Young Man in a Hurry is California Governor Gavin Newsom’s attempt to explain himself to a divided country that may soon find him vying for its presidency. He alternates between candor and wile in answering the book’s central question: who is Gavin Newsom? In these pages he constructs a striking hero’s journey, illuminating an insular
The semiotics of clothes, especially royal ones, can be fascinating, sending out powerful messages. Think of the jewel-studded, pearl-strewn portraits of Queen Elizabeth I or Princess Diana’s revenge-chic black dress. As a fashion queen herself (Justine Picardie was editor-in-chief of Harper’s Bazaar for more than seven years and has an acclaimed book on Chanel under
A surefire way to alienate people is to talk about the dream you had last night. In polite society, we’re generally told nobody cares about the goings-on of our subconscious and that it’s probably best to keep quiet. Nothing, then, quite prepares one for the oneiric delights to be found in Jung’s Life and Work,
Alexander Larman is the author of a biography of John Wilmot, Earl of Rochester, and of Byron’s Women. Reading Larman’s new biography of David Bowie, one gets the sense that this could have been the end of a trilogy, given all three men’s talent and excesses. In fact, Bowie once considered playing Byron in a
Terrific scripts, marvelous acting and glamorous locales – plus that haunting theme song – made HBO’s Succession superlative television. The show also took the sheen off being a billionaire. Who among us, watching Logan Roy (a barely veiled stand-in for media mogul Rupert Murdoch) mess with his children’s psyches, didn’t think “Isn’t it perilous to
“However British you are, I am more British still,” said the American expatriate novelist Henry James, explaining his fascination with all things aristocratic and Anglo. It’s a type of fascination that’s only gathered steam over the years. A grand representative of the establishment, Lady Anne Glenconner, sold thousands of copies of her first book, Lady
For any serious lover of cinema, the 1970s were both a golden decade and the beginning of the end of film as an art form. After the permissiveness and countercultural impact of the 1960s, a whole generation of new filmmakers emerged, many of whom remain household names. These men – and they were almost exclusively
On March 16, 1966, Neil Armstrong and David Scott became the first astronauts ever to dock with another spacecraft when they linked their Gemini 8 capsule to the uncrewed Agena target ship. However, the cheers had barely died down at Mission Control Houston when Scott realized they had a problem. The conjoined spacecraft had begun
Tucker Carlson may be the most divisive man in America, a human tuning fork vibrating at frequencies that delight half of the country and drive the other half demented. Few public figures inspire such simultaneous loyalty and loathing. To his admirers, he’s a truth-teller with a preternatural instinct for cultural anxiety. To his critics, he’s
George Saunders’s luminous new novella Vigil begins with a fall of a kind – lower-key, sinless and very funny: “What a lovely home I found myself plummeting toward, acquiring, as I fell, arms, hands, legs, feet, all of which, as usual, became more substantial with each passing second.” With the fallen narrator landing headfirst, ass
Americans who are concerned with heightened levels of political violence should understand that we are fortunate compared with Pakistan, whose most visible political family, the Bhuttos, have a history that makes even that of the Kennedys look tame. One survivor, journalist Fatima Bhutto, born in 1982, encapsulates the family tragedies. Her grandfather, the charismatic prime
Personally, I regard Mount Rushmore as an excrescence on the mountain and a monument to the horror that Edward Abbey called industrial tourism. Beyond that, it is an expression of a naive piety and a patriotic sentimentalism that no longer exists in America. Matthew Davis correctly views the presidential sculptures carved into the face of
Nicolas Sarkozy’s prison memoir is a slender book about a short sentence that nonetheless makes for compulsive reading. It is unintentionally comic, occasionally moving and almost always politically calculating. This, despite the weight of its author’s self-importance, moral evasions and intermittent self-awareness. Sarkozy, 71, was sentenced to five years for criminal conspiracy linked to Libyan
The scene is the imperial palace on the Palatine Hill in Rome in the 2nd century. The philosopher Favorinus is waiting to greet the emperor Hadrian when a grammarian corners him and launches into a lecture on the grammatical qualities of the word penus, meaning “provision.” “Well and good, master, whatever your name is,” Favorinus
