Penelope Fitzgerald (1916–2000, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Penelope_Fitzgerald ) was a great English writer, who would never have described herself in such grand terms. Her novels were short, spare masterpieces, self-concealing, oblique and subtle. She won the Booker Prize for her novel Offshore in 1979, and her last work, The Blue Flower (first published 1995), was acclaimed as a work […]
Penelope Fitzgerald: A Life Read More »
Andrew Roberts (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Andrew_Roberts_(historian)) would be the first to point out that there are already thousands of studies of Napoleon already in print (the British Library catalogue lists 13,000 items with the word ‘Napoleon’ in the title field). It takes some guts and ambition, therefore, to seek to add to that number. Fortunately we’re in the hands
Napoleon the Great Read More »
John Carey (http://www.johncarey.org/about.html), English professor at Oxford, controversial commentator, book critic and beekeeper, reflects on a life immersed in literature, from grammar school beginnings to the Oxford establishment. Best-known for his provocative take on cultural issues in The Intellectuals and the Masses and What Good Are the Arts?, John Carey describes in this warm and
The Unexpected Professor Read More »
Poet, lexicographer, critic, moralist, Dr. Samuel Johnson (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Samuel_Johnson) had in his friend James Boswell (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/James_boswell and http://www.jamesboswell.info/) the ideal biographer. Notoriously and self-confessedly intemperate (he availed himself of massive quantities of drink and prostitutes galore), Boswell shared with Johnson a huge appetite for life and threw equal energy into recording its every aspect in minute but telling detail.
The Life of Samuel Johnson Read More »
Primo Levi’s (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Primo_levi) account of his time in Auschwitz, If This Is a Man , (first published in 1947 in Italian as ‘Se questo è un uomo’ ), made him one of the first writers to document the Holocaust and it established his name around the world. But Levi was not just a writer. He
The Periodic Table Read More »
In 1929 Robert Graves (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Robert_Graves) went to live abroad permanently, vowing ‘never to make England my home again’. This is his superb account of his life up until that ‘bitter leave-taking’: from his childhood and desperately unhappy school days at Charterhouse, to his time serving as a young officer in the First World War that was
Goodbye to All That by Robert Graves Read More »
This volume contains both parts of Muggeridge’s (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Malcolm_Muggeridge and http://www.malcolmmuggeridge.org/) acclaimed memoir – The Green Stick (1972) and The Infernal Grove (1973), plus the start to an unfinished third volume entitled The Right Eye. An international throng of writers, politicians, soldiers, spies, traitors and eccentrics jostles in these page from Attlee to Wodehouse via Burgess and Philby, Churchill,
Chronicles of Wasted Time Read More »
An autobiography from 1982 delivered with the charm and gentle irony that became the trademark of this famously well travelled documentary maker (http://www.alanwhicker.co.uk/ and http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alan_Whicker) 390 pages in Elm Tree Books ISBN 978-0241107478 Alan Whicker
Within Whicker’s World Read More »
Victorian poet Arthur Hugh Clough (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arthur_Hugh_Clough) trod that ever- so-delicate path between faith and doubt that 20th century philosopher Anthony Kenny came to do himself. Both also had a connection with Liverpool and Balliol College. Kenny has immersed himself in the mind of Clough in order to deliver this ‘life’. He regards Clough’s religious verse as the finest
Arthur Hugh Clough Read More »
