V. S. Naipaul

A House for Mr. Biswas reminds one of all that a great novel can do: to recreate an entire world, to move and to instruct, to paint whole pictures in a few words, to delight and to astound, etc... This is no page turner: it is a novel to savour page by page, little by little as it reveals its incredibles riches. It is fundamentally a novel about poverty, but it is also a novel about exile, about aspiration  - mostly thwarted, but in the end successful after a fashion, since Mr Biswas does get his house. Satirical and compassionate, cruel and kind, a masterpiece.

Proustiana

The starting point for this entertaining and perceptive book is a famous supper party held in 1922 at the Majestic Hotel in Paris, on the opening night of the ballet Le Renard, attended by Diaghilev, Stravinsky, Picasso, Joyce and Proust - who arrived at 2.30 AM in white gloves and black tie. With his extensive knowledge of high society, low life and contemporary gossip, and his gay sensibility, Richard Davenport-Hines puts Proust in the context of the frantic Paris of the 1920's and gives a vivid account of his declining days, at the height of fame, wracked by disease and drugs, living by night, frantically struggling to finish his novel, ensconced in his dodgy and squalid apartment rue Hamelin with Céleste Albaret. Davenport Hines is eloquent on Proust's moral courage in publishing Sodome et Gomorre, with its frank account of homosexuality, and on his trepidation and equivocal attempts to protect his personal reputation. Davenport-Hines is also particularly good about the cast of characters revolving around Proust during this period. A valuable addition to the Proustian library.

חטופים

Watching Hatufim, the moving and chilling TV series about the return of two POWs to Israel after 17 years in Syrian captivity, I am reminded of the immense pain floating around in Israel and that hardly any family in that society has managed to avoid some huge personal drama. What I realised living in Israel in the early 90's is the intensely personal nature of politics there - in the sense that politics intrudes violently in everybody's personal life. It thus requires a huge amount of moral strength and intellectual detachment to rise above these dramas and look dispassionately at the issues. But this is what I expect from the people of the Book.

Walking in Wicklow

Today, Yom Kippur, we went walking up the river in Wicklow with Ilsa and Pierre. There was not a soul in sight, except a lone fishermen trying to catch trout. The sun was warm, the breeze was fresh, the light strong, the air light. Raffie, who also came, jumped and tunnelled through the weeds, fell into the river and climbed a rock. We walked for three hours, through the mud, the grass, the rocks, the bog. Around us bare mountains, above passing clouds and the sound of water all the way through.

Hisham Matar

"Anatomy of a Disappearance", the story of a boy who loses his father, kidnapped by Khaddafy thugs, feels so true that it reads like an autobiography. The language is so controlled, the emotions so tight, the scenes so vivid - the novel holds you in a grip.

Bleinhem

This is where the Duke of Marlborough lives - in this small pavilion at one extremity of his very grand palace - Blenheim where famously Winston Churchill, nephew of the 8th Duke, was born. The palace still belongs to the family. Only in England.

Gardens

The variety, the beauty but also the precision of english gardens are astounding. The walled garden, the flower garden, the vegetable garden, the formal garden - no english country house is complete without its garden. Beyond the garden, the park. Beyond the park the countryside.

Knole

In the town of Sevenoaks, in the midst of a deer park, sits Knole, with its 365 rooms, home of the Sackville-West family. In olden times, their nickname was Fillsack: the house, chockful of family portraits and royal furniture, reeks of rapacity. Pile on the riches, for the greater glory of the family, it screams. Wood-paneled room after room, in dim daylight, the rain outside, the heavy steps of the ancestors echoing through the halls. Vita Sackville-West, the dispossessed heiress, loved it. I am more in sympathy with Eddie, the 5th Lord Sackville, novelist, critic, musician, confirmed bachelor and aesthete, who moved to Ireland in 1956: he told the Daily Mail: "Ireland suits my temperament. I prefer it to that big house in Kent".

