Books of life
Image: Frank K. Molloy DAVID UPTON tries his hand at making his mark Everyone knows about Banksy, who came to fame around 2000 for his cheeky anarchic spray paintings and stencils on walls in Bristol, and later all over the world. His real name is still officially secret, though by now his works sell in…
Image: Wikimedia Commons The Diaries 1918-1938 Henry Channon, edited by Simon Heffer, Penguin, London, hb, 1,002 pages, £35 KEN BELL dives into an interwar atmosphere of complacency and privilege The complete diaries of Sir Henry “Chips” Channon are now being published and the first volume will be required reading for anyone interested in the interwar…
Image: Shutterstock A story about the 21st century celebrity conscience, by NICK ARAGUA ‘I wanna give something back,’ said Maisie. ‘I dunno how though.’ ‘There are plenty of ways to do that,’ said Anthony Parson, her accountant, vaguely. ‘We can talk about that some time.’ These kids, he thought. They have millions in the bank…
The statue of King Alfred at Winchester Image: Shutterstock Eþandun Epic Poem William. G. Carpenter, Beaver’s Pond Press, 2021, 252pp LIAM GUILAR finds much to admire in an ambitious new epic of Alfred, but fears it misses the mark Eþandun ((The title, with a modernised spelling would be Ethandun. The place of the battle is…
Image: Shutterstock Nuclear Folly: A New History of the Cuban Missile Crisis Serhii Plokhy, Allen Lane, 2021, 464 pages, £25 KEN BELL admires an unusually informed study of one of History’s nearest misses Serhii Plokhy’s Nuclear Folly: A New History of the Cuban Missile Crisis is the first work to mine the KGB files that…
NICHOLAS BOOTH captures a fleeting moment in Kent I packed my battered little orchestra of colours in an old Fortnum’s bag along with some rolled up paper and a bottle of ginger beer and set off for the pear orchard which lies across a road at the back of the housing estate where my mother…
Convict flogging in Australia MICHAEL WILDING remembers a foundational Australian writer Marcus Clarke’s His Natural Life is one of the great novels of the nineteenth century. The classic indictment of the horrors of the English convict system established in Australia, it is the story of Richard Devine, transported for a crime he did not commit…
"Theodore Dalrymple", anatomist of modernity (Image: Wikimedia Commons) MARK GULLICK profiles the cultural commentator THEODORE DALRYMPLE The English writer Theodore Dalrymple, whose real name is Dr. Anthony Daniels, spent much of his professional career as a hospital and prison psychiatrist. He has also written many books on a variety of subjects, and travelled the world…
Faun, 1898, by Wilhelm von Gloeden This is Chapter 22 of GOMERY KIMBER's novel The Killing House, about a would-be hitman who finds he's the one who's in danger Outline: American Troy has one ambition in life, to be an international hitman, so when he gets the chance to work for veteran assassin Rickardo Hanratty,…
This is Part 3 of LIAM GUILAR's still-being-written epic of Britain. Chapter 1 was published in Long Poem Magazine #25 Spring 2021, and you can read Chapter 2 in the previous issue of The Brazen Head. The story so far: 449 AD. The Roman province of Britannia is tottering. The Legions have long gone and…