Category: Literature

Vile Bodies (1930) was, as Waugh says, “a totally unplanned novel.”

Last year I was taken by Max-Otto Ludwig Löwenstein‘s wartime memoir, Accidental Journey. You may remember his family were rich Jews and he went to Cambridge before being sent round and about as an enemy alien and joining the British army.

When Don Calogero’s arrival was announced at exactly half-past four the Prince had not yet finished his toilet; he sent a message asking the Mayor to wait a minute in his study and went on placidly embellishing himself. He plastered his hair with Lemo-liscioy Atkinson’s‘ Lime Juice and Glycerine’, a dense whitish lotion which arrived… Continue reading A Proposal

I would not have bought this book. It is a Christmas present. Why not? I have never heard of Catherine Merridale and never read anything by Simon Sebag Montefiori. I know people who bought his Jerusalem: a Biography but none who finished it ; more than eight hundred pages and more than twenty-five hours as… Continue reading Moscow Underground

Should you visit the Blackmore tin-streamers on their feast-day, which falls on Friday-in-Lide (that is to say, the first Friday in March), you may note a truly Celtic ceremony. On that day the tinners pick out the sleepiest boy in the neighbourhood and send him up to the highest bound in the works, with instructions… Continue reading Saint Piran and the Millstone