Some time around the ninth century, Sappho’s nine books were irrecoverably lost. We have some tantalising scraps, single lines and short quotations, but only one complete poem – the...
15 December. As I’m correcting the proofs of this Diary the news breaks of the arrest of Saddam Hussein. It ought to matter, and maybe does in Iraq; it certainly matters in America. But here? Whatever...
I’ve been basking in a warm glow from A.N. Wilson’s recent book about Iris Murdoch* – I mean its way of holding Plato and Kant not quite on a level with each other but far above...
In 1904, George Bernard Shaw announced that there was now ‘no reasonable excuse for refusing to face the fact that nothing but a eugenic religion can save our civilisation’; in 1912,...
By 1995, there were 37 monuments and 113 plaques dedicated to Jean Moulin in France; 978 boulevards, avenues, streets, squares, bridges and stadiums were named after him, as well as more than 365...
I seem to have had a peculiar loyalty to the German language from about as early as a child can have articulate views. I was told by my parents that when they urged me as a three-year-old to...
The multi-volume Collected Letters is more of a literary monument than a necessary scholarly resource. The club of 20th-century novelists thus honoured is as exclusive as the strictest Leavisite...
Im`pro.vise, v.t. & v.i. 2. to make, provide or do with the tools and materials at hand, usually to fill an unforeseen and immediate need; as he improvised a bed out of leaves. Webster’s...
The majority of books about John F. Kennedy have been written either by toadying family retainers or by people bent on destroying the Camelot myth. The historian Robert Dallek is neither; he...
It may be that by the time this issue of the LRB is published, the monarchy-obliterating secret that lurks on Fleet St will have been revealed and the last of the Windsors will be preparing for...
In November 1619 René Descartes retired into a ‘stove’ in order to reflect on the foundations of our knowledge of ourselves and the world. From his meditations he produced the...
The trailer for the recent BBC dramatisation of Byron’s life made no bones about the poet’s appeal. ‘Everything you’ve ever heard about him is true,’ the husky...
History never repeats itself, but there are uncanny resemblances between policies of the Bush Administration since 11 September and the way the Government under Abraham Lincoln responded to the...
When Robert Graves left Charterhouse School in 1914, the headmaster wrote in his report: ‘Well, goodbye, Graves and remember that your best friend is the wastepaper basket.’...
The most notorious American painter of the late 19th century, a dandy who used his gift for showmanship and his Paris education to make himself the prototype Victorian aesthete, James McNeill...
Let’s unwrap this. Let’s shine a torch back into the mouth of the underworld, and take some notes in the mouth of the cavern. Let’s return there, as the fabled dog to its vomit. Let it be a trotty...
A friend asks me how old Edward Said was when he died. I pause, do the little sum, and say: ‘He was 67, a few months older than I was.’ Then I catch the weird tense. ‘Than I...
Mary Queen of Scots was beheaded in 1587. English observers, anxious about James VI of Scotland’s reaction to his mother’s execution, were alarmed to discover that the greatest of the...