Creative Works
Martin Rubin on Cecil Rhodes
From the Washington Times (9/7/2008): LEGACY: CECIL RHODES, THE RHODES TRUST AND RHODES SCHOLARSHIPS By Philip Ziegler Yale University Press, $45, 400 pages, illus. REVIEWED BY MARTIN RUBIN You never know what your most enduring legacy will be. Cecil Rhodes, a megalomaniac if ever there was one,…
September 7, 2008
Martin Rubin on Doris Lessing’s ‘Alfred & Emily’
Reimagined Lives By MARTIN RUBIN Wall Street Journal August 9, 2008 Alfred & Emily By Doris Lessing Harper, 274 pages, $25.95 "The hoopla surrounding last year's Nobel Prize in Literature was such an ordeal, and so distracting, that it has caused Doris Lessing to stop writing---or so she has…
August 8, 2008
Martin Rubin on ‘Daphne’ by Justine Picardie
-------------------- 'Daphne,' by Justine Picardie -------------------- By Martin Rubin Special to the (L.A.) Times August 5 2008 "JUSTINE PICARDIE'S 'Daphne,' which focuses on Daphne du Maurier's life in crisis as she turns 50 and prepares to celebrate her silver wedding anniversary, is an…
August 6, 2008
Martin Rubin Reviews Herbert Gold Memoir
Here's a book that sounds as though it should be a comfort to many of us: Friday, July 11, 2008 (SF Chronicle) Memoir review: Herbert Gold looks back Martin Rubin Still Alive! A Temporary Condition By Herbert Gold Arcade; 249 pages; $25 "'A most astonishing thing,' wrote W.B. Yeats in 1935.…
July 13, 2008
Martin Rubin on ‘Thrumpton Hall’ by Miranda Seymour
'Thrumpton Hall' by Miranda Seymour A memoir of life in the Nottinghamshire manor house that had so captivated her father. By Martin Rubin, Special to The (L.A.) Times July 12, 2008 "This enthralling book is not just another tale of restoring -- and living in the decaying magnificence of -- an…
July 12, 2008
Martin Rubin Reviews ‘The Forger’s Spell’
BOOK REVIEW 'The Forger's Spell' by Edward Dolnick The tale of the Dutch painter who fooled the Nazis and most of the art world with his fake Vermeers. By Martin Rubin, Special to The (L.A.) Times June 24, 2008 When it comes to forgery and its ability to fascinate, the bigger the better, and the…
June 28, 2008
Rubin on ‘The Last Thousand Days of the British Empire’
Losing Hope, Glory and Assets By MARTIN RUBIN Wall Street Journal June 20, 2008 The Last Thousand Days of the British Empire By Peter Clarke (Bloomsbury, 559 pages, $35) "The sun did set on the British Empire, after all, roughly 60 years ago, when Britain gave up the Indian Raj and of its Mandate…
June 21, 2008
Martin Rubin on ‘Austerity Britain: 1945-1951’
Revisiting the dark days of postwar Britain. By Martin Rubin, Special to The (L.A.) Times May 23, 2008 "In Austerity Britain: 1945-1951 [Walker & Co., 694pp, $45], British social historian David Kynaston tells the story of those drab, difficult postwar years so familiar to viewers of the…
June 4, 2008
Martin Rubin on British Food
When Britain went beyond the bland, found spice The Washington Times, Sunday, June 1, 2008 THE MULTICULTURAL HISTORY OF BRITISH FOOD By Panikos Panayi, The University of Chicago Press, $40, 288 pages, illus. REVIEWED BY MARTIN RUBIN "A couple of years ago, there was a certain amount of amusement…
June 4, 2008
Rubin on Livesey
BOOK REVIEW 'The House on Fortune Street' by Margot Livesey Two cohabiting couples, four interlocking narratives and the vicissitudes of love and luck. By Martin Rubin, L.A. Times, May 2, 2008 "The eponymous London house is not only the locus for the events quotidian and life-altering that take…
May 6, 2008