Books and Arts Archives

Tuesday

June 3, 2025

Joan Didion’s unedited record of therapy is morbidly fascinating

In Notes to John, Joan Didion’s ostensibly private record of three years’ therapy under psychiatrist Dr. Roger MacKinnon – one memory troubles her a great deal. When her daughter Quintana Roo Dunne was about seven, they watched the (wholly unsuitable) Night of the Living Dead, before Didion insisted Quintana accompany her to the kitchen at midnight. She pretended to be afraid for herself, but really she worried the glass doors of the living room made Quintana vulnerable to intruders. Reading this book sometimes feels like being the imagined predator lurking in the dark: we catch only a slice of the illuminated interior, and Didion behaves as if she isn’t being seen. By the end of 1999, Quintana, who was 33, had reached a new crisis point in her struggle with alcoholism.

Philip Clark

Erik Satie was an inadvertent innovator

The music critic Ian Penman has structured his new book about the great French composer and rascally agent provocateur Erik Satie in three parts, in the manner of classic Satie compositions such as Trois Gymnopédies, Gnossiennes and Trois morceaux en forme de poire. A hundred years after his death, aged 59, in 1925, Satie remains one of the great enigmas of 20th-century composition. A frequent visitor of Parisian cabarets, immersed in the city’s chanson tradition, his work could also be bafflingly conceptual. He was connected to the world of classical composition through his friendships with Claude Debussy and Maurice Ravel, but remained determinately his own person. His music is regularly held up as a precursor to John Cage and to ambient electronica alike.

Gustav Temple

Seventy-five years of Strangers on a Train

According to her own notebook, the idea for Strangers on a Train came to its author, Patricia Highsmith, in December 1945, while she was walking along the Hudson River in upstate New York with her mother, Mary Coates, and her stepfather, Stanley Highsmith. Given her fractious relationship with her mother, it is not surprising that the idea for a novel – two people swapping murders – came while in the company of the woman she thought of as her lifelong enemy. Divorced from Patricia’s father nine days before she was born in 1921, Mary spent most of her daughter’s childhood courting a new suitor, Stanley.

Aidan Harte

Why does Irish art avoid the Troubles?

Almost three decades after the Good Friday Agreement was signed in 1998, it is possible, if not always easy, to see the funny side of the Troubles. Derry Girls, Lisa McGee’s coming-of-age television series, and Milkman, Anna Burns’s surreal novel, wring laughs as well as tears out of mayhem. There are few laughs in Steve McQueen’s Hunger, which did “for modern film” according to one critic, “what Caravaggio did for Renaissance painting.” For those who prefer horror unmediated by fiction, Patrick Radden Keefe’s Say Nothing is the best example of longform journalism since Capote’s In Cold Blood. But along with their setting, these dazzling creations have something else in common: to get made, they all needed the backing of a producer or publisher from the UK or US.

Clarissa Sebag-Montefiore

Dead Outlaw is sharp-witted and irreverent

In 1976, the TV series The Six Million Dollar Man arrived to shoot at an amusement park in California. A central attraction was the funhouse ride, where screaming thrillseekers hurtled past a red mannequin hanging garishly from a noose. It was only when a crew member touched the body – and an arm fell off, revealing bone – that they realized the mannequin was, in fact, a corpse. Painted in phosphorus and slathered in wax, it had been suspended, unnoticed, for years. So began a frenzied investigation into who this mystery cadaver was. An autopsy revealed that the man had died from a bullet wound. His jaw was wired shut; inside his mouth were ticket stubs to a crime museum and a penny dating back to 1924. He had been preserved using arsenic.

Tuesday

May 6, 2025

Christopher Sandford

Who was William F. Buckley Jr., really?

What more can be said of the American conservative commentator, novelist, musician, sailor, talk-show host and tireless public intellectual William F. Buckley Jr. (1925-2008), that he or his previous biographers haven’t already said or written? After all, this is an individual who in 1983 wrote a 90,000-word book, called Overdrive, covering the events of a single week of his life. Plenty more, it turns out, as Sam Tanenhaus proves in his thousand-page biography Buckley: The Life and the Revolution That Changed America. Buckley was blessed with a voice that sounded like he let it marinate in a cask of port between appearances Buckley was 58 when he wrote Overdrive, and kept to a schedule that would have taxed the energy of a man half his age.

D.J. Taylor

The passage of Ragtime

Back in the winter of 1980, a young Martin Amis found himself on the London set of Miloš Forman’s movie Ragtime. The plan was to inspect what Norman Mailer, whom Amis was profiling for the Observer newspaper, was doing with the part of Stanford White, the real-life architect murdered by the deranged husband of New York chorus girl Evelyn Nesbit. Impressed by the lavish million-dollar backdrop, Amis looked on as the nattily dressed and neatly bewigged author of The Executioner’s Song, accompanied by his sixth wife, Norris, made his way into a reconstruction of Madison Square Garden.

