Books and Arts Archives

Tuesday

July 15, 2025

The enduring appeal of Jaws, 50 years on

It’s been 50 years since audiences first thrilled to the thudding theme music and bared teeth of the original Jaws. The movie, released on June 20, 1975, immediately had customers lining up around the block, recouping its then-astronomic $20 million production cost within a week. It still stands alongside Rocky and Star Wars as one of a trio of enduring “high-concept” mid-70s blockbusters. In keeping with Sylvester Stallone’s boxing picture and George Lucas’s space opera – and most other Hollywood money-spinners – it’s easy to forget that there was nothing inevitable about the film’s long-lasting success.

Zoe Strimpel

‘Being a mom sometimes sucks’: an interview with Sarah Hoover

I am expecting Sarah Hoover to be brash. The New York art-scene stalwart and influencer has written a warts-and-all misery memoir about motherhood and self discovery called The Motherload, which is presently cruising atop US bestseller lists. The book, unanimously agreed to be “unflinchingly honest” about all the bad things that can happen on a woman’s journey to and through new motherhood, opens with a stream-of-consciousness account of a party Hoover threw at the Chateau Marmont in 2017 for her first baby’s ten-month birthday. “I’d be in LA for a couple of weeks, staying at the hotel, and a diet of room service and edibles was my general game plan.

Stephen G. Adubato

How museums can promote diversity without demonizing tradition

The resignation of Jim Ryan as president of the University of Virginia in June marks the growing momentum of the Trump administration’s efforts to dismantle diversity, equity and inclusion initiatives within US universities. The Department of Justice deemed Ryan’s resignation a step toward resolving its inquiry into UVA’s compliance with the administration’s new policies. Conservatives may be encouraged by news of major institutions like UVA and Harvard rolling back heavy-handed DEI programming. But pure reactionary animus to the excesses of progressive ideology has often gotten conservatives into trouble – not just in education, but in the arts.

Tuesday

June 3, 2025

Travis Aaroe

Has Trump’s return defanged Ezra Klein?

Wonks are a useful sort to have around; no governing class should be without them. A wonk is someone who makes technical improvements to the existing order of things while remaining obedient to its premises. No social order can run entirely on its own propaganda. There does, somewhere, need to be some group of sober and dutiful people applying themselves to secular problems. For 21st-century America, this has been the “juicebox mafia,” a group of liberal bloggers who came of age in the early 2000s. Ezra Klein, Matthew Yglesias, Markos Moulitsas and Noah Smith were self-conscious wonks – the first, indeed, to treat wonkery as a personal credo. They called their articles “explainers” rather than op-eds.

Alexander Larman

Unpacking John Lennon and Paul McCartney’s complex relationship

Fifty-five years after they broke up, what is there left to say about the Beatles? There have been so many books written about the group and so many obsessively detailed websites devoted to exploring every song, every public utterance, every twist and turn in their history, that the average rational man or woman might think they know all there is to be known about them. Craig Brown’s magisterial 2020 volume 150 Glimpses of the Beatles was a pop-cultural dive into their peerless influence and standing; Ian MacDonald’s still legendary Revolution in the Head dives into the 241 songs that they recorded (although, of course, it should be 242, thanks to the emergence of “Now And Then” in 2023) and does so with grace, intelligence and slightly frightening attention to detail.

Olivia Downes

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.