s strangeness. Learning the meanings of difficult words proved more enjoyable than board games. Particularly distracting were the traces of earlier history that I could detect in the wording of Christmas carols. Why were the steeple bells ordered to be ‘swung-en’? In what way might the baby Jesus be ‘very’ God? Was he super-extra divine or something not yet understood by me? I pestered the adults around me for explanations and poked my little fingers into the thumb index of the big dictionary
One of Katherine Mansfield’s defining characteristics was her restlessness, both personal and artistic: she was always most at home when on the move. ‘Do other artists feel as I do,’ she wondered, ‘the driving necessity – the crying need?’ Ambitious, curious, greedy for experience, she became a formidable innovator, reading and borrowing from other authors, adapting techniques from avant-garde painting, music and new media, and trying all the time to make it new. It helped that she was no snob
Empire-line dresses, top hats, elegant balls and proper social etiquette. The world of Jane Austen’s novels is one of poise and restraint, both in manner and in literary style. Or so we think. But what if the queen of the balanced sentence was actually a more vibrant and (dare we say it) sloppier writer than we assume? What if Austen’s original punctuation shows a writer
In 1888, Vincent van Gogh invited Paul Gauguin to live and paint with him in the ‘Studio of the South’, the Yellow House in Arles. To decorate the house for his guest, he painted his second Sunflowers series, for which he is so famous. Van Gogh was besotted with everything Japanese. His invitation to Gauguin had included a portrait of himself in the guise of a Japanese bōnze (a monk). The frighteningly austere image shows his
In ‘What Has Passed Shall in Kinder Light Appear’, a 2012 story by the young Chinese science fiction writer Bao Shu, the end of the world seems near. And yet, after a series of strange and dramatic flashes in the sky, the world keeps going, only now the arrow of time is reversed. Kicking off […]
Remember that P G Wodehouse story where Jeeves shimmers into the presence on Christmas morning in a Santa suit, waking Bertie with a steaming cup and a sonorous ‘What ho-ho-ho, sir! God bless us, everyone’? Neither do I. Never happened. As seasons go, Yuletide did not recommend itself to Wodehouse. His favourite carol, he once […]
We arrived in Manaus with trepidation. Despite being masked up, gelled up, tested up, we’d seen the images of those early days of the pandemic – the crowded hospitals, the busy gravediggers. We had to go, we’d told ourselves. I had a book about Amazonia to write. The tickets were bought. The city, located in […]
Before the arrival of white men, some seventy million buffalo roamed the great plains of America. Their principal predators were people who, when I was a boy, were called Red Indians, later known as Native Americans. The buffalo made life tolerable in an inhospitable terrain. No part of the beast was ever wasted. The men […]
Thirty years ago, Russia’s archives opened their doors to any plausible enquirer. The vast treasures of the Russian State Library and the Russian State Archive of Literature and Art excited biographers, historians and editors, though older archivists, like the dogs in charge of the hay, disliked the invasion of their mangers by foreigners with laptops. […]
When the books of an unknown German writer called W G Sebald began to be translated in the mid-1990s, readers around the world were astounded by their mystery and melancholy, and above all by their deep empathy with the victims of history and the whole of nature. But researching and writing his biography, I learned […]
In 1554 or early 1555, the future Elizabeth I, under house arrest during the reign of her half-sister, Mary I, used her diamond ring to scratch these words on a window pane of Woodstock Manor gatehouse: ‘Much suspected by me,/Nothing proved can be,/Quoth Elizabeth prisoner.’ The inscription, though now lost, was attested to by John […]
Recently, while I was sitting at my desk at home, a ten-foot-long reticulated python fell past the window. I first saw it reaching out from above the eaves of the house in an attempt to get to a nearby champac tree. It overextended itself and slid off the roof, tumbling inelegantly into the tree’s lower […]
Gouverneur Morris was born in 1752 in what is now the Bronx district of New York. He died in 1816, some eight months before Jane Austen. Like her, he was addicted to writing: ‘write’ is indeed one of the words that occurs most frequently in his voluminous diary. Even when old age and illness set in, this did not change. ‘Another year is gone for ever,’ he notes morosely one late, cold January. Then immediately he
‘The Tipp-Ex Trip’ is how I’ve come to think of it. The trip that never was. It was meant to be ‘The Footsteps Trip’. I am writing a biography of H S Ede, commonly known as Jim, who created Kettle’s Yard in Cambridge. I had a plan: 2019 – libraries and archives; 2020 – in […]
This month sees the announcement of the Prix Goncourt, the French literary prize awarded since 1903 to the book that meets its nicely roomy criteria of the year’s ‘best and most imaginative prose work’. Previously won by Marcel Proust, Simone de Beauvoir and Michel Houellebecq, it was conceived by the novelist Edmond de
The Compasses lies on the edge of an old straight track in a hollow that shelters it from the blast of the southwest wind. It’s in the hamlet of Chicksgrove. You can still see the outline of an oppidum in the field below, where Chilmark stone was mined in Roman times. A second-century Roman bust […]
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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