Subtitled An Unexpected History in Twenty Objects, Neil MacGregor’s book shouts ‘gimmick!’ at the top of its nicely-designed voice. Yes, Dr MacGregor is the former British Museum director wrote A History of the World in 100 Objects; and yes, the publishing world likes lists and numbers – they give putative readers a good idea of what they’re…
In much the same way as there is a Christmas James Bond film (O.H.M.S.S., as if you needed to ask), there is also a Christmas war film: Where Eagles Dare. Actually, you could get almost as much enjoyment out of watching each during a heatwave; but still. There’s a lot of snow. The men and…
James Hawes’ A White Merc With Fins captured London in the 1990s beautifully (or perhaps just captured London in the 1990s for me beautifully, minus the glamour, bank robberies and IRA dealings). He is also an academic; hence, two decades on, The Shortest History of Germany. A split existed in the country we now call Germany –…
Oh, pour a glass of amontillado and put another bar on; it’s time for some winter chillers. All the short stories in this diverse collection, edited by Tim Martin*, ‘confine their haunting, chasing, shambling or manifesting to the festive season’. There is no stinting on the big names of the supernatural in Ghosts of Christmas Past – M.R. James, Neil…
As Mary Shelley makes clear in her forward to the extraordinary Frankenstein, she really did come up with the idea in the way Horrible Histories said; i.e. lake, thunderstorm, Lord Byron hiding behind the curtains*, her husband Percy Bysshe Shelley encouraging her to write ghost stories, etc. The idea of the scientist who reanimates bits…
First off, that title. The Lesser Bohemians. Perfect in pretty much every way: smart, funny, revealing. And for quite a while, the book lives up to it. An 18-year old Irish girl comes to London to go to drama school. She falls in love with an established actor twice her age. But why does he…
Barbara Euphan Todd is best-known as the creator of Worzel Gummidge. But before she got into tales of scarecrow folk, she also wrote this engaging curio: Miss Ranskill Comes Home is the story of a British woman who has been marooned on a desert island, presumed dead. When Nora Ranskill returns to England, World War…
Why I’m No Longer Talking to White People About Race grew about of a 2014 blog post by Reni Eddo-Lodge. A black British woman, she had tired of discussing race with white people who – not being, say, descendants of slave owners themselves – consistently failed to acknowledge their ‘white privilege’: “If you’re white, your race…
Sometimes the spaces between the lines, and the words unsaid, are as important as what’s on the page. Writing about another Penelope Fitzgerald book, The Beginning of Spring, the great novelist Penelope Lively wonders that the author manages ‘an amazing re-creation’ of Moscow in 1913, despite having visited Russia ‘once, briefly, and obviously not in…
The world of spying is endlessly fascinating to writers, perhaps because – since no-one knows what they really do – you can have them do anything. The fact that nobody referred to MI6 as ‘the Circus’ before John Le Carré thought of doing so is irrelevant: the Circus it has become. In Real Tigers, Mick…
The Understudy could have been a morality tale of an innocent’s bargain with devil – except that the devil is a vain, stupid, unfeasibly handsome actor in a plausibly dire-sounding West End ‘life of Byron’ called Mad, Bad and Dangerous to Know. Josh Harper is treading the boards in between conquering Hollywood; his understudy and…
If students at the Netherlands military staff college suggested attacking Arnhem by taking the Nijmegen road, they were failed on the spot. Such a plan of attack would be doomed: it was only wide enough for tanks to go single file, with the polders at either side too soft to allow them to traverse. Even…
‘I say, what’s that chap doing behind the beach hut?’ The ‘Sound Charades’ round of Radio 4 comedy quiz I’m Sorry I Haven’t A Clue once used this sentence to describe The Riddle Of The Sands. It’s an excellent joke. There aren’t so many laughs in the book. The sandbanks of the title are around…
Benjamin Markovitz is celebrated as a prose stylist. ‘The park was busy, the weather was white and cold,’ he writes on p138 of You Don’t Have To Live Like This. As he is writing about Detroit, Michigan, in winter, the ‘white’ works nicely here. He doesn’t mean that it’s snowing, nor – obviously – is…
‘Drowning in the North Atlantic three weeks after his leave, Walter had a vivid recollection of Sophy weeping in the train. He opened his mouth to shout for Polly and drowned that much quicker.’ As this extraordinary short passage shows, The Camomile Lawn is not a soft touch. A story about war, from the perspective of…
Dickens In The Other Room 