Books and Arts Archives

Friday

January 24, 2025

Why Goethe matters

Johann Wolfgang von Goethe bears one of the most famous names in world literature, though he is largely unread by English-speakers. He is most closely associated with the novel and dramatic form, so many would be surprised to know that he primarily spoke of himself, for much of a long life that spanned from 1749 to 1832, as a scientist. He was a pioneering exponent of the science of evolution, and in two wonderful poems, The Metamorphosis of Plants and The Metamorphosis of Animals, he explored his belief that nature evolves from simpler, earlier life forms. This, rather incredibly, was seventy or eighty years before Charles Darwin began to write.

Alexander Larman

The luck of Barry Lyndon

Shortly after Stanley Kubrick’s adaptation of William Makepeace Thackeray’s novel The Luck of Barry Lyndon was released in American cinemas in 1975, it was mercilessly parodied in the satirical publication MAD magazine. Over seven pages, “Borey Lyndon,” as it was called, was treated as an embarrassing flop, something to be ridiculed and regretted. The opening caption set the tone: “So you think Historical Movies are a thing of the past?! So you think no one wants to see Costume Epics any more?! So you think they’re too dull and slow-moving to hold your interest?! Then you probably just woke up after seeing this latest dull extravaganza! Well... here’s a chance to be put back to sleep — with MAD’s even duller version of ‘Borey Lyndon’!

Georgia Heneage

Why we dramatize history — and why we should stop

A few weeks ago, a friend asked if I had watched the Newsnight interview with Prince Andrew. That interview, yes — the one with all the sweating and the pizza in Woking, in which he definitely didn’t meet Virginia Roberts Giuffre but he did single-handedly crash his reputation, and Emily Maitlis, like the Medusa of journalism she has since become, just let him tie his own noose. Of course I’ve watched it. I’m a journalist. And a twenty-first-century citizen. Who hasn’t? My friend, for one, though she pointed out that she can just watch the three-part Amazon dramatization of the whole affair, A Very Royal Scandal, which is even juicier than the interview. (“I’m the son of the sovereign,” bellows the Duke of York, played by a soapy Michael Sheen.

Matthew Gasda

Doomers looks at what AI means for the future

I wrote my play Doomers partly because, the night Sam Altman was fired, I was performing in a play called Zoomers. Someone — I forget who — suggested the idea of Doomers as a joke, and I thought it was a good one. My method for some, if not all, of my plays over the past few years has been to take some kind of mimetic material — downtown, Gen Z, polyamory — and to find what is surprising or human inside the meme. I try to locate a universal story in what might otherwise seem like a surface-level idea that feels niche, obnoxious or both. Sam Altman and the autistic tech world, in particular, represent opaque surfaces that I believe conceal something deeper.

The Spectator

This month in culture: February 2025

Kinda Pregnant In theaters February 5 Amy Schumer stars as Lainy, a woman who dons a prosthetic pregnant belly when she grows envious of her best friend’s maternal glow. Once inside the secret world of mommies, Lainy learns how far she will go to stay close to her friends while being pulled toward a new love — Will Forte, who assures Lainy that she’s the least pregnant person he’s ever dated. Striking the balance of irreverence and heart Schumer is known for, Kinda Pregnant is buoyed by an accomplished comedic cast and backing from Adam Sandler’s Happy Madison Productions.

Thursday

December 26, 2024

Teresa Mull

An insightful account of America’s decline

I wouldn’t have thought a book about America’s decline would cause me to laugh out loud, but having enjoyed its author Matt Purple’s work for years now (full disclosure: he’s a personal friend and former Spectator colleague), I should not have been the least bit surprised that his debut book is as funny as it is insightful. Decline from the Top: Snapshots from America’s Crisis and Glimmers of Hope is a veritable joy to read. Though he declares himself to be a “cranky conservative,” Purple’s humor and wit offer a diagnostic examination of the American condition that exudes warmth and obvious heartfelt concern for our nation’s wellbeing.

Robert Dean Lurie

How Norman Mailer changed the face of biography

Many labels leap to mind in association with the prolific and controversial Norman Mailer, who died in 2007, but “biographer” is not typically one of them. He was not considered a serious practitioner of the genre in the same sense as Edmund Morris, Ron Chernow or his friend Doris Kearns Goodwin. And yet, as his own official biographer J. Michael Lennon asserts to me, “Mailer became a major biographer in the last half of his career.” Thirty years ago, two intriguing books by Mailer appeared just a few months apart: Oswald’s Tale: An American Mystery and Portrait of Picasso as a Young Man.

