TIME’S TERPSICHORIAN Anthony Powell: Dancing to the Music of Time Hilary Spurling, London: Hamish Hamilton, 2016, hb., 510pps Anthony Powell’s million word, twelve-volume novel sequence Dance to the Music of Time is one of the great achievements of postwar English literature, attracting near-universal praise for its subtle and textured evocation of England between the First… Continue reading
Posts Tagged → Chronicles
Upcoming Chronicles reviews
My review of Kassia St. Clair’s engrossing Secret Lives of Colour will be in the July 2018 issue of Chronicles I have also just sent them my review of David Cannadine’s Victorious Century (no idea yet when that will be published)
The Camelot-Chequers axis
THE CAMELOT-CHEQUERS AXIS Union Jack: John F. Kennedy’s Special Relationship with Great Britain Christopher Sandford, Lebanon, N.H.: ForeEdge, 2017, hb. 300pps Cultural historian Christopher Sandford’s enquiring eyes range widely, playing over everything from cricket to Kurt Cobain, the Great War to The Great Escape, Conan Doyle to Eric Clapton, and countless other late nineteenth and… Continue reading
Old North – wanderings in Lothian
OLD NORTH – WANDERINGS IN LOTHIAN Ravens over North Berwick Law – could any phrase be more hyperborean? I turned the words over lazily as I watched the birds fifty feet above, circling and diving on each other, flicking expert wings, commenting incessantly on their sport as they alternately dropped or upheld the thin blue… Continue reading
First Lady: The Life and Wars of Clementine Churchill, by Sonia Purnell, and No More Champagne – Churchill and His Money, by David Lough
CHURCHILL’S HOME FRONT First Lady – The Life and Wars of Clementine Churchill Sonia Purnell, London: Aurum Press, 2016, pb., 392pps., £9.99 No More Champagne – Churchill and His Money David Lough, London: Head of Zeus, 2016, hb., 532pps., £25 Winston Churchill is one of the most closely-examined (and lionised) of all politicians, and it… Continue reading
Island insurrectionists – review of The Bad Boys of Brexit by Arron Banks
ISLAND INSURRECTIONISTS The Bad Boys of Brexit Arron Banks, London: Biteback, 2016, hb., £18.99 Arron Banks looks out proudly and pugnaciously from the cover of Bad Boys of Brexit like a character in a Hogarth engraving, flanking the equally Hogarthian Nigel Farage, in a photo taken as Farage faced the globe’s agog media on the auspicious… Continue reading
Homing in – review of The Story of England by Michael Wood
HOMING IN ON ENGLAND The Story of England – A Village and Its People Through the Whole of English History Michael Wood, London: Penguin, 2011, 440 pp. Michael Wood begins with a quotation from Blake: “To Particularize is the Alone Distinction of Merit.” This summarises his aim, which is to zero in on one small… Continue reading
Letters from antediluvian Europe
LETTERS FROM ANTEDILUVIAN EUROPE In Tearing Haste: Letters Between Deborah Devonshire and Patrick Leigh Fermor Edited by Charlotte Mosley, London: John Murray, 2009, 416pp. In times of texting and sexting, Twittering and wittering, there is something antediluvian about epistolary collections – a whiff of fountain pens and headed notepaper, morocco-topped escritoires in long-windowed drawing rooms… Continue reading
Outré Europe – review of Basile’s Tale of Tales
OUTRÉ EUROPE The Tale of Tales, Giambattista Basile, trans. Nancy L. Canepa, London: Penguin Classics, 2016, pb., $20 Like most Western children, I was reared partly on fairy-tales. Presented in beautifully illustrated Ladybird books, these were as much a part of my early childhood as the house decor, encouraging me to read, and arousing inchoate ideas… Continue reading
Rise of the Dominatrix – review of Margaret Thatcher: Not for Turning by Charles Moore
Rise of the Dominatrix Margaret Thatcher: Not for Turning Charles Moore, London: Allen Lane, 2013, 859pp When Margaret Thatcher died last April, the obsequies were at times almost drowned by vitriolic voices celebrating her demise. There were howls of joy from old enemies, street parties, and a puerile campaign to make the Wizard of Oz… Continue reading