’He has changed the world – not as Mussolini has changed it, with coloured shirts and castor oil; not as Lenin has changed it, boldly emptying out the baby of the humanities with the...
Two images of Quintin Hogg suggest themselves. Perched upon the horsehair seat known as the Woolsack is the Lord Chancellor, hands clasped at the top of his walking-stick, tricorn hat sitting on...
Few scientists have provided the occasion for such an expense of ink as Charles Darwin. Although for much of his career he was appreciated only by a relatively small circle of fellow specialists,...
A well-known author with reason to suspect people who arrive bearing gifts of extravagant praise likes to tell this story. An African woman who had just had a child saw someone approaching her...
It is worth stating a few facts about Stephen Tennant, the subject of this excellent biography by Philip Hoare, in case some readers may not have heard of him. He was born in 1906, the son of a...
‘Relaxation is my bane, Lady Morpeth. All my habits and tastes lean that way and in consequence I am going to wage war upon them all. I dread a languid yellow old age, hot, perfumed and...
The rise of Laura Ashley seems like the right accompaniment to the rise of contemporary feminism, following her initial vogue in the radical climate of the Sixties. The first move was back to...
Men who get their memoirs published are generally confident enough to report, gleefully, their victories over particular opponents, and to try to explain any defeats. There is another sort of...
From David Hockney’s Lord of Misrule to its repetition on the back of the jacket, this book is a bull shot, like the cocktail at the bar in Langan’s Brasserie. It consists of...
This is Richard Evans’s second book on McEnroe. The Struwwelpeter of tennis is now 31 and No 4 in the international ratings. The first book, McEnroe: A Rage for Perfection, came out eight...
Emancipation involves escape, but having got out of the Victorian prison, what then? The new world may seem wholly delightful, like Blake’s Beulah or Keats’s Chamber of Maiden...
In the introduction to this autobiography Hans Eysenck approvingly quotes Oscar Wilde’s assertion that ‘modesty is the worst kind of vanity.’ Accordingly, Eysenck...
Attitudes to Ford Madox Ford (né Hueffer) vary; some think he wrote some very good novels, and some do not; some aren’t bothered by his lies, and some are. And while some find his...
The fascination of other people’s letters and diaries lies in the fact that what seems most private in us is what we have most in common. This is also one of the discoveries of love: love...
In an uncharacteristic moment of playfulness during her affair with Nelson Algren, Simone de Beauvoir called herself his ‘frog wife’. Although it echoed his tough-guy slang about...
In old age Herbert Read wrote an uncharacteristically tart bit of verse, perhaps after a quarrel with his second wife Ludo: Tired of this lonely life Gone to find another wife. ...
The history of psychoanalysis is full of skeletons. This particular one has tumbled out of its cupboard several times before but is none the worse for that. It is still an enjoyable read,...
Who said of whom: ‘I have talent but he has genius’? Evelyn Waugh had been reading Futility, which first came out in 1922, but his favourite Gerhardie novel was to be Jazz and Jasper....