Hutchinson
Paul Kildea reviews 'Henry ‘Chips’ Channon: The diaries 1918–38' edited by Simon Heffer
At a sports carnival early in Evelyn Waugh’s novel Decline and Fall, the schnockered schoolmaster Prendergast, unsteadily wielding a starting pistol, shoots poor Lord Tangent in the foot. Thereafter, Tangent barely appears in the narrative, with only a sentence now and then charting his slow medical decline. ‘Everybody else, however, was there except little Lord Tangent, whose foot was being amputated in a local nursing home.’ And later still: ‘It’s maddenin’ Tangent having died just at this time,’ some old sea dog mutters.
... (read more)Christopher Neff reviews 'Hard Choices' by Hillary Clinton and 'HRC: State secrets and the rebirth of Hillary Clinton' by Jonathan Allen and Amie Parnes
It takes a village to run the world, and Hillary knows how to do it. These are the main lessons from Hillary Clinton’s new memoir, Hard Choices. The book traces the finality of her presidential campaign bid in 2008 and her four years as secretary of state. Her analysis of this period provides insights into ...
... (read more)Some of the wildly successful historical novels of Richard Harris are counter-factual, like Fatherland (1992), which assumes a successful Nazi invasion of Britain. By contrast, his most recent work, An Officer and a Spy (2013), builds on a highly detailed account of the Dreyfus affair, which convulsed France in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries ...
... (read more)John Hirst reviews 'Lazarus Rising' by John Howard and 'A Journey' by Tony Blair
John Howard and Tony Blair both came to the prime ministership in landslides, Howard in 1996, Blair in 1997. They were on opposite sides of the traditional political divide, Howard leading a Liberal Party opposed to Australian Labor and Blair leading the British Labour Party ...
... (read more)In a world which has lost its faith and its standards, the situation of the creative artist is both central and precarious. As Wallace-Crabbe sees it, he must stand inside and outside society at once, be both totally involved with himself and totally responsive to his society. While doing this, he must create not only his own audience but even his own language.
In this series of essays, Wallace-Crabbe explores this dilemma in the work of contemporary English-language poets ranging from Thomas Hardy to Elizabeth Bishop, and from W. H. Auden – ‘the good Christian practices light verse’ – to Robert Lowell and Ezra Pound. The essays both illuminate the work of the writers he discusses and contribute to our understanding of the crucial problem of contemporary culture.
... (read more)Margaret Dunkle reviews 'The Man in the Red Turban' by David Martin
I know nothing of David Martin’s childhood or family, but I think that he must come from a long line of slayers of dragons, and that somewhere during the formative years of his childhood he listened to many adult conversations on social justice and human dignity. At any rate, his adult life has been spent dealing with dragons, in one way or another.
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