Biography
Dead poets’ society
In December 1817 Benjamin Robert Haydon — vivid diarist and painter of huge but inferior canvases of historic events —…
Mao’s violent disciple
Much has been written about Deng Xiao-ping (1904–1997), most recently by Ezra Vogel in Deng Xiaoping and the Transformation of…
The wandering Jew
Stefan Zweig wasn’t, to be honest, a very good writer. This delicious fact was hugged to themselves by most of…
Cometh the hour, cometh the man
An eccentric, thoroughgoing genius, surfing every wave with a death-defying self-belief — Philip Hensher wonders who Boris Johnson can be thinking of
After Albert
A new, revisionist biography argues that it was only after her husband’s death that Queen Victoria found her true self. Jane Ridley is impressed
Poet, priest and life-enhancer
Hilaire Belloc was once being discussed on some television programme. One of the panellists was Peter Levi. The other critics…
A monumental achievement
Ivor Roberts-Jones was in many ways the right artist at the wrong time. Had the sculptor been born a few…
The leader of the band
Chris Barber, still going strong with his big band, was born in 1930. He heard jazz as a schoolboy on…
Mystery and magic
For better or worse, we live in the age of the talking composer. Some talk well, some badly, a few…
‘Draw lines, young man’
Lucian Freud once said that ‘being able to draw well is the hardest thing — far harder than painting, as…
Playing fast and loose
Simon Blow recalls the wealth, recklessness and beauty of his family’s better days
At home with the Bloomsberries
Above the range in the kitchen at Charleston House is a painted inscription: ‘Grace Higgens worked here for 50 years…
‘The most important Jewish writer since Kafka’
Ian Thomson on the turbulent life of Clarice Lispector
We were not amused
Princess Louise (1848–1939), Queen Victoria’s fourth daughter, was the prettiest and liveliest of the five princesses, and the only one…
Between tenderness and rage
In the autumn of 2012, Philip Roth told a French magazine that his latest book, Nemesis, would be his last.…
Aesthete and huckster
Sam Leith suspects that even such a distinguished connoisseur as Bernard Berenson did not always play a straight bat
The maiden aunt of modernism
Marianne Moore’s poems are notoriously ‘difficult’ but her personality and the circumstances of her life are as fascinating today as…
Fun and games at Glin
I have to declare an interest: for many years the Knight and I were the closest of friends until a…
Too many Cooks…
It’s no joke, writing about comedians. Their work is funny, their lives are not. Rightly honouring the former while accurately…
A touch of Frost
Is there any such thing as abstract art? Narratives and coherent harmonies seem to me always to emerge from the…
The Welsh Chekhov
Rhys Davies was a Welsh writer in English who lived most of his life in London, that Tir na nÓg…
Winning through
‘Experiences aren’t given us to be “got over”, otherwise they would hardly be experiences.’ The opening sentence of the first…
Neither saint nor sage
The inventor of ‘doublethink’ was consistently inconsistent in his own political views, says A.N. Wilson. And no fun at all
Sheer genius
What, one wonders, will John Eliot Gardiner be chiefly remembered for? Perhaps, by many who have worked with him, for…
Black and beyond
When Prince Albert died in 1861, aged 42, Queen Victoria, after briefly losing the use of her legs, ordered that…
