About a decade ago, with my writing career going nowhere fast, I received some savvy advice from my then-literary agent. “Write about the royal family,” he said. “There’s an endless appetite for books about them. They combine history, social commentary and gossip with old-fashioned fascination with the rich and powerful. You can’t go wrong.” I
MAX JONES: “What do you think of the Beatles as artists and people?” BOB DYLAN: “Oh, I think they’re the best. They’re artists and they’re people.” —Melody Maker, March 1965 For more than 60 years, people have been fascinated by the connections between Bob Dylan and the Beatles. All were born during World War Two.
This story is little more than a brutal anecdote, which Patrick Radden Keefe has chosen to tell at excessive length. It has the kind of fact-checked gravity that indicates a star American journalist bent on perpetrating an entire book. (“Built in 1923 and originally known as the Empire Stadium, Wembley was the most iconic sporting
The early Greek inhabitants of Sicily peered into Etna’s crater and declared the volcano to be full of monsters. Its “impenetrable darkness” reminded Samuel Taylor Coleridge of his opium addiction. Helena Attlee, whose hugely enjoyable The Land Where Lemons Grow (2014)won acclaim, brings to her portrait of Etna a softer, more admiring – yet respectful
Did you know that a secretive thing called private equity owns almost 10 percent of the UK economy? Did you know that it controls the jobs of several million people and may well own your local hospital, water supply, children’s school or even your home? No? Here is a book that aims to straighten you
It’s a great shame that Elsa Schiaparelli is less widely known than her rival Chanel. Perhaps that’s down to how difficult her name is to pronounce. Is it “shap,” “skap” or “skyap”? Tristram Hunt, director of the V&A, answers with a quip from Schiaparelli herself: “No one knows how to say it, but everyone knows
How would you like your nostalgia served, sir (and it is usually “sir”): in mist-shrouded monochrome or crazed lysergic Technicolor? Earlier this month, I saw two bands in the same venue, a few days apart. Neither having released any new material for more than a decade, both duly crammed their sets with their greatest hits.
One of the miracles of art history is how painting, so often written off, keeps on coming back. Right now we are in the middle of just such a resurgence, and one sign of the current vitality of the medium is the emergence of painters such as Hurvin Anderson. Admittedly, Anderson – who was born
HBO Max is the latest streaming channel trying to lure you into yet another of those subscription contracts you only remember having signed up for about three years later when you’re trying to work out why you are so skint. Its showpiece series is The Pitt which attracts ten million viewers per episode and has
Grade: C– Kanye? No, I can’t, quite. I will always quietly overlook the idiotic political sensibilities of the conformist millennial legions who comprise our pop charts – the keffiyeh-clad Hamas wannabes, the BLM halfwits, the greenies, the men-can-be-women wankpuffins – in order to let their music be judged on its own merits, free from boomer
