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‘I am not a number’: the callous treatment of orphans
Orphans are everywhere in literature — Jane Eyre, Heathcliff, Oliver Twist, Daniel Deronda, and onwards to the present day. They…
The short step from good manners to lofty imperialism
In the gap between what we feel ourselves to be and what we imagine we might in different circumstances become,…
The wilder shores of excess in William Trevor’s fiction
A very prolific and long-standing writer of short stories reveals himself. William Trevor, who died in 2016, owned up to…
1968 and the summer of our discontent
’68 will do as shorthand. Most of ’68, as it were, didn’t happen in 1968. It was, at most, the…
Debussy: the musical genius who erupted out of nowhere
At the end of his study of Debussy, Stephen Walsh makes the startling, but probably accurate, claim that musical revolutionaries…
The murder of a harmless Hampstead eccentric remains shrouded in mystery
‘True crime’ is a genre that claims superiority over imagination, speculation and fantasy. It makes a virtue of boredom and…
Reading Norman Davies’s global history is like wading through porridge
For many of us, life has become global. Areas which were previously tranquil backwaters are now hives of international activity.…
Romance and rejection
‘Outsider’ ought to be an important word. To attach it to someone, particularly a writer, is to suggest that their…
Of his time
Great novelists come in all shapes and sizes, but one thing they all share is a status of half-belonging. If…
Whatever happened to Alice?
In 1987, the art of opera changed decisively. John Adams’s opera Nixon in China was so unlike the usual run…
A dazzling vision
There are a number of reports by his contemporaries of Thomas Gainsborough at work. They make you realise what a…
Annie Proulx is lost in the woods
In spurts and bursts and flashes, a sublime novelist at work reveals herself. In Annie Proulx’s new novel, there are…
Why we love unfinished art
The unfinished is, of course, something which tells us about the history of a work of art’s creation. A work…
The making of modern India
The other day, some anti-imperialist students were questioning the presence in their institutions of statues of Cecil Rhodes, a West…
Sartre, de Beauvoir and Sheffield teenagers; the weird glamour of existentialism
I’m certainly the wrong person to be reviewing this book, never having succeeded in understanding anything that a philosopher said…
Moguls and other Hollywood monsters
This is a very odd book that Jean Stein has compiled — about the evanescent splendour of Los Angeles, which…
America’s greatest magazine — at its greatest
The New Yorker, not far off its centenary now, has moved beyond rivalry to a position of supremacy among American…
Charles Williams: sadist or Rosicrucian saint?
Charles Williams was a bad writer, but a very interesting one. Most famous bad writers have to settle, like Sidney…
Margaret Thatcher’s most surprising virtue: imagination
In almost every one of the many biographies of Margaret Thatcher that now exist, the story is told of her…
The old-fashioned greatness of Christian Thielemann
Christian Thielemann (born in 1959) is a self-consciously old-fashioned figure who makes rather a virtue out of his limitations. As…
Go Set a Watchman should never have been hyped as a ‘landmark new novel’, says Philip Hensher
This is an interesting document, and a pretty bad novel. I don’t know why anyone thought it would be otherwise.…
Queen Victoria was born to be a novelist — this book proves it
Few monarchs could become novelists. They wouldn’t be able to develop the practice, or possess the necessary temperament. No monarch…
Carnage on the home front: revisiting a forgotten disaster of the first world war
The story is an interesting one. Gunpowder had to be manufactured. In 1916 one of the places dedicated to the…
Plumber, taxi driver, mystic, musician — the many facets of Philip Glass
Philip Glass is by now surely up there in the Telemann class among the most prolific composers in history. There…
A strain of mysticism is discernible in the floating colour fields of Mark Rothko’s glowing canvases
One of the curiosities of western art is that, until the 20th century, few visual artists were of Jewish ancestry.…
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