Books and Arts Archives

Wednesday

April 9, 2025

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.

Philip Womack

Scott Turow’s latest novel attempts to understand humanity

Scott Turow’s Presumed Innocent burst into the world in 1987, zinging out of bookstores into bestseller-dom like nobody’s business. It concerned Rusty Sabich, a lawyer who became a suspect in the case he was prosecuting. There were enough twists and turns to satisfy the most Daedalian of labyrinth-makers, and its longevity was demonstrated by its being adapted into a new, Jake Gyllenhaal-starring show last year on Apple TV+. Presumed Guilty’s title plays nicely on its predecessor’s, and also points toward this new book’s consideration of racism within the American justice system. Sabich is now an old man, nearing his eighties. But boy, is he active. We know this because he likes to canoe while stripped to the waist. He chops wood in the outdoors!

D.J. Taylor

A biography of Lorne Michaels that strays into hagiography

The gilt fell off Saturday Night Live’s reputational gingerbread almost from the moment of its inception. Long before the arrival of Bob Woodward’s Wired: The Short Life and Fast Times of John Belushi (1984) — its antihero dead at the age of thirty-three — whatever luster the show had possessed had been well-nigh obliterated by a tide of scuttlebutt. The girls were (apparently) all bulimics and anorexics. The guys were coke fiends and egomaniacs. Misogyny (exemplified by Belushi’s dislike of sketches written by women) and back-stabbing were endemic; drug dealers sat in on the writing sessions.

Nancy Alsop

Can a TV series capture the extraordinary story of the Mitford girls?

We remain fascinated, even obsessed, by the Mitfords. Collectively, their existence is the stuff of legend: the affairs, the imprisonment, the polarized politics, the wit, the beauty, and the brutality, all in one glamorous package. In uncertain times, the sisters offer a flush of eccentric characters: Nancy the Novelist, Pamela the horsewoman, Diana the Fascist, Unity the Hitler-lover, Jessica the Communist and Debo the Duchess.

Alexander Larman

American cinema at its best

The extraordinary success of The Brutalist is not something that Hollywood, or anyone else, anticipated. When it was announced for last year’s Venice Film Festival, it was regarded with a degree of interest but not much else. After all, Brady Corbet’s previous two films — The Childhood of a Leader and Vox Lux — had attracted a degree of critical attention but neither had been an awards player, let alone making any money at the box office. Auteurs can auteur, but the wider Hollywood establishment will only take them seriously if their films make some decent bank. When Chloé Zhao won Best Picture and Best Director for Nomadland, her reward was to be given hackwork on Marvel’s first major flop, Eternals: fingers crossed that her next picture, Hamnet, restores her to critical favor.

Jenny McCartney

Bella Freud’s fashion inquisition

Sometimes the mind needs to take a break. And I can’t think of a better stopping-off place than the soothing, gloriously bonkers discussions on the Fashion Neurosis podcast, hosted by the British fashion designer Bella Freud. Its premise is that Freud, daughter of Lucian and great-granddaughter of Sigmund, encourages guests to recline on her couch and talk over any and every aspect of their relationship to fashion. Her mellifluous, affirming manner is much more soft soap than steel wool, but this is not territory that requires a serious broadcaster, and the concept proves a surprisingly fruitful route into family history, personal stories and high-grade gossip.

Monday

February 17, 2025

Anne Sebba

The Einstein family atrocity

What’s in a name? Well, if it’s Einstein, quite a lot. For Roberto Einstein, it was to prove a devastating connection, even though he had lived in Italy all his adult life, was married to an Italian Christian woman, Nina, with whom he had two children who regularly attended church, and was father to two motherless nieces who were brought up Catholic. In 1944, the increasingly paranoid German occupation decided that Roberto’s whole family was Jewish and inextricably linked to the world-famous Nobel prizewinning scientist Albert Einstein, now in America and high on the Nazi death list. There were connections, of course. Roberto and Albert were first cousins — their fathers were brothers — and were both committed atheists.

Christopher Sandford

Bill Gates’s memoir offers an oddly revealing look into the Microsoft founder’s psyche

In 2024, a Swiss company called FinalSpark claimed to have built the world’s first computer processor fired by human brain cells. To do this, the company evidently took small samples of living brain tissue, and — so the press release says — “connected them to specialized electrodes to perform computer processing and digital analog conversions to transform neural activity into digital information.” Frankenstein undertones aside, the whole FinalSpark initiative raises the issue of how far a computer can be humanized, made not only to respond with factual accuracy but with something approaching emotional intelligence.

Octavia Sheepshanks

Romantasy, the hot new literary genre du jour

A friend recently found himself trapped on a plane next to a young woman reading a Kindle bedecked with stickers of dragons and pointy-eared, hunky men. The font size was so large it was impossible not to see the sexually explicit text. He observed, “I was reading The Lord of the Rings; her book was more along the lines of I’m the Lord of Your Ring. I’ve never felt so uncomfortable.” Welcome to the cultural phenomenon of romantasy — a newly mainstreamed trend fueled by TikTok, or rather BookTok. It’s a shame there isn’t room in the portmanteau name for “sex,” which is a crucial ingredient in the genre, made clearer in the alternative informal term “fairy porn.

