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There is more to ‘The Blue Rider’ Expressionists than ‘transgressive gender’ pushed by Tate Modern
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There is more to ‘The Blue Rider’ Expressionists than ‘transgressive gender’ pushed by Tate Modern
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There is more to ‘The Blue Rider’ Expressionists than ‘transgressive gender’ pushed by Tate Modern
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Allan Massie

A Calvinist intellectual worth arguing with
April 26, 2018
What Are We Doing Here? by Marilynne Robinson, Virago, 315pp, £19 As a novelist and essayist, Marilynne Robinson is unusual – unusual for our time, that is. “I have adopted myself into an old Protestant tradition, once important in England and America, now relatively unknown in the world at large and in America as well,”
Unravelling the myth of a Most Christian King
April 12, 2018
Francis I: The Maker of Modern France by Leonie Frieda, Orion, 352pp, £25 Good English biographies of French kings are rare. So Leonie Frieda’s life of Francis I is welcome. If he is remembered at all this side of the Channel, it is for his role in that absurd piece of summitry, the Field of
Chapter & Verse: Escape from the gin-trap
March 15, 2018
Some writers do their best work when young, later deteriorating on account of fading inspiration, alcoholism, the corrupting influence of celebrity; Hemingway being an example. The career of Alfred Duggan, the finest English historical novelist of the mid-20th century, followed a different course. He was born in Argentina, his father a rich Irish-Argentine, his mother
A man with high ideals and narrow intelligence
March 08, 2018
The White King by Leanda de Lisle, Chatto and Windus, 399pp, £20 First, the title – it whets one’s curiosity – for few of us, I guess, have heard Charles I called “the White King”. It was, Leanda de Lisle writes, “a sobriquet used by Charles’s contemporaries. To supporters he was the saintly White King
Chapter & Verse: The roots of Belloc’s prejudice
February 08, 2018
“The anti-Semite is a man so absorbed in his subject that he at last loses interest in any matter, unless he can give it some association with his delusion, for delusion it is.” This is a statement with which one is unlikely to take exception. Many, however, might be surprised to find that its author
The murderer who was given a second chance
February 08, 2018
The Minister and the Murderer by Stuart Kelly, Granta, 342pp, £20 In 1969 James Nelson battered his mother to death. He was found guilty of murder and sentenced to life imprisonment. Fifteen years later, when he had been released on licence and had studied theology at St Andrews, the General Assembly of the Church of
Chapter & Verse: Greene’s favourite contemporary
January 04, 2018
In 1988 I came close to securing the Booker Prize for Brian Moore, the Northern Irish/Canadian Catholic novelist. For a moment, on the last day of discussion, there was a 3-2 majority for his novel The Colour of Blood. But PD James and Selina Hastings, the two judges in favour of Penelope Lively’s Moon Tiger,
How Hitler acquired his disastrous genius
January 04, 2018
Becoming Hitler by Thomas Weber, Oxford, 422pp, £20 Hitler has been dead for 72 years, which is 16 years longer than he lived. There have been excellent biographies. Everything that can be known about him is known. And yet the books keep coming. Only a small number of misfits anywhere revere him. There is no
Historical fiction to curl up with at Christmas
December 07, 2017
There’s always something a bit silly about literary prizes. I’ve been a judge of several, and been judged myself, and I know there is rarely a “best” Book of the Year in any category. As it is, neither critics nor readers are likely to agree about much. So what follows doesn’t pretend to be anything
Chapter & Verse: A keen sense of evil
November 16, 2017
Muriel Spark’s first novel, The Comforters, was published 60 years ago. Next year is her centenary, and Birlinn are bringing out a complete edition of her novels, all 22 of them. Complete editions used to be quite usual. They are rare today. I’ve written the introduction to the new edition of The Comforters. It was
The silliness of England’s radical reformers
November 09, 2017
A Revolution of Feeling by Rachel Hewitt, Granta, £25 Authors are not always to be blamed for their subtitles – they may be foisted on them by publishers to make a book more eye-catching. So here we have “The Decade That Forged the Modern Mind”. “Which one was that?” you may reasonably ask, even before
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