Ford Madox Ford, an appealingly talented and gossipy subject, has naturally attracted biographers. In 1971 Arthur Mizener’s The Saddest Story seemed adequately exhaustive, but now Max...
Know your enemy, and know yourself, and you may fight a hundred battles and not lose one. Sun Tzu, The Art of War, c.450 BC The historian William Manchester, who served with him in the Pacific,...
The words ‘HIV Positive’ and ‘Aids’ do not appear in the poems in Mark Doty’s My Alexandria (1995); instead, they hover in the spaces between the other words, and...
The letters exchanged by Nancy Mitford and Evelyn Waugh over twenty years were written, we are told, ‘to amuse, distract or tease’, a welcome function no doubt in times of bogged-down...
It’s a dependable party game: who was the MP who sat from 1950 to 1987, emerged as a strong and early opponent of hanging and supported homosexual law reform; was fiercely anti-Nato,...
Fifty or sixty years ago, there were many people for whom Gladstone still mattered. This can hardly be said today. He has become more and more marginal to our preoccupations, partly because those...
‘Did you write it yourself?’ That is the first question any visiting journo asks Howard Marks about his autobiography, Mr Nice. Marks suppresses a yawn. The morning is not really his...
The title of this writer’s autobiography is taken from Easy-to-Make Old-Fashioned Toys. ‘Flip-books, or Flickerbooks ... a series of sequential pictures or photographs put on separate...
Virginia Woolf once said that biographies fail because the subject of the biography always goes missing (lost under the welter of the life). In this case, it is madness that goes missing because Woolf...
3 January. To ‘Dynasties’, the exhibition of Tudor portraits at the Tate. There are some superb pictures but, with the sitters shortly to die or be executed, many of them seem ominous...
Bryan Magee is a brilliant philosophical entrepreneur, host of two BBC television series in which he interviewed live philosophers and dead ones (the latter mediated by other live ones). The late...
It may be that only the truly self-absorbed can make art out of self-effacement. This at least is one of the suggestions of the first volume of Christopher Isherwood’s Diaries, a whingeing,...
In 1966, the year I made the acquaintance of Ilya Ehrenburg, these words appeared in the Daily Mirror: ‘His name is always mud – somewhere or other. He is Ilya Ehrenburg, the renowned...
Kas Maine sharecropped on the marginal farmland of Willem Nieman, a staunch Afrikaner, chairman of the local National Party branch and hater of the English and the Jews. When Kas’s first...
G.K. Chesterton wrote every day of his life, seldom revising and missing as many targets as he hit. But because of the sheer magnitude of the output, that still leaves a monument of achievement,...
What is the use in having lived so long, travelled so widely, listened and looked so hard, if at the end you don’t know what you know?
Lionel Tennyson, the Poet Laureate’s second son, had what might be called an interesting marriage. Interesting from our point of view, however difficult from his own. Like everyone who...
Hardy’s wives were not inclined to be reticent about the trials of life at Max Gate. Florence was struck with uneasiness after one particularly edgy bout of discontent: ‘I hope you...