11:48

John le Carre

There has been plenty written about John le Carre following his death. His earlier novels are a perfect picture of post-war austere England and its class-strangled male inhabitants. And they are nearly all male - his women tend towards two dimensional cliched cut-outs - a result, as he himself acknowledged, of an upbringing almost entirely devoid of women. His mother left when he was four and he spent the whole of his childhood, adolescence and early manhood in male institutions. He was sent to prep school at five. He also spent two years teaching at Eton where he observed that the English upper classes are even worse than they pretend to be. In an interview he recounted the time, in his twenties, when he finally met his mother who he had managed to track down. She told him to meet her on the down platform on Ipswich station. When he arrived, there were three middle aged women standing there - but he recognised his brother in one of them. It was an awkward meeting.


His upbringing by his conman father with a background of bankruptcies, cons, jail terms and casual brutality scarred him - but it also, as he acknowledged, gave him a lifetime of experiences on which the novelist could draw. And also an anger that never left him and which sustained and drove his later work when most writers of his wealth and fame might have coasted into gentler waters. The men, so brilliantly drawn in his earlier writing, never really worked in his later novels. They, very often, were the same types - public school, inhibited, class-defined - that hadn’t changed much despite the obvious shift in society. 


But all this is cavilling in the context of a lifetime of furious productivity that rivals Dickens. At his best, he is sublime - and even his lesser works, like Dickens, may not be great literature - but they are always interesting.



SHARE:

13:36

Online ads

Online ads
We are supposed to be being taken over by machines. AI is apparently analysing every keystroke and the tech giants are supposed to be able t...
SHARE:

23:17

Stretch across the centuries

Stretch across the centuries
Great age gives a huge stretch across history - sometimes generating second hand reports that seem extraordinary. My mother-in-law, who died...
SHARE:

10:21

Infant Teeth

Infant Teeth
This is a young child’s skull that shows its multiple layers of teeth. No wonder teething hurts so much. 
SHARE:

06:29

(Temporary Backup) Cassettes

(Temporary Backup) Cassettes
For me, one of the unalloyed joys of the modern age is digital music. You can download anything you want and either buy it or stream it on S...
SHARE:

11:36

American fundamentalism

American fundamentalism
American exceptionalism is something that was understandable in the greatest democratic experiment there has ever been. Who can deny that th...
SHARE:

18:03

Brave new property world

Brave new property world
I wrote this for Property Vision in August of the Coronvirus Year “At the beginning of the plague, when there was now no more hope but that ...
SHARE:

20:56

The North Face of the Eiger

 The North Face of the Eiger
When I was at prep school, I read Heinrich Harrer’s The White Spider. Harrer is famous as the author of Seven Years in Tibet, made into a fi...
SHARE:

17:44

Beyond Meat

Beyond Meat
I had my first Beyond Meat burger this week. It was delicious. The texture and taste were good and it was like meat. Like is the best word a...
SHARE:

09:37

Property in a Coronavirus world

Property in a Coronavirus world
It has been almost impossible to comment on the property market over the last six weeks - not least because it would seem like musings from ...
SHARE:

15:58

Silent Spring

Silent Spring
During the lockdown there has been many mentions of a Silent Spring - a phrase that has sinister connotations of a post-apocalyptic world of...
SHARE:

17:42

South Africa - a sad waste

South Africa - a sad waste
This chart surprises and shocks. It surprises in the extraordinary economic success of so many African countries (these figures are pre-Coro...
SHARE:

17:17

Toughening up

Toughening up
There has been much talk about wartime spirit of late - common danger faced with a heightened sense of community. The one thing that hasn’t ...
SHARE:

13:28

Heathrow

Heathrow
There has been much jubilation at the Court of Appeal’s decision on Heathrow. Sadly (I think a third runway is a terrible idea) that jubilat...
SHARE:

15:52

Tube Map

Tube Map
We all know what the London Tube map looks like. It’s not a great way to navigate your way around London above ground however - as many naiv...
SHARE:

12:53

Octopuses

Octopuses
This is a review by Amir Shrinivasen in the London Review of Books of   Other Minds:  The Octopus and the Evolution of Intelligent   Life by...
SHARE:

15:37

1917

1917
I went to see 1917 recently and seem to be in a minority of one that didn’t like it. Where to start? The story was ridiculous. Communication...
SHARE:

23:19

Dropping into another world

Dropping into another world
The nature of paragliding is that you are held aloft by thermals that are bubbles of heated air that separate from the ground and rise up to...
SHARE:

17:27

Cycling and surfing

Cycling and surfing
You would think that bicycling and surfing would be chilled out activities - out in the open, often in the sun and at one with nature. So wh...
SHARE:

17:33

Spain from the air

Spain from the air
I recently spent a week in north-east Spain flying my little plane around Catalonia, Aragon and Navarre. I was blown away by the beauty, wi...
SHARE:

18:58

Cannabis Laws

Cannabis Laws
Sometimes you hear things that are so stupid you wonder if common sense is truly dead. This morning, on the Today Programme, they interviewe...
SHARE:
Blogger Template Created by pipdig