Books
What really amused Queen Victoria? Dwarfs, giants and bearded women
The American dwarf ‘General’ Tom Thumb is only mentioned once in Lee Jackson’s encyclopaedic survey of Victorian mass entertainment, and…
London after the Great Fire: The King’s Evil, by Andrew Taylor, reviewed
The scene is London in 1667, the city recovering from the Great Fire the year before, with 80,000 people homeless…
Is there no end to the retelling of classical myths?
In the past few years there has been a flourishing of literary responses to the Trojan war. To mention a…
A hero of the Franco era: Lord of All the Dead, by Javier Cercas, reviewed
Who is a hero? Javier Cercas, in his 2001 novel Soldiers of Salamis, asked the question, searching for an anonymous…
Character building
Having fired off his first challenge in paragraph one (‘Read every word of this book, but don’t believe a word…
Not all British memsahibs were racist snobs
Despite efforts to prevent them, British women formed a part of the Indian empire almost from the start. Although the…
Searching for the sublime in deep dark holes
Edmund Burke, as a young Irish lawyer in 1756, first made the distinction between beauty and sublimity. Beauty for Burke…
Looking back on Baku
The discovery of oil in Baku brought Ummulbanu Asadullayeva’s family respect if not respectability. Peasant-born, her grandparents ranked by the…
How Camilla’s grandfather helped popularise the architecture Prince Charles detests
Was the Bauhaus the most inspired art school of all time or the malignant source of an uglifying industrial culture…
Fantasist, bigamist and cheat: the colourful career of Robert Parkin Peters
In 2010, Adam Sisman published a masterly biography of Hugh Trevor-Roper, who was not merely one of the best historians…
A very tangled web: Liar, by Ayelet Gundar-Goshen, reviewed
The Hebrew word for ‘truth’ – see above left (emet) is comprised of the first, middle and last letters of…
Desperate mothers, abandoned babies: the tragic story of London’s foundlings
One of the oddest of Bloomsbury’s event venues must be the Foundling Museum. The handsome building on Coram’s Fields houses…
How poetry turned a failing comprehensive into one of Oxford’s most oversubscribed schools
Kate Clanchy is an extraordinary person. She is a veteran of 30 years’ teaching in difficult state schools, as well…
Fame made Gabriel García Márquez a pedantic bore
Gerald Martin’s titanic biography of 2010, Gabriel García Márquez: A Life, was the product of 17 years of research and…
Would Turkey exist as a nation if it hadn’t annihilated its Christians?
Turkey greets you with a chilly blue eye, a flared eyebrow, a cliff-like cheekbone. The face of the republic’s founder…
Should adoptive parents be allowed to pick and choose their child?
The sorrow of involuntary childlessness is profound. The award-winning novelist Patrick Flanery and his husband knew this pain. Their craving…
Satirising the global society: Only Americans Burn in Hell, by Jarett Kobek, reviewed
An immortal faery queen from a magical gynocratic island arrives in Los Angeles to track down her missing daughter. This…
Has Shakespeare become the mascot of Brexit Britain?
The deployment of Shakespeare to describe Brexit is by now a cliché. It might take the form of a quotation,…
It’s ugliness, not beauty, that spurs us to action
Timothy Hyde’s Ugliness and Judgment: On Architecture in the Public Eye is not about why we find things ugly. It’s…
The serious games of the Oulipians
Have you heard of the Oulipo? The long-running Parisian workshop for experimental writing? Even if you haven’t, you might have…
Cracking jokes with Dr Johnson
I cast my Readers under two general Divisions, the Mercurial and the Saturnine. The first are the gay part of…
Would Faber & Faber still exist without T.S. Eliot?
Like many a 20th-century publishing house, the fine old firm of Faber & Faber came about almost by accident. The…
An outsider inside: We, The Survivors, by Tash Aw, reviewed
It’s not immediately obvious who the survivors in Tash Aw’s formidable new novel are, or who the narrator even is,…
A remote island tribe in Indonesia makes whaling seem positively noble
Our relations with cetaceans have always been charged with danger and delight, represented by the extremes of the Book of…
Is British food really still wodges of stodge?
‘You are what you eat.’ The old phrase always reminds me of Denzil, John Sparkes’s character in the comedy sketch…