Amelia Butler-Gallie

Inside Thomas Pynchon’s most underrated novel

Atop the Almaden Tower in downtown San Jose — the world headquarters of Adobe Systems Inc. — sits a singular art installation. Four amber wheels rotate every few seconds in a seemingly innocuous and frankly nonsensical digital display. The installation, known as the “San Jose Semaphore,” is the brainchild of the data-driven media artist Ben Rubin and first appeared — or began transmitting — in August 2006 to the mass bamboozlement of passersby. What was going on, they cried? Was it that most millennial of things — a sign? For those less likely to be beguiled by some concealed piece of chicanery, the circles were little more than frivolous decoration, another example of Adobe splashing the cash on some geometric garnishing.

Alexander Larman

David Lodge, the master of Anglo-American campus humor

"Literature is mostly about having sex and not about having children.” So said the British novelist, occasional screenwriter and literary critic David Lodge, who died at the beginning of 2025 at the age of eighty-nine. Lodge, who had suffered from encroaching deafness for several decades, had not, in truth, been a major literary figure for a considerable period before his death. This retreat into obscurity had not been helped by a trio of memoirs, beginning with 2015’s Quite a Good Time To Be Born, which perplexed critics — including this one — with their dour, downbeat and decidedly un-humorous tone. Few would have known, from reading them, that their author had once been regarded as one of the late twentieth century’s most accomplished comic novelists.

Clarissa Sebag-Montefiore

Veteran journalist Edward Wong on his memoir of food and feud

From 2008 to 2016, Edward Wong reported on China for the New York Times, heading up its Beijing bureau. Last year, the veteran journalist, now the Times’s diplomatic correspondent, published his first book: a blend of family memoir, narrative history, political observation and personal reckoning. At the Edge of Empire tracks Wong’s father, Yook Kearn Wong, as he moves from fervent support of the Chinese Communist Party and its ideological goals to disillusionment and disappointment. It is also a book about what makes an empire. Born in Hong Kong before moving to Guangdong Province as a child, after joining the military as a young man Yook Kearn was posted to remote Xinjiang province, in China’s northwest corner.

Anne Margaret Daniel

Like Bob Dylan in the movies

The Bob Dylan biopic A Complete Unknown has opened worldwide to largely positive reviews. Negative ones have focused on the silly quibble that fiction is not fact: the story told in the movie of Dylan’s rise to fame, from his January 1961 arrival in New York City as an unknown, folk-obsessed teenager from the Minnesota Iron Range, to his electrified electrifying performance at the Newport Folk Festival in July 1965, does not strictly hew to actual biography. Recently the New York Times made the unfathomable decision to take A.J. Weberman, best known for going through the Dylans’ garbage when they lived in Greenwich Village in the early 1970s (and getting thumped by Dylan for stalking), to see A Complete Unknown.

Alexander Bull

The underground music scene reshaping Dubai’s cultural landscape

Nestled between the sci-fi skyscrapers of downtown and luxury marina beaches, Dubai has a side few tourists or outsiders get to see. Forget the glamour and explore the industrial warehouses of al Quoz and the unassuming streets of al Barsha, coated in a layer of desert dust. You would be justified in assuming the al Barsha Holiday Inn, awkwardly situated adjacent to the eighteen-lane Sheikh Zayed Road, must be a low point. But if you find yourself in its gaudy lobby on the odd Saturday night, you might be surprised to see punk ravers and goth girls draped in chains suddenly streaming toward the elevators at the back. Follow them down to the lower levels and you’ll find the Q Underground, one of the venues at the vanguard of Dubai’s boundary-pushing alternative music scene.

Adrian Brune

The genuine faker John Myatt

John Myatt held his breath as the bidding began in the Christie’s auction room. His drawings were selling, one by one. He had dreamed of having his work on the block since the beginning of his career. He felt a tingle of adrenaline as the paddles went up... and victory as he strolled through the city streets with a wad of money in his back pocket afterward. But the feeling didn’t last long. Eventually, Myatt started to feel empty and disappointed. The psychic void grew as the prices that his agent, John Drewe, sought for his work went up and up.

William Newton

Barcelona rising

Barcelona is one of the world’s great cities; happily, it seems to be waking up from a lengthy nightmare of its own conjuring. During the anti-everything leadership of its previous mayor, failed actress Ada Colau, empty storefronts, open-air drug markets and sidewalks reeking of urine proved unconducive to outside investment. A deal to establish a local branch of the Hermitage Museum fell through, thanks to political virtue-signaling by local officialdom. Anti-tourism campaigners stepped up their activities over a period of years, even as cities such as Madrid and Málaga began to boom with historic renovations, new luxury hotels and cultural projects designed to attract visitors. Fortunately, things seem to be turning a corner.