In so far as there was a shared response to Hart Crane’s poetry after his suicide in 1932, it took the form of invidious comparisons. ‘Crane had the sensibility typical of...
‘I can’t say he’s reasonable,’ a colleague remarked of Stanley Kubrick, ‘I can only say he’s obsessive in the best sense of the word.’ Because he was...
When I was 16 or so, my parents moved to Weardale, a farming area where little villages and farms flock between Durham on the east and Northumberland on the west. The church in the village we...
In the autumn of 1980 I was leafing through the latest number of Books and Bookmen and came across a notice of Hans-Otto Meissner’s biography of Magda Goebbels. The reviewer was Diana...
My favourite moment in Martin Gilbert’s Life of Churchill is when the Prime Minister is touring the ruins of Hitler’s Chancellery in 1945: In the square in front of the building a...
Sincerity and curiosity are virtues in painting; but so are grace, nobility and even the kindness that comes close to being flattery. ‘Van Dyck,’ Roger de Piles noted, ‘took his...
Despite their ill-fated, short-lived, acrimonious reunion in 1993, the Velvet Underground are still the coolest rock band there ever was. Nowadays, music critics and historians talk of their...
For his half-niece Anne Wharton, writing immediately after his death in 1680 at the age of 33, the poet Rochester was the guide who would have led her ‘right in wisdom’s way’: ...
We are now familiar with the spectacle of a Conservative leader appointed after his Party has suffered a severe electoral setback, troubled by warfare within his own ranks and confronted by a...
Once more upon the waters! yet once more! And the waves bound beneath me as a steed That knows his rider.On 25 April 1816, Byron set out from Dover for the Continent, never to return to England....
From the recollections of the Roman centurion who tells his story to the children in Kipling’s Puck of Pook’s Hill, we learn that a Libyan cohort, the Thirds, were stationed as part...
The old fortress city of Mandu stands high on a rocky plateau above the plains of central India. It is entered from the north; after a tortuous dusty ascent from Dhar, the road squeezes between...
The wedding was like a dream outside her power, or like a show unmanaged by her in which she was to have no part. The Member of the Wedding How to account for the vagaries of literary...
This book is ostensibly about six literary figures with whom Norman Podhoretz, for 35 years the editor-in-chief of Commentary, was closely involved from the early Fifties until the early...
Michael Reynolds is the marrying kind of biographer: president of the Hemingway Society, he has published a 140-page annotated chronology of Hemingway’s life, a 2300-item inventory of...
Jeremy Thorpe has long been the non-person of modern British politics. Never mind that 25 years ago he attained for the then stand-alone Liberal Party more votes (over six million) than Paddy...
To write a satisfactory biography of Adolf Hitler is perhaps the greatest challenge a historian can face. Hitler was a demagogue and a skilful manipulator rather than a statesman, someone guided...
Alfred Hitchcock is famous for planning everything beforehand, shooting his films in his head, never looking through the camera because he knew exactly what he would find. But the photographs in