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Belfryful of Bells

Theo Tait: John Banville, 19 November 2015

The Blue Guitar 
by John Banville.
Viking, 250 pp., £14.99, September 2015, 978 0 241 00432 6
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... an alternate reality, in the ‘new-old world that Godley’s theorem wrought’. This refers to Adam Godley, from his 2009 novel The Infinities, a mathematician who cooked up the world-changing Brahma Postulate. This is something to do with quantum physics, and it means that there are an infinite number of worlds, that history has gone into reverse, that ...

Into the Net

Neal Ascherson: Records of the Spanish Civil War, 15 December 2016

Spain in Our Hearts: Americans in the Spanish Civil War, 1936-39 
by Adam Hochschild.
Macmillan, 438 pp., £25, April 2016, 978 1 5098 1054 3
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¡No Pasarán! Writings from the Spanish Civil War 
edited by Pete Ayrton.
Serpent’s Tail, 393 pp., £20, April 2016, 978 1 84668 997 0
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The Last Days of the Spanish Republic 
by Paul Preston.
William Collins, 390 pp., £25, February 2016, 978 0 00 816340 2
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A Distant Heartbeat: A War, a Disappearance and a Family’s Secrets 
by Eunice Lipton.
New Mexico, 165 pp., £18.50, April 2016, 978 0 8263 5658 1
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... in tragedy and a viciously disputed memory and made little difference to the war’s outcome. Adam Hochschild, in Spain in Our Hearts, suggests that the foreign journalists covering the war were so obsessed with the military struggle and the Republican leadership in Madrid that they hardly noticed the revolution going on outside their hotels. And yet ...

Look beyond the lips

Bee Wilson: Hedy Lamarr, 28 July 2011

Hedy Lamarr: The Most Beautiful Woman in Film 
by Ruth Barton.
Kentucky, 281 pp., £25.95, May 2011, 978 0 8131 2604 3
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... flees an unhappy marriage with a wealthy older man, and falls in love with a young engineer called Adam. Machaty had planned a close-up of the heroine’s face as Adam kisses her and wanted the audience to be in no doubt that she had indeed reached a state of ‘ecstasy’, in Eden, with her ...

‘I love you, defiant witch!’

Michael Newton: Charles Williams, 8 September 2016

Charles Williams: The Third Inkling 
by Grevel Lindop.
Oxford, 493 pp., £25, October 2015, 978 0 19 928415 3
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... and Norman Nicholson, and on the undergraduate Philip Larkin, who admired his lecturer’s novels. Victor Gollancz and L.H. Myers, both given to occult speculations, were fans of the thrillers; Dylan Thomas attended his lectures. There was a harried quality about his later years. Between 1936 and his death in the last days of the Second World War, as well as ...

Christ in Purple Silk

Irina Dumitrescu: Medieval Selfhood, 2 March 2023

The Permeable Self: Five Medieval Relationships 
by Barbara Newman.
Pennsylvania, 378 pp., £58, September 2021, 978 0 8122 5334 4
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... by extension, in one another. Paul summed it up in Corinthians 15:22 when he wrote that ‘as in Adam all die, even so in Christ all shall be made alive.’ Newman leans heavily on coinherence, arguing that it extended to relations between people even in secular contexts such as romantic love. One of the attractions of coinherence is the ethical imperative ...

The Manners of a Hog

Christopher Tayler: Buchan’s Banter, 20 February 2020

Beyond the Thirty-Nine Steps: A Life of John Buchan 
by Ursula Buchan.
Bloomsbury, 479 pp., £25, April 2019, 978 1 4088 7081 5
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... made him see red. Jews and the high finance.’Buchan’s biographers, starting with Janet Adam Smith in 1965, tend to hold up this turnaround as evidence that he wasn’t an antisemite. They point to his handful of Jewish friends, to his Zionism – a cause he learned about from his friend Arthur Balfour, who set him on the path of writing thrillers ...

Her Boy

R.W. Johnson: Mark Thatcher, 16 November 2006

Thatcher’s Fortunes: The Life and Times of Mark Thatcher 
by Mark Hollingsworth and Paul Halloran.
Mainstream, 415 pp., £7.99, July 2006, 1 84596 118 8
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The Wonga Coup: The British Mercenary Plot to Seize Oil Billions in Africa 
by Adam Roberts.
Profile, 304 pp., £9.99, June 2006, 1 86197 934 7
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... a new edition has been rushed out with some added material. For the real story one must turn to Adam Roberts’s gripping, well-researched and – given the ludicrous ease with which African tyrants have been able to milk the English libel laws – legally very bold book. Equatorial Guinea had the bad luck to come to independence under Macias Nguema, whose ...

