The composer Lord Berners (1883-1950), as a dozen books of memoirs remind us, was very much a name in the Twenties and Thirties, in the sphere in which fashionable society meets the arts. His...
Some years ago, the Sunday Times magazine published a memorable portfolio of photographs, nude studies of a young woman who had starved herself into an advanced state of emaciation. Shot in moody...
Is there something in modern South Asia’s intellectual culture that prompts scholars to separate the private from the public lives of their subjects and deploy the public as a defence...
‘Why do we hear so much of Dr Priestley?’ asked Dr Johnson rather sternly in the course of a chemistry lecture he attended in Salisbury. Joseph Priestley was the pre-eminent public...
‘Martha Gellhorn (1908-98), war correspondent and heroine’. Since her death in February, this epitaph has become a depressing possibility. Now we can say what we like about her, but...
In 1957 Jennie Lee wrote a long letter, which she did not send, to her husband Aneurin Bevan, asking him to give her ‘a little self-confidence’. The end of the letter makes it clear...
The one line that everybody knows about why people climb mountains was spoken on a wet night in New York, 17 March 1923. The tall, lean and theatrically handsome George Mallory, clergyman’s...
The history of publishing records no unlikelier-looking candidate for bestsellerdom. Written by a professor of zoology at the University of Indiana, it appeared in 1948 under the imprint of a...
Joseph Mitchell, who died on 24 May 1996, was a staff writer on the New Yorker for 58 years and belonged to the band of contributors who made the magazine’s reputation. His special subject...
We are told by the editors that some 30,000 letters of Marianne Moore survive, many of them extremely long, and that she sometimes wrote fifty letters a day. When she was young and not famous her...
I remember a nightmare walk in the Oxfordshire woods of my childhood. Among the trees, I stumbled on an eerie flock of birds: chaffinches – brilliant dabs of green, orange, blue and white...
In October 1860 Dickens finally moved what remained of his family from Tavistock Square in Bloombury to Gad’s Hill Place in Kent. He’d bought it four years earlier (for £1750),...
Thomas More, the scrupulous martyr, is the complete English saint. But no man can be a saint in God’s eyes, and no man should be one in ours; and certainly not Thomas More. He is seen as a...
Never give a writer a key to your apartment. Or your office. Never let him talk to your children. If he says he wants to take a bath tell him the plumbing’s knackered. If he makes for the...
Modern artist as con-man: Salvador Dalí. The phoniness of Dalí’s work from the late Thirties until his death in 1989 coincided with the period of his greatest notoriety and...
Alexander Korzhakov, Boris Yeltsin’s former chief bodyguard, operated out of a poky cubby-hole in the Kremlin with room for barely anyone but himself. Vyacheslav Kostikov, Yeltsin’s...
We all love Bonnard now. In straw polls he is in everyone’s top three. Unexpected people turn out to have been fans: Francis Bacon liked his brushwork. It was not always so. ‘Pierre...
‘An obituary,’ Virginia Woolf wrote on Saturday, 6 January 1940. Humbert Wolfe. Once I shared a packet of choc creams with him at Eileen Power’s. An admirer sent them. This was...