2000 Articles by Amanda Foreman

The Mail on Sunday: December 2000
I`m glad I gave El Salvador`s peace a chance

My happiest memories from my graduate-student days are of spending time with Marisol, my Salvadorian flat-mate. We used to waste hours just chatting about this and that.
She had a way of talking about her war-ravaged country that made it sound heartbreakingly beautiful. The real El Salvador, she assured me, was a magical paradise of tropical forests, ancient volcanoes and empty beaches. I promised her when she left that one day I would see the country for myself.................................
You Magazine, The Daily Mail: October 2000
Market Forces

September, 1998, I went to New York for a week's holiday and began a new life instead. I could say it was all due to my decision to write a book that has an American theme. But the libraries are just as good in Britain. The truth is, on my second day I met a very nice man. A year later he asked me to marry him and I moved to Manhattan.
I'm not sure I believe people who say they love moving around. Plants don't like to be uprooted, so why should human beings? I was very frightened to leave my home in London. The strangeness of everything, and my ignorance of New York, filled me with anxiety. However, now that I have been here for some time, not only have my fears gone but I have discovered an interest that rivals my love for history. I always liked to cook, but it's turned into a passion. I read cookbooks as if they were novels, trawl little speciality shops, and spend hours experimenting in the kitchen. It is as though I have learned a new language and want to practise it all the time.................................
The New York Times: July 2000
Enfant Terrible: Marie Antoinette The Last Queen of France, by Evelyne Lever. Translated by Catherine Temerson.

Voltaire claimed that ''history is nothing more than a tableau of crimes and misfortunes.'' Had he lived to witness the French Revolution, he would have seen his idea of a tableau transformed into a continuous theater of death. All who took part in the revolution became players in their own tragedy. Some fought against their fate, others stumbled blindly into it. But Marie Antoinette seemed to discover her grand destiny on the scaffold of the guillotine.
She had always wanted to be an actress. Before the revolution, she had her own little theater, where a select audience was allowed to watch her perform. She loved to be the center of attention. Ironically, it took a revolution to grant the queen her dearest wish.................................
The Guardian: May 2000
Manahattan Transfers

It is easy to see why Salman Rushdie, Martin Amis and a host of other writers have fallen in love with New York. Like a femme fatale, it is irresistibly compelling. With every generation comes a new wave of hopefuls: small-town escapees, European refugees, disaffected Londoners. Once here, few are not entranced. Suddenly, the rest of the world seems like an unbearable backwater. After a year of living here while researching my next book, I still look around me with a sense of wonderment. I think I understand what a citizen from ancient Athens must have felt when seeing the might of Rome for the first time.
The New Yorker writer, EB White, once compared the city to a poem, "whose magic is comprehensible to millions of permanent residents - but whose full meaning will always remain elusive". But the magic is by no means pure. The energy that New York exudes is as much the light of extinguished souls as it is the spark of individual enterprise. And while the full meaning of the city may prove elusive, all New Yorkers are painfully aware that it remains an intractable mass of contradictions. It is not just the extremes of wealth and poverty living side by side. It is as though every condition is locked in a struggle with its opposite, fixing New York in a state of permanent tension.................................
The Observer: January 2000
Love and philosophy - with a pinch of salt. Amanda Foreman, The Marriage of Souls by Warwick Collins Weidenfield & Nicholson £16.99, pp482

EVERY NOW AND THEN, a writer emerges who just gets better and better. These are the really exciting ones to encounter. Their novels carry the promise of so much more to come. Warwick Collins is one such writer. He is the author of several novels and each has been an extraordinary improvement on the last. The Rationalist marked Collins out as a writer who would be able to challenge the supremacy of Hilary Mantel, Rose Tremain and Ferdinand Mount. The Marriage of Souls confirms that he has arrived.
The Marriage of Souls, like The Rationalist, is an exploration of humanist philosophy wrapped between the delicate leaves of an eighteenth-century tale.................................

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