The last few years have seen a remarkable surge in studies of the Reformation period and this book by Diarmaid MacCulloch (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Diarmaid_MacCulloch and http://www.stx.ox.ac.uk/people/fellow/professor-diarmaid-macculloch) makes a further contribution, putting at the centre of the first half of the 16th century Thomas Cranmer (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cranmer), the archbishop with the beard who created the Church of England. Cranmer’s beard dominates […]
That the great are ‘silly like us,’ as Auden said of Yeats, may seem by now a lesson we have learned over and over again. But among the shining dead, there are still a few who seem as though they must have been free of human foolishness. And among the English novelists, the most likely
Reading the hyper-active Pepys in his Diary, is to be absorbed in the sheer confusion of reality. The rush of events is recounted in such detail with such relish – by a man rising from secretary/servant to chief administrator of the Navy – that the mind boggles. Here is this shrewd, alert, impulsive, libidinous, music-loving steward, plagued
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On the Black Hill (1982) is an elegantly written tale of identical twin brothers who grow up on a farm in rural Wales and never leave home. They till the rough soil and sleep in the same bed, touched only occasionally by the advances of the 20th century. In depicting the lives of Benjamin and
‘The best way of lengthening out the rest of our days, old chap, is to finish off our old things’, said the ageing William Morris to his oldest friend and collaborator Edward Burne-Jones (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Edward_Burne-Jones). Both were in their sixties; neither would see out the 1890s. Burne-Jones had been designing tapestries and stained glass – sometimes at the rate of
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‘If my story were ever to be written down truthfully from start to finish, it would amaze everyone’, wrote Henri Matisse. It is hard to believe today that Matisse (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Matisse and http://www.bbc.co.uk/arts/yourpaintings/artists/henri-matisse), whose exhibitions draw huge crowds worldwide, was once almost universally reviled and ridiculed. His response was neither to protest nor to retreat; he simply
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A fascinating account of piracy, betrayal, and raw survival on the high seas and dry land, Selkirk’s Island rediscovers the amazing tale of an eighteenth-century legend. Born a poor Scotsman, Alexander Selkirk signed with William Dampier, a pirate who was as famous for his self-promotion as for his naval success, on an ill-fated quest to
‘My mother began me one evening in 1968 on a table in the café of the town’s only cinema. One short flight of stairs away, up behind the balding red velvet of the Balcony curtain, the usherette was yawning, dandling her off torch, leaning on her elbow above the rustlings and tonguings of the back
Since the success of Brazzaville Beach (1990), William Boyd (http://www.williamboyd.co.uk/ and http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/William_Boyd_(writer) has enjoyed a reputation as a male novelist who understands women and writes believably from a female viewpoint. Given that women hold up rather more than half the market as novel-buyers, the reputation has undoubtedly proved useful. With Restless (2006), he enters the female-friendly territory