David J. Garrow

A profound account of the October 7 pogrom

I first learned about anti-Semitism at the age of eight, when my father explained to me that his closest business friend could not live near us because he was Jewish. This was 1961, hardly three miles from Mount Vernon, Virginia, in a new-build neighborhood that was racially segregated, as was my elementary school. Black children descended from George Washington’s slaves lived in a nearby rural ghetto called Gum Springs and were not welcome east of Fort Hunt Road. Somehow that memory – like John F. Kennedy’s assassination two years later and the view of his funeral procession from my father’s office window – is one of my earliest and starkest recollections.

Maria Albano

Ocean Vuong’s newest work is an affecting celebration of misfits

Ocean Vuong’s writing is heavily influenced by his own experiences. The protagonist of his first coming-of-age novel, On Earth We’re Briefly Gorgeous, is a carbon-copy of the author. Vuong was born in Vietnam in 1988. While serving with the US Navy, his American grandfather fell in love with “an illiterate girl from the rice paddies” who gave him three children. When one of them, Vuong’s mother, was identified as mixed-race by a policeman, the family was displaced to a refugee camp in the Philippines and finally made it to Hartford, Connecticut, where Vuong was raised by his mother, aunt and grandmother. His family story merits a book of its own.

Henry Jeffreys

Keith McNally’s memoir is strangely unappetizing

Harvey Weinstein has a memorable walk-on role in Keith McNally’s memoir I Regret Almost Everything. Taking a break from being New York’s most celebrated restaurateur, McNally wrote and directed a film called End of the Night that was screened at Cannes in 1990. Its auteur hoped that Weinstein, who distributed the previous year’s Palme D’Or-winning picture Sex, Lies, and Videotape, would warm to it. He was blunt: “I didn’t like your film and I’m not going to buy it.” As McNally swallows the shot, there’s a chaser. “But I’d still like to come to the after-party.” McNally admires Weinstein’s honesty, if little else. So I’m going to be straight, too. I didn’t enjoy I Regret Almost Everything. This is a shame, because the ingredients are promising.

Philip Clark

Charles Ives was a composer before his time

In February 1951, Leonard Bernstein led the New York Philharmonic through the première of a symphony by an American composer unknown at Carnegie Hall. The composer in question was Charles Ives, by then too frail to attend in person. He listened from home when the concert was broadcast a few weeks later. An experimenter by instinct, Ives’s work had already proved an inspiration to a younger generation of radical American composers including John Cage, Lou Harrison and Morton Feldman. But that Ives listened from afar to the première, at long last, of his Second Symphony – completed in 1902 – was symbolic of the distance he maintained from America’s classical mainstream.

Clarissa Sebag-Montefiore

The Picture of Dorian Gray is headache-inducing

The Picture of Dorian Gray begins on an unadorned note. Sarah Snook sits alone on an otherwise empty stage, facing a camera which projects her image on to a giant vertical screen. Chameleon-like, she switches instantaneously between two characters: the awkward but sincere painter Basil and his more debonair – and dastardly – friend Lord Henry. Snook may be Australian and a woman, but borne on her considerable gifts we are transported to Victorian England. With no props save a paintbrush for Basil and a cigarette for Lord Henry, Snook chops and changes between the two men: she contorts her face into nervy, painful subservience for Basil and her voice into a high, febrile whine.

Raj Tawney

My Bob Dylan pilgrimage

On March 25, Bob Dylan delivered his first performance of the year in Tulsa, Oklahoma, as his “Rough and Rowdy Ways” tour enters its fourth year running. At 83 years old, there was no guarantee Dylan would keep performing live. At the start of the year, there were no new dates listed on his website. Then, in early January, one performance popped up. The show was to be held at the Tulsa Theater – an important location for the performer, as the city is home to the Bob Dylan Center, located in the downtown art district. Tulsa also has a reputation as a musical destination through which almost every legendary folk, rock, country and blues artist has toured. Dylan is no exception.

Wednesday

April 9, 2025

Laura Allsop

Amanda Knox’s new memoir asks what lies next

The question at the heart of Amanda Knox’s latest memoir Free: My Search For Meaning is a simple one: what are the life prospects for an exoneree? It follows 2013’s Waiting to be Heard, which detailed the Seattle student’s imprisonment in Italy before and after a wrongful murder conviction, and her fight for justice. For anyone who was asleep under a boulder at the time, Knox is the gauche American student who became the target of a media firestorm following the brutal murder of her British roommate Meredith Kercher in Perugia, Italy, in 2007. She was convicted of the crime alongside her boyfriend Raffaele Sollecito in 2009 and freed on appeal in 2011. (Kercher’s actual murderer, Rudy Guede, was convicted in a fast-track trial in 2008, and released in 2021.

