Shimmering off the cover of The Renoir Girls are sisters Alice (aged four) and Elisabeth Cahen d’Anvers (six), portrayed in all the promise and innocence of a pampered childhood by Pierre-Auguste Renoir. Aged 40, Renoir was then the coming portrait painter for the gratin of Paris, as he struggled to make ends meet with smart
Can artificial intelligence become godlike? Can such technology unravel the world’s great mysteries? Can everything, from love and intuition to consciousness and wonder, be replicated by computers and reduced to simply knowing the right algorithm? These are the big questions running through Sebastian Mallaby’s engaging book The Infinity Machine, which charts the rise of DeepMind,
There are several things wrong with James Vanderbilt’s new film Nuremberg, least of all, some might say, the fact that it fails the Bechdel test. This 1985 metric assesses female representation in film by whether two named women have a conversation on screen about anything other than a man. If you are thinking, ‘So what?
Robert Seethaler is known for celebrating the unsung: commonplace characters – peasants, labourers or shop assistants – who draw us into their quiet lives. But the protagonist in The Last Movement is a celebrated historical figure: Gustav Mahler. For those in search of biographical information, as W.H. Auden put it, a shilling life will give
‘As anyone who has gleefully spotted a typo in a prestigious publication, felt a flicker of schadenfreude at a pompous critic’s downfall, or secretly enjoyed a literary scandal knows, it is possible to love books while delighting in their disasters.’ The sentiment expressed in Rogues, Widows and Orphans is familiar to this reviewer. Rebecca Lee,
In a 2013 interview, Deborah Levy said: ‘Modernism is the soft typewriter of the womb that made me.’ But what made Modernism? My Year in Paris with Gertrude Stein is Levy’s attempt to answer the question. In this novel, an unnamed narrator from London moves to Paris to write an ‘essay’ on Stein, the American
Greed, death, hate and clouds of destruction – this is the cormorant season all right. I was hungry to read Gordon McMullan’s book because I love the birds and looked forward to learning their secrets. But I gathered only a little about the green-glossy, serpentine jewel of a fowl I saw in Hebden Beck recently,
Set in the American South during the Jim Crow era, Tayari Jones’s Kin follows the parallel lives of Annie and Vernice. The ‘cradle friends’ are both motherless, Annie having been abandoned and ‘Niecy’ orphaned, leaving them with a painful ‘wound’. They are as vulnerable as ‘unshucked, naked peas’. Though they are trauma-bonded, the ways in
Yann Martel, the author of Beatrice and Virgil and Life of Pi, typically explores competing storylines, narrative reliability and the nature of truth. His new novel, Son of Nobody, pursues these themes in a first-person account written by a scholar who discovers a Greek epic. The narrator is a Canadian called Harlow Donne – a
Christopher de Hamel is an outstanding salesman. At Sotheby’s, back in the 1990s, he brokered the sale of the 15th-century Sherborne Missal to the British Library for £15 million, a record-breaking sum. Over the past decade, his reputation as a salesman has fitted a much less conventional mould. In two dazzlingly illustrated books he has
I received this book for review on the same day that Dorothea Tanning was making headlines in the auction world, breaking records with the sale at Christie’s of a tiny but key early work for more than £4 million. Her prices have risen an astonishing sevenfold in the past year, as collectors cotton on to
In the early years of the 20th century, a young philosopher named Franz Rosenzweig (1886-1929) set himself the task of revitalising German Jewry – of bringing German Jews in from what he saw as the periphery of assimilation to the centre of a living faith. He thus became one of the pioneers of a Renaissance
What mistake did Narcissus make when he looked into the water? To fall in love with his own ravishing self, we might think. But to the medieval mind, that wasn’t his problem at all. In John Gower’s 14th-century poem ‘Confessio Amantis’, Narcissus falls in love all right – but with someone else entirely. His fault
Like its predecessor My Phantoms (2021), Gwendoline Riley’s new novel is stuffed to the gills with the sort of people she has come to specialise in – who, once assembled, supply a kind of casebook of rebarbativeness. To begin with there are the terrible men: – the thespian, Lawrence, for example, who says things like
Back in the 1970s, people in Britain were mystified by the enthusiasm of Americans – especially New Yorkers – for shrinks. Since then, the vogue for therapy has spread and advice from non-experts on surviving divorce, bereavement and bankruptcy is now commonplace and not always insightful. By contrast, Gwen Adshead, a psychiatrist who has specialised
Did you know that a secretive thing called private equity owns almost 10 per cent 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
The early Greek inhabitants of Sicily peered into Etna’s crater and declared the volcano to be full of monsters. Its ‘impenetrable darkness’ reminded 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, eye. Unpicking
Although it may be in bad taste to have a favourite story about the General Strike of May 1926, one served up by David Torrance in his superb The Edge of Revolution is probably unbeatable. He quotes an anecdote told by Walter Citrine, the 39-year-old acting secretary of the TUC, who recalled a man ‘with
When I was in my twenties and giving dinner parties every week, I came up with a couple of money-saving devices. First, no snacks. This also ensures that, by the time dinner is served, your guests are so hungry they’ll mistake almost anything for a masterclass. Second, invite people on a Monday evening, so they
In the not-too-distant future, if your T-shirt starts giving fashion advice or we’re all enslaved by a race of disease-resistant metahumans, then blame Martin Amis. More precisely, blame his obsession with Space Invaders. With a foreword by Steven Spielberg, Amis’s 1982 Invasion of the Space Invaders: An Addict’s Guide to Battle Tactics, Big Scores and