Category Archive: Non-Fiction
The Natural History of Ghosts
The Natural History of Ghosts: 500 Years of Hunting for Proof (Roger Clarke) The Sunday Times review grab on the cover tells us that this book is “beautifully written, lithe, complicated and hugely rewarding”. “Beautifully written”. Two words that send a shiver down the spine. “Lithe, complicated and hugely rewarding”. Promises, promises. Unfortunately, the book is lithe and complicated in that there is no readily discernible structure to the context. “A Natural History” will only be hugely rewarding to those who wish to read or reread a telling of famous ghost stories – The Angel Warriors of Mons*, the Bell Witch case (although this one…
Continue Reading →Cold Cream: My Early Life & Other Mistakes
(by Ferdinand Mount) (2008) It will come as no surprise to the reader that the “cold cream” of the title is the Pond’s cold cream used as a cure-all by the writer’s mother when he was a child. Somewhat less commonplace is the probable reason for Mrs Mount’s adherence to the unpleasant ointment – she earned a lifetime’s supply as a result of having spruiked it before her marriage – “Lady Julia Pakenham says she owes her flawless complexion to Pond’s Cold Cream”. Lady Julia, the youngest daughter of the 5th Earl of Longford KC, married Robert Francis (“Robin”) Mount who, when at…
Continue Reading →Books About JonBenét
What happened to her? (Picture thanks to Associated Press)
She was the beloved daughter of wealthy parents, and the only little girl in the world with that name. And we all know how things ended, only we don’t. The two best books on the subject, to date, are Lawrence Schiller’s Perfect Murder, Perfect Town and Detective Steve Thomas’ JonBenét, Inside the Ramsey Murder Investigation. There’s no need to outline the events which are known, or to detail the weirder aspects – the “War and Peace” of all ransom notes, the $118,000 ransom, the playwright across the road who wrote it all before it happened, the false confession, Burke’s voice on tape when it…
Continue Reading →Everything is Happening
(by Michael Jacobs, with an introduction and coda by Ed Vulliamy) (2015) Diego Velázquez (Summer 1599 – 6 August 1660), one of Spain’s greatest painters, created Las Meninas (“The Ladies in Waiting” or “Maids of Honour”) in 1656. A large work, a masterpiece of High Baroque, it seems to be the painter casting his patrons (King Philip IV and Queen Mariana) as a camera, they surveying the room in which Diego is painting them, with its royal domestic scene. With brilliant use of light and shade, peerless brushwork and tasteful use of colour, Velázquez provides a series of highlights that float around the…
Continue Reading →A Million Windows
Photo of the author c/- the Sydney Morning Herald
(by Gerald Murnane) Murnane’s writing is the literary equivalent of a performance by the dance troupe Jailolo. As the dancers creep across a stage via barely discernable, repetitive, miniscule movements, so Murnane inches and tics his way from nowhere to somewhere word by word. His is a philisophy of obscurantism, distance and apprehension. “I recalled just now an earlier undertaking of mine to explain in the previous paragraph why this is not a self-referential work of fiction. The discerning reader should have found the promised explanation in the paragraph as it stands. For the sake of the undiscerning reader I shall repeat the simple fact…
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