Anthony Sampson begins and ends his book with an account of his grandfather’s funeral, held, as requested in his will, at the top of a Welsh mountain, Foel Goch. Among the mourners were...
Our highly unreliable map of Bolivia puts the distance from Trinidad to Santa Cruz de la Sierra at roughly 500 km, none of it paved. But after driving through floods and deep mud all the way from...
It adds greatly to the glamour of this book that its author was threatened for having written it. Her offence was to argue that many of the passing media events of our culture – chronic...
Johannesburg, one can never forget, is a mining town. There are physical reminders – great pyramids of spoil from the mines litter the landscape – but more entrenched is the...
Will Rogers died in 1935 the most loved man in America. Ray Robinson, who was 14 years old, remembers the news reaching his summer camp by radio and spreading like wildfire from bungalow to...
Historians prefer not to think about coincidence. It threatens their generalising if the resemblances between events are just accidental. Simon Szreter’s remarkable and very important book...
In the index to that best of bedside books, the Army and Navy Stores Catalogue for 1915, there are 148 entries under ‘Brushes, various’. For men there were such essentials as...
‘Ecstasy’ is a brand name. According to tradition, the tag first became attached to the drug MDMA (3-4 methylenedioxymethamphetamine) some time in the early Eighties, when it moved...
An unfortunate student who had been attempting to attract Harvey Sacks’s attention: HS: Are you asking a question, or are you bidding or what? Q: Well I was just wondering if we are ever...
The scene: the A30 protest, at Fairmile. The cast includes a girl called Animal, a dog called Badger, a man called Ratty, and Swampy digging his famous tunnel. A white Rasta is cleaning dishes...
No theorist of what only a theorist would dare to call ‘modern society’ commands more attention in the anglophone world; no one is closer to the centre of the local ‘field of...
It is easy to conjure up landscapes of the past peopled by holy fools, and to suppose that medieval times were full of simpleton jesters, and boy bishops leading rites of inversion and showing...
It’s life, death and the whole cyclical thing we can’t stand. We are appalled by life’s fertility, and anything that reminds us of it, especially anything that provokes thoughts of excess, will be...
My son Joseph, his college room-mate Benjamin and I had come to the lowlands of the Beni in Bolivia to see the animal life. But the rains had caused plenty of problems for our 4x4 on the journey...
Why are we being compelled to think about how male pianists speak? King Vidor’s A Song to Remember (1945) exerted no such pressure. Nor did Max Ophuls’s Letter from an Unknown Woman...
Trinidad, Bolivia, in the tropical lowlands of the Beni below the Amazon, was not even our destination. We were only driving to Trinidad to leave it again, by way of the road to Santa Cruz de la...
In 1843, the artist Richard Dadd murdered his father and was put away in Bethlem Hospital, Britain’s oldest lunatic asylum; his portrait of the alienist Sir Alexander Morison stares from...
Blake Morrison begins his account of the murder of James Bulger with a delicate diversion into the story of the Children’s Crusade. The year 1212: at Saint-Denis, a boy of 12 begins to...