I can’t remember liking my German grandfather. ‘Oh,’ said my mother, ‘you adored him when you were a baby.’ That was in the incredible time when things were right,...
Henry James was a generous correspondent in more senses than one, but his fellow writers may have found some of the Master’s letters rather exasperating. ‘I read your current novel...
On 23 May 1909, Jacques Deprat left France for Hanoi with his young family to start a career as a geologist in the Service Géologique de l’Indochine. His advancement had been won...
The recipient of the following letter was Sir James Hayes-Sadler, Governor of the East African Protectorate (soon to become known as the Colony of Kenya). Its author was a British settler writing...
They say, and it does seem to be true, that we get the prime ministers and presidents we deserve. Now, it looks as if each generation is going to get the Karl Marx it deserves.
‘One of the most important and compelling documents of wartime Japan,’ the publisher informs us. ‘A tribute to the human spirit,’ declares the blurb. The translators...
Although Surrey’s surviving poems can be read in an afternoon, they represent a major achievement for someone whose life was cut short (literally: he was beheaded) at the age of 30. He...
The first work of fiction to which Proust returns in A la recherche du temps perdu – and also the last, one complete, 2500-page orbit later – is George Sand’s François le...
In his essay on laughter, Bergson argues that comedy is chastening, not charitable. Laughter is defined by a certain absence of sympathy, a distance and disinterestedness, the philosopher tells...
When he came to write his autobiography, the biographer Michael Holroyd decided to restrict himself to what he calls ‘a good walk-on part’, assigning the leading roles to his family....
I have three daughters and could have sold them several times over in the places I have visited where slavery in some form or other is still customary practice. Most recently in Timbuktu, for...
The first and only time I saw her dance on the stage was in 1950 at Badia’s Casino, in Giza, just below where the Sheraton stands today. A few days later, I saw her at a vegetable stand in...
The encounter between Alain Corbin and François-Louis Pinagot was at one level fortuitous. The historian picked the dead peasant’s name from the register of births in a provincial...
Václav Havel’s life would seem to be an unrivalled success story: the Philosopher-King, a man who combines political power with a global moral authority comparable only to that of the...
Was I just too seasick to care? Or too stupid to understand that war can really kill? Does memory blot out fear? If so, I wish it would also blot out homesickness, friendlessness, a lifelong sense of –...
There is a wood, the canal, the river and above the river the railway and the road. It’s the first proper country that you get to as you come north out of Leeds and going home on the train...
2 October 1949. Yesterday we were busy with Jacob’s birthday till about five (or rather Hetta and Walter were and I was hanging about): then Kidd and his wife turned up and we all set out...
In June this year the BBC showed a documentary called Diana’s Dresses. It was about the auction which took place at Christie’s in New York two months before the Princess’s...