Sissinghurst

Vita Sackville-West would have inherited Knole were it not for a "technical accident": the fact that she had been born a woman, a piece of bad luck that she tried hard to compensate for. Both she and her husband, Harold Nicolson, were homosexual.  Vita was a novelist, great friend of Virginia Wolf, the inspiration for her novel Orlando, but her passion was gardening. Harold was a minor diplomat, a minor politician and a minor writer but he survives, thanks to his discipline. Every day, before adjourning, no matter how late it was or how much he had had to drink, he sat at his typewriter and accounted for his day. His diaries, spanning decades, are a priceless record of english history, disguised as gossip. Together they bought Sissinghurst, an old Tudor Castle and made it their home. Nigel Nicolson, their son, disclosed their secrets in "Portrait of a Marriage".

Literary families

I am sitting at Gatwick airport, waiting to catch my flight to Dublin, reading "The Hated Wife", a short biography of Rudyard Kipling's wife. I picked it up, on a whim, at the end of a visit to Bateman's house, Kipling's residence, in the village of Burwash, in Sussex, at the end of a week roaming the english countryside. The weather had been glorious, but today it had been raining, steadily. The house was gloomy and sad: perhaps a reflection of Kipling's plunge from the height of fame to a sort of crepuscular existence as the discredited, quaint champion of British imperialism. Add to that his sorry domestic circumstances: the death of his favorite daughter, and then his son, sacrificial victim to his patriotism, whom he had enlisted, by force of connections, in the Irish Regiment, to see him predictably perish and disappear in the battle of the Somme. And his dour wife, watching over him, crushed by sorrow and by the burdens of running his grand household. I have no interest in Kipling, but I was attracted by the book. I liked the first sentence, and I was interested in the author, Adam Nicolson, 5th Baron Carnock, son of Nigel Nicolson and grandson of Harold Nicolson and Vita Sackville-West. So I read on, carried forward by Nicolson's tight, knowing prose. Is he, perhaps, the best writer of that literary family?

English queens

After Cecil Beaton, Rupert Everett. His outrageous memoirs, searing and bitchy, witty and sad, knowing and camp, full of sex, drugs and .... no, not rock'n roll, theatre, pasty make up dripping with sweat, Hollywood wannabee, all of this with a posh upper class accent. Throw in a bit of catholic perversion, some travelogue, famous friends - and you just keep on reading, Vanished Years - yours too, because he is a boy of my generation - goes to the top of the pile and gets read, to the bitter, uproarious, moving end.

The artist is present

Marina Abramovic sits and stares for three full months at the MOMA. At the end of the show the lines form the previous evening. People spend the whole night queuing to have the privilege of staring at, and being stared at by the artist. In the middle of the run, the little table separating the artist from the starer is removed. Nakedness is enhanced. Vulnerability and emotion run high. 

West Cork

Cecil Beaton

Place: Time Traveller's bookshop in Skibereen, West Cork
Time: Easter friday, 2013, around noon time, a beautiful grey winter day
Arriving in Skibereen, we stop on our way to Vivian's to look at the immaculate new bookshop, worthy of Munich or Milan, that has recently opened. On my right I stumble upon a row of Cecil Beaton's diaries. Idly, I pick up "Self Portrait with Friends, The Selected Diaries of Cecil Beaton 1926-1974". I know Cecil Beaton as the famous royal photographer and socialite but have no idea Cecil Beaton has written such extensive diaries, beginning in the roaring 20's. I open the book at random. I am instantly smitten: what grace, wit, levity, immediacy in the descriptions, how fast and brilliantly everything passes before your eyes. You are there with Beaton, partying in London, discovering Hollywood, meeting Greta Garbo, taking the portrait of the Queen, gingerly photographing Winston Churchill, going out in Marrakesh with Mick Jagger. And the photos: dozens, hundreds, thousands, portraits, fashion, war reportage. And he could also draw. What an excess of talent. Cecil Beaton: a coup de foudre.