Costume Dramas

Posted on by David Gelber

Londoners consists of interviews with about two hundred of the six million or so people who call themselves Londoners. ‘My criterion for selecting them was simple, perhaps unashamedly so’, Nicholas Shakespeare explains. ‘I pursued those people living in the city who caught the corner of my eye.’ Londoners therefore is essentially a guide to the […]

Did This Man Really Win the Nobel Prize?

Posted on by Tom Fleming

There are hundreds of ways of writing about Venice. One can be lyrical and high-flown like Ruskin; fastidious and dismissive like Gibbon; melancholy and nostalgic like Proust; ghoulish and disapproving like Dickens; sensitive and almost unbearably precise like Henry James. One can write histories or guidebooks, disquisitions on the painting or the architecture, poems, descriptive […]

Doing the Charleston

Posted on by David Gelber

There can be few people who enjoy dreaming about history who have not remembered Gone with the Wind and Stonewall Jackson and imagined the Southerners winning the war. There is even a book (written by a Yankee of course) entitled If the South had Won, and musing with sentimental fondness on Lincoln’s honourable captivity after […]

How Matilda Lost Her Cherry

Posted on by Jonathan Beckman

Robert Hughes tells with wicked relish the story of a distinguished left-wing Australian intellectual who, when he heard that Hughes was writing a book on the transportation of convicts to that country, remarked that this was like Eichmann undertaking a history of the Jews. Hughes’s immediate response to this (during a radio interview, I believe) […]

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