Credit: Wikimedia Commons R. J. STOVE remembers a classic work of anti-travel literature So far as Anglo-American relations are concerned I have always felt that they would probably have been better had the two nations spoken different languages. In the latter years of the eighteenth century there was a school of thought which held that…
Credit: Shutterstock GOMERY KIMBER believes there really can be second-sight On the afternoon of September 11th 2001 I was making notes for a story I planned to write about the ghost of a slave ship captain. I’d already named the ghost Noah, but I couldn't think of a suitable surname. I sat there, pen in hand, awaiting…
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…
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…
CHRISTOPHER SANDFORD evokes an age of desperate belief On 7 September 1919, the 60-year-old Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, GP, lecturer, seafarer, sportsman, indefatigable social campaigner – and globally-renowned author of the Sherlock Holmes tales – shared the platform of a Spiritualist rally at the seafront Grand Hotel in Portsmouth with a 38-year-old medium named Evan…
GUY WALKER says we must be allowed to imagine opposites Fitzwilliam Darcy, Mr. Knightley, Dr. Lydgate, Edward Casaubon, Will Ladislaw, and Daniel Deronda are excellent examples of well-rounded and believable male literary inventions, with a variety of qualities of character. Portia, Beatrice, Miranda, and Viola are excellent examples of brave, intelligent, and virtuous women, while…
via Wikimedia Commons Personal Writings Albert Camus, Penguin, 2020, 224 pages, £7.07 Committed Writings Albert Camus, Penguin, 2020, 160 pages, £7.21 ALEXANDER ADAMS revisits the rich oeuvre of one of 20th century France’s finest thinkers Albert Camus (1913-1960) confessed that he had one wellspring of inspiration: his Algerian childhood. His silent unlettered mother, his absent…
SHUTTERSTOCK MARK GULLICK sees wrinkles on the Free World's senior stuffed-shirt “I confess that in America I saw more than America; I sought the image of democracy itself, with its inclinations, its character, its prejudices, and its passions, in order to learn what we have to fear or to hope from its progress” ((Alexander de…