D.J. Taylor

One hundred years of Theodore Dreiser’s An American Tragedy

The high-water mark of the American naturalist novel lasted for about forty years — the period bookended by Frank Norris’s 1899 McTeague and John Steinbeck’s 1939 The Grapes of Wrath, taking in along the way such highlights of the form as Upton Sinclair’s 1906 The Jungle, Sinclair Lewis’s 1920 Main Street and James T. Farrell’s Studs Lonigan trilogy of 1932-35. But these are all subsidiary crags on the path to Mount Olympus, for the novel that towers above them all and draws each of them — to mix the metaphor a little — into its remorseless slipstream is Theodore Dreiser’s 1925 An American Tragedy.

Christopher Sandford

Lisa Marie Presley’s posthumous book exposes the horrors of celebrity

The title of this book may offer a clue to its prevailing tone. There’s a certain amount of showbiz gossip involved, but it is essentially a protracted rumination of the “What’s it all about, Alfie?” variety, with plenty of unflinching discourse on matters such as spirituality, depression, addiction and the precariousness of the human condition. “I wondered how many times a heart can break,” the authors write near the end of their tale of untold material privilege and wrenching emotional grief. All too often, is the inescapable answer. The book is freighted with a certain amount of woe from the start, because its principal author, Elvis Presley’s only child, herself tragically died in January 2023, aged fifty-four, due to weight-loss surgery complications.

Philip Womack

William Boyd’s latest novel is a smoothly gripping read

Gabriel’s Moon is William Boyd’s eighteenth novel, swiftly following last year’s The Romantic, which delightfully described the adventures of a man living through the nineteenth century in Europe. Though Boyd relates a smaller section of his new hero’s life here, many of his characteristic themes are fully at play: surveillance, deception, honor, love, art, fraud, real historical characters jostling with fictional ones, and relationships between mothers and sons. Essentially, this new book is a spy story, well within the lineage of John le Carré (complete with liberal ambivalence about duty to one’s country), and with skillfully handled layers of double-dealing.

William Newton

Guiding young minds through the National Gallery of Art

"Are there any more questions?” I asked loudly. I was struggling to make myself heard above about thirty seventh-graders, whom I was leading on a tour of the National Gallery of Art. There had already been many questions that morning, even before we began looking at objects in the museum’s permanent collection. We had just finished an analysis and discussion of techniques and symbolism in a seventeenth-century sculpture from Seville, so I took advantage of the momentary lull in the hand-raising and was walking toward the next work on our itinerary when I heard an unexpected sound. Thud. Turning, I saw that one of the students had fainted, practically at my feet. Teacher and chaperones rushed in, and after a few moments the student was fine.

The Spectator

This month in culture: January 2025

Wallace and Gromit: Vengeance Most Fowl January 3, Netflix The panic that gripped the McMorris household in November 2023 was rivaled by that of the great toilet paper shortage of 2020. Greater even, for this crisis could not be solved with a credit card and the willingness to fight hand-to-hand against fellow Costco members. Aardman Animations, the last bearable producer of children’s entertainment, was running out of clay. The sole remaining British factory that produced the stuff behind Wallace and Gromit and Shaun the Sheep had shuttered. Only a pitchfork would suffice. The advent of CGI has fried parental eyeballs with neon ever since Toy Story and only Aardman has resisted the trend, delivering us stop-motion Stan and Ollie routines.

Thursday

November 21, 2024

A.S.H. Smyth

John le Carre’s son resurrects George Smiley

Anyone reading this review will know a few fundamentals of the Smileyverse: spymaster George Smiley is podgy, spectacled, middle-aged, soft-spoken, wears ill-fitting clothes, can vanish in a crowd and is routinely cuckolded by his wife over the course of all “his” novels. Thanks to the success of John le Carré’s novels about him, the Smiley canon is now (we might assume) unchangeable: so, making a virtue of necessity, novelist Nick Harkaway has gone back to his Golden Age. Karla’s Choice opens in 1963, the year after the Cuban Missile Crisis, the era when the Berlin Wall went up, the aftermath of Suez, the “candle-end days” of Empire. In East Berlin, a charismatic young man is carted away by the Stasi.

