A Swiss Reformation woodcut shows a mill being brought back into use under the eye of God the Father. Christ is emptying St John’s eagle out of a sack into a hopper to join St...
South Wales was an entirely female country in our family mythology, despite the mines and miners. A female place, an urban place and a place all indoors. Going there was like sinking into fantasy for...
Coming home one evening in the last weeks of 1962, I found a bottle of wine in the vacated room, with a note underneath. Edward Thompson had been completing The Making of the English...
Clemenceau was an archetype; he even looked like the Third Republic. He wore, in Keynes’s words of 1919, ‘a square-tailed coat of very good, thick broadcloth, and on his hands, which...
At one point in this book, except that it’s not so much a book as a series of sharp-eyed digressions, Breyten Breytenbach tells the story of his friend Tobe. We’ve already got used to...
Reading Ian McIntyre’s new Life of Reith I found myself longing for just one deed, one word, one sentiment from the great man which I could admire. In public office, notably as the...
These days Hanmer School is tranquil and thriving, just the kind of country school people campaign to keep open because it’s gentler than the bigger urban versions, and the kids get more...
‘My great new friend is Noël Coward’, Nancy Mitford confided to a correspondent in 1949. ‘Bliss. He shakes like a jelly at one’s jokes, I adore that.’ It was...
Spain has had two queens called Isabel who had, by repute, little in common apart from a tendency to run to fat. In the age of Squidgygate, Isabel II looks like the better source of...
When Ved Mehta enrolled as an undergraduate at Balliol in 1956, he thought he had arrived in heaven. He was at ‘the holiest of holy places’. For three years he would be dwelling...
In his slightly overplayed beginning, Watkins says: I swear, I thought I was going to a party. I had a new suit made of blue corduroy and new black shoes that came with...
Europeans coming to Veracruz during the 19th century were invariably impressed by its large population of vultures and sharks. Those who arrived in the 1860s in pursuit of Napoleon III’s...
J.-B. Pontalis is a Parisian intellectual de pur sang. Born into a wealthy upper-middle-class family, he was brought up in Neuilly, and, as a child, spent long summers at a family house in...
Few reputations are so fragile or ephemeral as those of minor modern royalty – the brothers and sisters, uncles and aunts, younger sons and daughters, cousins and more distant relatives of...
Two Englishmen spring to mind in connection with Tagore: C.F. Andrews and W.W. Pearson. Andrews, with his further association with Gandhi, looms now and then in Indian history books and national...
‘When we were in the World Cup Final ...’ ‘When we had Huw Wheldon at the BBC ...’ ‘When we were first married ...’ David Hare calls the curators of these...
In the early Fifties the Hon. Angus Ogilvy, after National Service in the Scots Guards and three agreeable years at Trinity College, Oxford, approached his father, the 12th Earl of Airlie, with...
If a certain stoicism was required to get through William Burroughs’s disgusting novel, Naked Lunch, there are fewer problems with his mail. Indeed, the only danger is over-indulgence, for...