On the Sofa

Alice Spawls: ‘Killing Eve’, 8 November 2018

... foreign visitors. She’s bored, though she doesn’t entirely know it. The girlfriend of Victor Kedrin, a Russian sex trafficker murdered in Vienna, is put in her charge. Eve arrives at the briefing late, hungover, trying to eat a croissant from a paper bag without making a noise. She blurts out that the killer, who sliced Kedrin’s femoral artery ...

Going Up

Tobias Gregory: The View from Above, 18 May 2023

Celestial Aspirations: Classical Impulses in British Poetry and Art 
by Philip Hardie.
Princeton, 353 pp., £38, April 2022, 978 0 691 19786 9
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... round of the Punic Wars, is visited in a dream by the spirit of his grandfather Scipio Africanus, victor of the second Punic War. The elder Scipio transports his grandson to a ‘high starry place’, prophesies his victory over Carthage and subsequent political career, and shows him the nine spheres of the universe. The Earth, he explains, is inhabited only ...

Notes from an Outpost

Kenneth White, 6 July 1989

... rot set in? Way back in the 18th century, analysing the socio-economic situation that was coming, Adam Smith, professor of philosophy in the university at which I had graduated, concluded that the writer would henceforth have to present his books on the market in the same way as socks. And what if you didn’t like ‘knitted literature’ or stink-sock ...

Under the Loincloth

Frank Kermode, 3 April 1997

The Sexuality of Christ in Renaissance Art and in Modern Oblivion 
by Leo Steinberg.
Chicago, 417 pp., £23.95, January 1997, 0 226 77187 3
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... full humanity, with the reservation that the sexuality of Jesus was not like ours but like that of Adam and Eve before the Fall. He was ‘like us in all things except sin’. His genitalia could therefore only with much impropriety be called pudenda. These pictures dwell on that paradox or oxymoron, the sinless generative organ. Despite much bowdlerising by ...

Up the avenue

Peter Clarke, 11 June 1992

Election Rides 
by Edward Pearce.
Faber, 198 pp., £5.99, April 1992, 0 571 16657 1
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... the snows of yesteryear were never quite what they are cracked up to be, and that there is, as Adam Smith would no doubt be saying if he had sat through the saga of Jennifer’s Ear, a deal of ruin in electioneering. The Grand Old Man was actually no slouch at the game of media manipulation. It was he, above all, who succeeded in using the new technology ...

Born to Lying

Theo Tait: Le Carré, 3 December 2015

John le Carré: The Biography 
by Adam Sisman.
Bloomsbury, 652 pp., £25, October 2015, 978 1 4088 2792 5
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... Smiley, or a conspiratorial mindset, to divine that something odd is going on behind the scenes of Adam Sisman’s new biography of John le Carré. In the past, would-be biographers have been discouraged from poking their noses into the business of David Cornwell, the former spy who has written under that curious pseudonym since 1961. Robert Harris chose not ...

What happened to Edward II?

David Carpenter: Impostors, 7 June 2007

The Perfect King: The Life of Edward III, Father of the British Nation 
by Ian Mortimer.
Pimlico, 536 pp., £8.99, April 2007, 978 1 84413 530 1
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... Abbey, erected soon after his death in 1377. Edward, the initiator of the Hundred Years War, the victor of Sluys and Crécy, the conqueror of Calais, achieved legendary status in his lifetime, and was long revered after his death. Dr Johnson, in his poem London, called on ‘illustrious Edward!’ to survey the current crop of degenerate Britons: ‘Lost in ...

Jottings, Scraps and Doodles

Adam Shatz: Lévi-Strauss, 3 November 2011

Claude Levi-Strauss: The Poet in the Laboratory 
by Patrick Wilcken.
Bloomsbury, 375 pp., £30, November 2011, 978 0 7475 8362 2
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... 1941, he boarded the Capitaine Paul-Lemerle along with 350 other ‘undesirables’, among them Victor Serge, who described the ship as ‘a kind of floating concentration camp’. Lévi-Strauss found the ascetic Serge unapproachable, but while docked in Casablanca he struck up a lasting friendship with André Breton, with whom, Wilcken writes, he shared ...

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