Alexander Larman

Reassessing Jerzy Kosinski

At the conclusion of Hal Ashby’s remarkable Being There, which celebrates its forty-fifth anniversary this month, comes a scene that has only acquired greater resonance and relevance since it first appeared. At the funeral of the plutocrat Ben Rand (Melvyn Douglas), the US president (Jack Warden) is delivering a heartfelt but somehow trite eulogy. As the pallbearers march away with Rand’s casket, which will be buried in the family mausoleum, talk turns to who should replace the president; the film has already suggested that he is suffering from erectile dysfunction and, wickedly, equates this with his falling popularity ratings.

Tomoé Hill

The life and legacy of Mavis Gallant, an American in Paris

"God help the English if she ever starts on us,” remarked Jonathan Keates in a blurb for Mavis Gallant’s Paris Notebooks. Far from being the ubiquitous “love letter” to a city, the essays and reviews within revealed people and their lives as they were, not as ideals. What Keates didn’t realize was that in Gallant’s short stories, everyone, regardless of nationality or gender, was fair game for her sometimes vicious, often dryly funny, always unblinking gaze. When she died in 2014, aged ninety-one, an obituary noted her profound irritation at her critics’ focus on The Collected Stories of Mavis Gallant: “Everyone who has reviewed it so far mentions exile.

Saffron Swire

Why Alice Neel remains a vital presence

There is no portrait by Alice Neel quite as radical as her own. The artist was one of the first octogenarian women to exhibit a nude of herself with 1980’s “Self-Portrait.” In the painting, Neel grasps her paintbrush and sits exposed at the edge of a blue-and-white striped armchair. There’s no doubt about it; this is a woman of conviction who demands, “Look at me, in all my senescent glory: my silver hair, wrinkled face, sagging breasts, this is a life lived and here are its marks.” It’s only in the last decade or so that Neel has risen from relative obscurity to be acknowledged as one of the twentieth century’s greatest portraitists.

William Boyd

The ups and downs of making Chaplin

The commission Thirty-four years ago, in the summer of 1990, I had a call from my Hollywood agent, Geoffrey Sanford. Lord Richard Attenborough, the film director, would like to meet me to discuss a project. I said “Yes, please,” instantly. The timing was good — I had delivered my fifth novel Brazzaville Beach to my publishers and was awaiting its autumn publication. I met Dickie, as everyone called him, with his co-producer and right-hand woman, Diana Carter, in Blake’s Hotel in west London. The subject of the meeting was a proposed film of the life of Charlie Chaplin, a passion project of Dickie’s. But there was a complication. A script had already been written by Dickie’s old friend, the actor-director-producer Bryan Forbes.

Algy Cluff

Memories of David Niven

In 1967 I visited, as I often did, my uncle, who lived for twenty years in the Hotel Richemond in Geneva. From there I was flying back to London; in those far-off days the tendency among educated people was to dress up rather than down. I immediately realized that my trim, military-looking neighbor was none other than David Niven, wearing, I observed, a Rifle Brigade tie, from the regiment he patriotically joined from Hollywood at the outbreak of war in 1939. Niven, like myself, had been educated at Stowe in its early days under the founding headmaster J.F. Roxburgh.

The Spectator

This month in culture: December 2024

Star Wars: Skeleton Crew Disney+, December 3 Of the making of Star Wars, there appears to be no end. This one, though, looks different. The characters are a group of children on an Amblin Entertainment-style adventure, a coming-of-age story as they try to make their way back home across the universe after something goes wrong on their home planet. The trailer gives strong Spielberg/E.T./Goonies vibes. Taking place around the same time as The Mandalorian, it rounds out its cast with Jude Law as a “new kind of Jedi,” according to the creators. — Zack Christenson Nightbitch In theaters December 6 Based on Rachel Yoder’s hit horror-comedy novel of the same title: Amy Adams stars as an artist turned stay-at-home mom who learns that domesticity contains multitudes.

Peter Tonguette

Barcelona turns thirty

Released thirty years ago this year, Barcelona is the movie with which Whit Stillman came of age. The New York-born cinematic portraitist of the well-mannered and well-heeled launched his career in 1990 with Metropolitan, which charted a course deep into J.D. Salingerdom with its cast of demure debutantes and their callow escorts. For all its wit and winsomeness, the movie has a certain undeniable post-adolescent soppiness: a girl is driven to tears by a cruel remark by her brother; a young man clings to the toys of his youth; there is a paean to Babar and a lament for absentee fathers. The film’s much-loved Christmastime setting actively contributes to this tone of teenage melancholia.