Modern biographers aspire to tell all, and psychoanalysts writing the lives of psychoanalysts should be better at this than most. But there are those who may doubt the propriety of their...
His name was Franz Kafka, and he quite often went to the movies. Some such statement constitutes both the basis of Kafka Goes to the Movies and its primary impediment: the rock it has to roll up...
In what Dylan Thomas called his ‘impermanent, oscillating, ragbag character’, Welshness was a performance rather than a passion. When he talked about Wales he was talking about himself, the self that...
Robin Cook’s memoir concentrates on the first two years of the second Blair government, from his ‘demotion’ to leader of the House immediately after the 2001 general election to...
In 1865, a year after John Clare’s death in the Northampton General Lunatic Asylum, Frederick Martin, a former amanuensis of Thomas Carlyle, published the first biography of the...
If we follow the logic of Fredric Jameson’s Postmodernism, or the Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism, we could say that Rupert Murdoch is not so much a man, or a cultural force, as a...
The early photographs of Walker Evans are now so familiar that it is easy to forget how radically different they seemed at the time, and to take their subtle influence for granted, or, now that...
The possession and use of a toothbrush was a mark of the difference between us and them, gentry and peasant, or so Lady Gregory suggested when she made the remark – jocular, perhaps, and...
Aaron Barschak, who gatecrashed Prince William’s 21st birthday party last year, says the question he is most often asked is: ‘What was Camilla Parker Bowles like?’ He could do...
Returning to her aunt’s villa in Florence in 1899, after an intense but short-lived affair with Axel Munthe, Ottoline Morrell was an ideal candidate to become one of the acolytes who...
Some time around the ninth century, Sappho’s nine books were irrecoverably lost. We have some tantalising scraps, single lines and short quotations, but only one complete poem – the...
15 December. As I’m correcting the proofs of this Diary the news breaks of the arrest of Saddam Hussein. It ought to matter, and maybe does in Iraq; it certainly matters in America. But here? Whatever...
I’ve been basking in a warm glow from A.N. Wilson’s recent book about Iris Murdoch* – I mean its way of holding Plato and Kant not quite on a level with each other but far above...
In 1904, George Bernard Shaw announced that there was now ‘no reasonable excuse for refusing to face the fact that nothing but a eugenic religion can save our civilisation’; in 1912,...
By 1995, there were 37 monuments and 113 plaques dedicated to Jean Moulin in France; 978 boulevards, avenues, streets, squares, bridges and stadiums were named after him, as well as more than 365...
I seem to have had a peculiar loyalty to the German language from about as early as a child can have articulate views. I was told by my parents that when they urged me as a three-year-old to...
The multi-volume Collected Letters is more of a literary monument than a necessary scholarly resource. The club of 20th-century novelists thus honoured is as exclusive as the strictest Leavisite...
Im`pro.vise, v.t. & v.i. 2. to make, provide or do with the tools and materials at hand, usually to fill an unforeseen and immediate need; as he improvised a bed out of leaves. Webster’s...