The terms of the Armistice of 1940 required the French to ‘surrender on demand’ anyone the Germans wanted to get hold of. Gestapo hit-lists were drawn up, but the chaos of defeat...
There came a time in the middle and late 1970s when Dominick Dunne knew he was washed up. For most of his life he had been trying to get into Hollywood by acting as more than he was. Or without...
‘How I envied Winifred Holtby,’ wrote the novelist Phyllis Bentley. ‘Tall and fair and handsome ... that lovely speaking voice, that precision of English, that flat in London,...
When Philip Larkin first met Kingsley Amis at Oxford in the early 1940s, he was appalled, he later said, to find himself ‘for the first time in the presence of a talent greater than...
Here they come, marching north out of Spitalfields, stride for stride in hallucinatory ordinariness, the celebrated living sculptures, Gilbert and George. It’s an English spring afternoon...
How bogus was Baldwin? When he said in 1925, ‘I give expression, in some unaccountable way, to what the English people think’, the statement was, as Philip Williamson notes in this...
One day in 1914, Ford Madox Ford, then 40 years old and feeling it, found himself for a while in the custody of the youthful Percy Wyndham Lewis, a writer whose work had appeared in Ford’s...
‘You are invited by Les Temps modernes to attend a seminar on peace in the Middle East in Paris on 13 and 14 March this year. Please respond. Simone de Beauvoir and Jean Paul Sartre.’ At first I thought...
In 1943, victory for the Allies being in sight, I was in Princeton, after three and a half years in Canada as a wartime evacuee, waiting for a passage home on a safe neutral ship. My temporary...
To be fair to Alan Walker, I should confess that I’m an amateur pianist who loves playing – or trying to play – some of the virtuoso music Liszt both composed and, of course,...
In early September 1878, an old woman named Sarah Tomkins lay dying at her lodgings on Penton Place, an undistinguished terrace in the South London district of Newington. The street was poor but...
An item in the 11 May 1889 edition of the Pall Mall Gazette, quoted by Ruskin in a footnote to Praeterita, reports ‘extraordinary’ events in some allotments in Leicester. Every...
Noel Annan will be best remembered for Our Age, his grand, confident and sometimes very funny memoir written in the late 1980s, looking back at that generation of the British élite which...
When the Guardian covered the recent Budget, it had a lot of fun unpacking the surprises sprung by Gordon Brown in the course of his demonstration that ‘all this prudence is for a...
The New Zealand novelist Maurice Shadbolt recently published what he described as a ‘memoir’,1 explaining that this form differed from autobiography in that it claimed only to recount...
John Fothergill, the high-handed host of the Spreadeagle at Thame between the world wars, described himself in Who’s Who as ‘Pioneer Amateur Innkeeper’. Evelyn Waugh, sending...
The films of Woody Allen are dedicated to the proposition that life is both alarming and boring. Is this possible? Surely alarms are at least interesting? Nothing is interesting in Allen’s...
Because Matisse’s work (his late work, anyway) seldom involves any alienating display of skill or aggressive degree of difficulty, he persuades us that our ordinary visual pleasures could,...