The liberation of Paris in August 1944, two months after D-Day, was one of the most highly publicised victories of the second world war, although it was of no military importance. General Eisenhower, the supreme Allied commander, originally planned to bypass the city altogether but was persuaded by General de Gaulle to allow the tanks
‘The House’ in the title of Richard Davenport-Hines’s engaging new book is Christ Church, by any reckoning the grandest of Oxford’s colleges. The place has always been, he notes, akin ‘to an autonomous duchy within a larger federated kingdom’, and thus ‘a separate realm of memory’. Notoriously, its teachers and researchers are referred to not
On reaching the end of Hettie Judah’s Acts of Creation, I felt somewhat overwhelmed. At 272 pages, the book isn’t particularly large, but the time span it covers, from prehistoric goddess figures to Laure Prouvost’s 2021 cyborg-octopus installation ‘MOOTHERR’, is enormous. The trajectories, practices and obsessions of the artists discussed range far and wide. Written
In 2021, a financial newspaper estimated the American televangelist Kenneth Copeland’s wealth to be in the region of $750 million. This fortune has helped the preacher build a property empire and purchase a fleet of private jets – acquisitions, he says, ordained by God. Gillis, the principal character in Chris Kohler’s Phantom Limb, has not
A drop of water falls on the head of Ashur-banal, the erudite but merciless king of Assyria, as he walks through his capital, Nineveh. Having dissolved into the atmosphere, it reappears in 1840 as a snowflake that falls into the mouth of King Arthur of the Sewers and Slums, the fancifully named son of a
We are blessed to be living in a golden age of anchovies. They’re everywhere – lacing salads, festooning pizzas, draped across inordinately expensive small plates. In certain circles, there are few more potent social signifiers than the red, yellow and blue of an Ortiz tin. Victory for the umami junkies. How times change. Today the
Evie Wyld’s powerful fourth novel opens from the perspective of Max, a ghost who haunts the south London flat where he lived with his girlfriend Hannah. A ghost story is new ground for Wyld, the multi-award-winning Anglo-Australian writer, but her signature traits are immediately evident – poetic observations of unusual details; a pervasive sense of
‘Ex-wives like us illustrate how this freedom for women turned out to be God’s greatest gift to men,’ quips Patricia, the flapper heroine of the American novelist Ursula Parrott’s 1929 bestseller, which, republished nearly a century later, reveals striking contemporary resonances. Both timeless and unmistakably of its time, this candid portrait of marital breakdown, and
Over a 40-year career, Sophie Osborn has evolved from a greenhorn volunteer for nature, doing mundane tasks in the wilds of Wyoming, to the manager of a captive-release programme for California condors in Arizona. This post placed her at the heart of perhaps the most sophisticated operation for a threatened bird anywhere in the world.
As a child, Edward Wong had no idea that his father had been in the People’s Liberation Army. The only uniform the young Wong associated with his parent was the red blazer of Sampan Café, the Chinese take-away his father worked at in Virginia. China was seldom spoken of, with Wong getting only snatches and
Tasty meals and epiphanies: that’s what Banana Yoshimoto mostly deals in. It’s no accident that her most famous book is entitled Kitchen. Sometimes the epiphanies come by way of the tasty meals; at other times they are triggered by effects of light playing over rivers, trees, landscapes, as if we had suddenly found ourselves inside
