On 14 June 1940, Paris fell to the German Army. The British author Sylvia Townsend Warner wrote in her diary. ‘Paris has fallen — has been abandoned.” The occupation of Paris, the cultural pivot of Europe, and the fall of France which followed two days later were ‘a flaring, presaging comet in all men’s eyes’. The war was not going…
A recent NYTimes Cooking newsletter from Melissa Clark drew my attention to the article about Raghavan Iyer by Kim Severson Mr. Iyer’s debilitating cancer treatment gave him the idea for the Revival Project, a searchable database of comfort-food recipes, with the goal of nourishing patients with dishes suited to their specific origins, preferences and medical conditions. The recipes are organized by…
Two centuries after William Hogarth published his engravings of the decline and fall of Tom Rakewell, Rebecca West wrote a morality tale of decline and fall updated for the C20th –The Modern “Rake’s Progress” 1934. Eighteenth-century Rakewell was the spendthrift, dissolute son of a rich merchant who goes to London and wastes his money on luxurious living, prostitution, and gambling…
Here’s a treat for those who relish fiction with off-the-wall cognitive mayhem – The Hearing Trumpet Suddenly it seemed as if everyone in my online book world had read it (see here and here for here examples). It’s a short novel by Leonora Carrington, better known for her wildly idiosyncratic art. It was written in 1950, first published in 1974,…
A novel by Kate Atkinson is always something to look forward to and I’ve just finished reading her latest – The Shrines of Gaiety. As always, she does not disappoint. This character-rich, picaresque romp through the underbelly of the world of the Bright Young Things of London in the 1920s is what is known as a good read. The Great…
Together with a whole lot of other readers in the UK in 1976, I read Wilt – the first in a series of over-the-top, grotesque Tom Sharpe novels about the misadventures of a mild-mannered and hapless tech college teacher named Henry Wilt. He’s a rather fuddy-duddy, decent-enough, beer-drinking, everyman kind of chap given to being misunderstood, especially by his wife…
Hands down, this is the best book I’ve read all year: All For Nothing by Walter Kempowski. It’s the bitter winter of 1945. An odd assortment of people lives in the Georgenhof – a small neglected estate in East Prussia. Eberhard von Globig is a Sonderführer, a special officer in the German army away in Italy confiscating wine and olive…
I did, in the first weeks of the war, before I got my commission, suffer severely from ‘evacuees’.– Evelyn Waugh in a preface to Put Out More Flags complaining about evacuees much as he might have done about gout or rising damp. Evelyn Waugh is often at his most entertaining when he is at his most disagreeable. Reading Waugh – and…
‘Oh, I know all about goats,’ Sonia was saying. ‘People give them the same recommendation as the billeting officers did with evacuees – they’re no trouble. For all I know it may be true of goats. But then, like evacuees, they smell, and that’s quite enough for me.’ – Hemlock and After, 1952, Angus Wilson . It’s Britain post-war, and…
“What are you doing in the wardrobe?” “Narnia business” C.S.”Jack” Lewis spent childhood years in a house in Belfast where he and his brother immersed themselves in myths and legends. They spent wet afternoons sitting inside an old and cavernous wardrobe where they told each other tales of a magical kingdom of talking animals. The world of Narnia was rooted…
All our stories begin before we are born. Not Just the blue eyes or flat feet we inherit, but the stories we hear from uncles and aunts, from grandmothers and grandfathers. Even if oral history is no more reliable than the party game of Chinese whispers, everyone bringing to it their own subjective lumber of myths, half-truths, fancies and deceits,…
It’s always fun when a tiresome book about the rules of the English language gets debunked and when some clever clogs points out that the prose of said tiresome tome is full of the very errors it decries. So it was with Lynn Truss’s bestseller Eats, Shoots & Leaves: The Zero Tolerance Approach to Punctuation The book is this month’s…
I was first drawn to Anna Kavan’s writing through her collection of wartime stories I Am Lazarus (1945) – the perfect antidote to the mindless cheerfulness of Blitz nostalgia. Kavan – the pacifist and anti-fascist – is having none of that delusion. But that’s another story. Twenty years later – in a time of Cold War tension and dread – …
“I am not interested in complicated things nor in the commonplace, I like to paint simple things that are a little strange.” – Gertrude Abercrombie After Pied Piper and The Thinking, my explorations led me into the byways of British literature of WW2 evacuation and evacuees. On that journey, I made – and continue to make – discoveries: Writers and…
Many people know that the poet T. S. Eliot was very fond of cats and indeed created some wonderful cat characters and wrote poems about them. Many people also know that he loved practical jokes – things like exploding cigars and farting cushions. They may also know that he was a fan of detective fiction and wrote reviews for The…