M r Zank was quite short, maybe five three with a wide waist for his size, somewhat wavy brown hair, about fifty, looked directly at you when he spoke with soft remnants of a Polish accent. He...
A merican radicalism , the art critic Hilton Kramer claimed in a review of Max Eastman’s autobiography in 1965, produced ‘not an intellectual tradition that illuminates current...
M ontaigne presents an unusual case for a biographer: since his essays are full of personal details, his readers feel that they know him well already. He tells us that he lacks the impulse to...
T he commune of Gurs in the foothills of the Pyrenees is famous for its internment camp, built by the French to house fugitives from Spain after the Republic fell to Franco in 1939. A...
‘A father is a necessary evil,’ Stephen Dedalus says in Ulysses. In Yeats: The Man and the Masks, Richard Ellmann quoted Ivan Karamazov: ‘Who doesn’t desire his...
10 July. It occurs to me, that tedious though Love Island is, it has immensely respectable origins, indeed the best. It is after all Bloomsbury whose motto was ‘personal relations for ever and...
She sounds, at times, as if a huge crow is about to land on her right shoulder. She breathes the Santa Ana instead of the air. It would be possible to write a parody of her novels called Desert Abortion...
W hen faced by admirers, Edward Lear was inclined to portray himself as a puzzle, or a trap: ‘How pleasant to know Mr Lear!’ Who has written such volumes of...
She stresses her own inadequacy and failure in a way it’s almost impossible to imagine a man’s political memoir doing.
A t the beginning of A Tale of Two Cities, Dr Manette is ‘recalled to life’. His death was figurative – he had been held in the Bastille for 18 years by lettre de cachet. The...
T he title of Gian Balsamo’s intriguing book is staid enough: Proust and His Banker. The subtitle – ‘In Search of Time Squandered’ – promises all kinds of...
Mikhail Sergeyevich Gorbachev changed the world, as so many adoring millions saw it at the time, by ending the threat of their extermination by nuclear war and by allowing Europe’s ‘captive...
W hen I first came to Berlin in 2002, house façades were still pockmarked by shrapnel, weeds grew in the empty plots of bombsites and the wind whipped round the new skyscrapers on...
The time capsule was buried in a secluded square in Murmansk in 1967 on the eve of the fiftieth anniversary of the Russian Revolution. Inside was a message dedicated to the citizens of the Communist...
H istorians of Northern Ireland have plenty of material to work with. A book called Lost Lives (2001) records the lives and deaths of each of the 3720 people who were killed during the...
‘It must be a full moon,’ colleagues remark when a night in the emergency department is particularly blood-soaked or there are an unusual number of psychiatric admissions.
Californians are notoriously solipsistic about their disasters and tend to save their sympathy for themselves. Yet even here we are so narrowly focused that the worst fire disaster since San Francisco...
In Europe what you hear on trains is minimal and informative: you get told your destination and the stops as they approach. In Britain it’s a relentless patter of pseudo-information aimed at pseudo-customers...