The Girl in the Shiny Boots

Richard Wollheim: Adolescence, 20 May 2004

... the tiled halls, and now and again there was the silent apparition of a bald-headed man in a white towelling dressing-gown. I rented a cubicle, about which I remember only the enormous size of the key, and I lay down to sleep, but I couldn’t. I passed the night with a high fever, travelling through strange, lurid nightmares. In my lucid moments, I ...

Love in a Dark Time

Colm Tóibín: Oscar Wilde, 19 April 2001

The Complete Letters of Oscar Wilde 
edited by Merlin Holland and Rupert Hart-Davis.
Fourth Estate, 1270 pp., £35, November 2000, 1 85702 781 7
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... slimness of his boyish figure, the slenderness of the bare legs that protruded from his billowing white shorts, one of the legs folding back and resting on the other knee.’ As they left the café, Wilde asked Gide if he wanted the boy. Gide nervously said that he did. Wilde, having made the arrangements, laughed uproariously as his suspicions about Gide’s ...

Corncob Caesar

Murray Sayle, 6 February 1997

Old Soldiers Never Die: The Life of Douglas MacArthur 
by Geoffrey Perret.
Deutsch, 663 pp., £20, October 1996, 9780233990026
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... and the American West Coast, Britain pushed the Versailles conference of 1919 to mandate the Gilbert and Caroline Islands, and the Marianas group, all formerly German, to Japan. Japan promptly, and illegally, fortified them. Japan’s supply lines to its new possessions crossed America’s communications with the Philippines, which also lay athwart ...

The Suitcase: Part Three

Frances Stonor Saunders, 10 September 2020

... officials from the British Consulate were waiting on the quay. The passengers (Helen, sheet-white) were bussed straight to the consulate, where they were offered sandwiches, tea, cigarettes and more forms to fill in. My uncle Peter thinks they were then put up for a couple of weeks in the Pera Palace Hotel, established in 1895 by the Wagons-Lits Company ...