Here comes Kamala! | The Spectator

Boys will be boys

In The Dark Knight, one of the best superhero movies, the Joker presents Batman with a serious dilemma: he must choose between saving his romantic interest, Rachel, or Gotham’s ‘white knight’ DA, Harvey Dent. Batman makes the ‘wrong’ decision and runs off to save Rachel, only to discover the Joker has tricked him, and sent him to Harvey instead. The moral gray area isn’t that rare in modern superhero movies. Tony Stark (Iron Man) is otherwise a pompous, drunken lothario. Thor and Hawkeye react to a crushing defeat in battle by becoming a fat, lazy shut-in and a vigilante, respectively.

Craig Raine

Playwright at play

Gilbert in Oscar Wilde’s dialogue ‘The Critic as Artist’: ‘Every great man nowadays has his disciples, and it is always Judas who writes the biography.’ Not here. Hermione Lee’s immensely long Tom Stoppard: A Life is expert, engrossing, entertaining and sympathetic to its subject. At its heart is a writer steely in his determination to entertain, an inexhaustible mine of mots, a nonstop genius of jokes, capable of winning the Nobel Prize for the interview as an art form. It comprehensively replaces Ira Nadel’s Double Act (2002), a biography which Stoppard hoped would be ‘as inaccurate as possible’. (Indian Ink and Arcadia are both explicitly hostile to biography and its hubris.

James Delingpole

Ridley’s game

An epic new sci-fi series executive-produced by the director of Blade Runner and Alien: who wouldn’t want to watch Ridley Scott’s Raised by Wolves? Myself for one. When I heard the name, I assumed Raised by Wolves was an update of the forgettable 2013 sitcom based on Caitlin Moran’s chaotic childhood in the industrial city of Wolverhampton, England. Caitlin’s very strong on stuff like vaginas and the importance of female empowerment, but I’d rather be stuck aboard an attack ship on fire off the shoulder of Orion than have to endure any of that. To be honest, I’m not sure that Scott’s drama is any more enticing than Moran’s sitcom.

Frederic Raphael

Eyes wide open

Dear Stanley, Did I ever hear you laugh or see you smile? I like to think I amused you from time to time, but laughter was scarce among your responses. A pause was your applause. During the many months we worked together you were often friendly, always somber. You never hinted why. Private anguish was nobody else’s business; work its narcotic. Might it be that, throughout your life, success was as much revenge as pleasure? You seemed as much lonesome as autocrat; mark of the still photographer you first were; and the kid before that? As far as our script for Eyes Wide Shut was concerned, you apologized for not being able to specify what you wanted. You could promise only to recognize it when you saw it.

Tristram Hunt

From Prussia with love

‘What a loss is the excellent Humboldt. You and Berlin will both miss him greatly,’ Prince Albert wrote to his much-beloved daughter Vicky, Crown Princess of Prussia, on news of the death of the author, explorer and celebrity Alexander von Humboldt in 1859. ‘People of this kind do not grow upon every bush [‘an den Blumen’] and they are the grace and glory of a country and a century.’ After some delays and bad luck, the grace and glory of the Humboldt name flourishes once again with the opening of the Humboldt Forum. Annoyingly digital to begin with, the launch in January of the Forum signaled the culmination of Berlin’s Museum Island restoration program and, with it, the crowning of the capital’s place within contemporary European culture.

Lee Langley

An unquiet life

Kikuko Tsumura is a multi-prizewinning Japanese author whose mischievously deceptive new novel takes us into what purports to be the office world of Tokyo. The routine at first seems familiar, but intriguing disparities emerge: the present is also a foreign country. There’s No Such Thing as an Easy Job gives us the minutiae of everyday working life — but not as we know it. Think Nicholson Baker’s Mezzanine, freed from lunchtime restrictions. A burnt-out young woman wants a job without responsibility — no stress, no demands. First up: a surveillance assignment observing a novelist suspected of receiving contraband goods.

Ian Thomson

A Scottish Paradise

As every Italian schoolchild knows, The Divine Comedy opens in a supernatural dark wood just before sunrise on Good Friday, 1300. Dante Alighieri, a figure in his own work, has lost his way in middle age and is alone and frightened in the darkness. The ghost of the Roman poet Virgil is about to show him Hell: ‘Midway in the journey of our life I found myself in a dark wood, for the right path was lost.’ Begun in the early 14th century, Dante’s poem is, for many, the greatest single work of western literature. With its dramatic chiaroscuro of hellish fuming mists and paradisal stellar regions, the poem is ‘awful’ in the archaic sense of the word (still valid in the Italian terribile), meaning to inspire awe.

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