Kazuo Robinson

The double life of a single man

In the late 1930s, the author W. Somerset Maugham said that Christopher Isherwood “holds the future of the English novel in his hands.” But the younger writer was about to leave London for Los Angeles. He and his close friend W.H. Auden emigrated in January 1939. En route, their ship was beset by a blizzard. It arrived in New York looking like a wedding cake, in Isherwood’s evocative description. Their journey to the New World was a wholescale rejection of what Isherwood had long thought of as “the Test.” For earlier generations, this had been the Great War (Isherwood’s father, Frank, was killed at the Battle of Ypres). For them, it was to be World War Two. Auden and Isherwood would be damned as cowards, but Isherwood had already found other interests.

Oliver Soden

A Charles Dickens patchwork

What connects pistachios, hay, and Mr. Krook in Charles Dickens’s Bleak House? Asked this question on a recent episode of the British TV quiz show Only Connect, the contestants noted all three are prone to spontaneous combustion, although, as one player exclaimed, “I can’t imagine that happening in a novel, but things were different back then.” Novels contain novel imaginings, but people back then were equally skeptical. Dickens eventually had to defend the death of Krook, the sozzled owner of a rag-and-bottle shop, by listing the historical precedents. He knew a thing or two about a rapid reaction between fuel and oxygen that emits a fiery blaze of energy. By night he walked and walked, to still his beating mind.

Charles Cornish-Dale

Whatever happened to the Panther Den Show?

“The laughter of children is like the blossoming of a flower,” wrote French poet Charles Baudelaire. “It is the joy of receiving, the joy of breathing, the joy of opening out, the joy of contemplation, of living, of growing. It is the joy of a plant.” Conservatives and most right-wingers have a hard time understanding laughter, I’d vouch, especially the laughter of children – by which I mean the laughter of zoomers and their even younger peers, Generation Alpha. But laughter is an increasingly powerful political tool, one that has the ability to mobilize the young even as it confounds and confuses older generations. Today’s conservative establishment ignores laughter at its peril. Laughter is a vital force propelling the right to new success. Just look at Donald Trump.

Alexander Larman

The genius of Gene Hackman

When the news of Gene Hackman’s death at the age of 95 was initially reported, ghoulishness quickly overtook sorrow. The unsolved-crime aspects of his death dominated the coverage. The actor, his wife Betsy Arakawa and one of their pet dogs were found dead in their New Mexico home in February. They were likely to have died as many as ten days beforehand. The police were swift to suggest that, while initially unfathomable, there were no signs of foul play. Still, this did not stop the usual conspiracy theories, including the indomitable Randy Quaid declaring that Hackman was murdered by the “Hollywood Star Whackers,” who also “got” Heath Ledger and David Carradine.

Thursday

March 13, 2025

Amelia Butler-Gallie

How F. Scott Fitzgerald anticipated our modern age

It has never been easier, or less rewarding, to be a Great Gatsby bore. As the book that is frequently, and speciously, cited as the Great American Novel — perhaps because, at around 180 pages, people have bothered to read it — turns 100 this month, it has become the byword for a certain kind of middlebrow literary appreciation. Even people who are barely aware of the novel know certain images and lines, such as the omnipresent lighthouse, “So we beat on, boats against the current, borne back ceaselessly into the past” and the whole Ralph Lauren-esque visual aesthetic that F. Scott Fitzgerald appeared to anticipate. The novel, published in April 1925, has achieved the impossible by breaking free of the page and reverberating across the world in a kind of endless meta-narrative.

Arabella Byrne

Caroline Calloway wants to give you some advice

Caroline Calloway — “It” girl, Instagram phenomenon, scammer, grifter — wants to give you some advice. Except, like most things in Calloway’s world, it’s not that simple. What she actually wants is for Elizabeth Wurtzel, author of Prozac Nation (1994), to give you some advice. But there’s just one problem: Wurtzel is dead. No matter: Calloway is stepping in, updating Wurtzel’s unpublished advice guide with some of her own insights and social-media savvy. If this unbidden collaboration from beyond the grave sounds farfetched, that’s because it is. Elizabeth Wurtzel and Caroline Calloway’s Guide to Life is about as mad as you would expect from the self-published author of Scammers and no less extraordinary for it. Of collaboration, Calloway knows a fair bit.