Songs of Blood and Sword: A Daughter’s Memoir by Fatima Bhutto
NIGEL COLLETT | 18 July 2010The epithet "brave" is one all too frequently found in book reviews, almost always applied to a book under review, less frequently to the book's author, so you may be forgiven for any skepticism on reading it again here, a skepticism, though, that would on this occasion be badly misplaced, for FATIMA BHUTTO, author of SONGS OF BLOOD AND SWORD: A DAUGHTER’S MEMOIR, is breathtakingly brave to have written this memoir of her father, Mir Murtaza Bhutto, and to some extent... [ more ]
The Planter's Wife by Stephen Simmons
NIGEL COLLETT | 28 May 2010The British Empire, while it lasted, was surprisingly bereft of good fiction. A few major figures tower up through the colonial mists to remind us of the wealth of human experience the Empire could have afforded the novelist. Kipling and Conrad are almost alone in having made the imperial world the greater part of their life's work and Paul Scott, a much-under appreciated novelist, chronicled the Empire's demise in fiction,... [ more ]
Burying the Bones: Pearl Buck in China by Hilary Spurling
NIGEL COLLETT | 11 May 2010Literary fashion can be as fickle as any other. Authors rise to fame, short- or long-lived, then vanish from the public consciousness, sometimes even before they die, often afterwards. Giants of the time like Rudyard Kipling become politically incorrect. Stylists like Henry James write themselves into an old-fashioned oblivion. Popular writers who made fortunes in their day like Willie Somerset Maugham fade along with the... [ more ]
Eight White Nights by Andre Aciman
NIGEL COLLETT | 23 April 2010ANDRE ACIMAN has to be one of the most romantic intellectuals among novelists. His first novel, Call Me By Your Name, was a paean to love, and that, daringly, the love between two men, but a golden love so idyllic as to be scarcely achievable by the merely mortal. It was a love set in an intellectual idiom that crystallised it, polished it, displayed it as if it were some exotic creature preserved in cultural amber. Now, he... [ more ]
Body2Body by Jerome Kugan and Pang Khee Teik (eds.)
NIGEL COLLETT | 02 February 2010Even in largely Muslim-controlled and socially conservative Malaysia, the social ground is shifting. Slowly maybe, but enough to have begun to produce the beginnings of a queer culture (by which I mean a cultural sub-set of those of any sexual diversity, lesbian, gay, bisexual or transgender, or LGBT). The arts as always lead the way; film, the plastic arts and now literature are showing early signs of a liberalization of... [ more ]
Nine Lives: In Search of the Sacred in Modern India by William Dalrymple
NIGEL COLLETT | 24 January 2010Three themes are woven through the nine tales in WILLIAM DALRYMPLE's newest work on India, NINE LIVES: IN SEARCH OF THE SACRED IN MODERN INDIA, though he confesses, in his introduction, to only one of them. This, as he puts it, is an examination of the way "religious vocation has been caught and transformed in the vortex of India's metamorphosis during this rapid period of transition, while revealing the extraordinary persistence of faith in a fast-changing landscape." He takes... [ more ]
Dead Hand: A Crime in Calcutta by Paul Theroux
NIGEL COLLETT | 23 December 2009What interests Paul Theroux in his latest novel about India is the unreal: the unreality of the country in which he has spent much of his life travelling, a place in which he indicates all foreigners see only the surface and so must be perpetually lost; and the unreality of seeing India through the eyes of the writers who have lighted on the place. The India which, he indicates, Calcutta epitomises is like an opaque mirror,... [ more ]
Archibald Wavell: The Life and Times of an Imperial Servant by Adrian Fort
NIGEL COLLETT | 15 April 2009The Second World War produced many British heroes, none of whom ended the war in such an elevated post as Wavell, by then Field Marshal, Viscount and Viceroy of India. On retirement from the last post, he was created an Earl. No other British commander held senior command in as many posts or for as long throughout the war as he. He was, in succession from 1939, Commander-in-Chief (C-in-C) Middle East, C-in-C India, briefly... [ more ]