The beginning of Crucible, the writer and Oscar-nominated director John Sayles’s eighth novel, opens with a feint. A couple of journalists are taken for a mock-perilous test drive at the presentation of Henry Ford’s latest automobile. On their return, what starts as a humorous Q&A becomes increasingly restrictive as it becomes clear there is to
Airplane hijacking, like the mode of transport itself, became common in the 1960s. A practice largely confined to the United States, it was invariably a means for ordinary criminals to extort ransom money or flee to Cuba. In 1968, the hijacking of an El Al flight by the left-wing Popular Front for the Liberation of
This book shouldn’t work. A memoir written by a 60-year-old actress – who, frankly, has never threatened to become a major movie star – hardly sounds promising. Then there’s the author’s personal baggage. Since 2014, Cheryl Hines has been married to Robert F. Kennedy Jr., the raspy-voiced Health and Human Services Secretary who served as
It is no overreaction to look at the current state of western culture, through academia and the arts alike, and to feel that Rome has fallen all over again. Whether it’s a crowd chanting in support of terrorists at Coachella, or a horrific political assassination on a university campus, cheered by some, we are witnessing
Jon Fosse, the Norwegian novelist who won the 2023 Nobel Prize in Literature, has sat center stage in the recent revival of interest in Scandinavian literature. Fosse’s one-time creative-writing student Karl Ove Knausgård became the very definition of a publishing sensation when the first volume of his six-part memoir Min Kamp (“My Struggle”) – in
When the novelist Richard Yates, who was born in February 1926, was interviewed by the magazine Ploughshares in 1972, the conversation turned to the neglected writers of his generation. Yates, a man of remarkable acuity and taste, was typically incisive about the likes of Evan S. Connell, Brian Moore and Edward Lewis Wallant – and,
Everybody criticizes Wikipedia, but everybody uses it. Having spent my childhood cross-legged on my carpet reading dictionaries and encyclopedias, I found it a revelation and refuge from the get-go. Google could never emotionally compete. While some AI products have become useful knowledge tools, there is still nothing like Wikipedia’s hyperlink paradise, which allows nights to
The Great American Novel is a holy obsession – the Everest every writer dreams of summiting. For most, that dream begins and ends with William Faulkner, whose winding sentences and sunburned Southern landscapes birthed prose that seemed to breathe. His words marched; crookedly, yes, but always with purpose. Louis C.K., a would-be Faulkner disciple, trudges
I won’t attempt to explain Mitfordmania; we’d be here all night. Suffice it to say that fascination with the British sisters – Nancy, Pamela, Diana, Unity, Jessica and Deborah, born to the 2nd Baron Redesdale between 1904 and 1920 – shows no sign of waning. This year alone, the six have inspired Outrageous, a lavish
The film Ballad of a Small Player opens with a blast of classical music, a shot of the Macau skyline and Lord Doyle (Colin Farrell) waking up in a hotel suite littered with Champagne bottles, cigarette butts and designer loafers that are starting to show their wear. While he dresses and shaves, a voice-over informs
‘Even when the story is dark, Superman still stands for something — and we need more good guys like that’
Not long ago, a group of psychologists analysing data about national happiness discovered that the British were at their unhappiest in 1978. Reading Anthony Quinn’s enjoyable novel set in that year and early 1979, it’s not difficult to see why. In case you’ve forgotten, strikes were spreading like wildfire. The National Front were reaching a
The title alludes to Jonathan Meades’s first collection of criticism, Peter Knows What Dick Likes, and to the album by Peter Cook and Dudley Moore in their scabrous personae of Derek and Clive. Meades explains the title in his introduction: ‘It’s akin to “Two-Hour Dry Cleaners” where the operative, out of her head on perchloroethylene,
Novelists’ careers take different paths, and sometimes don’t look much like careers at all. It’s true that some start publishing between 25 and 35, and write a novel respectably every two or three years until they die, like Kingsley Amis. Others don’t start until they are 60, like Penelope Fitzgerald, or stop abruptly without warning,
One of the many pleasures offered by Lords of the Desert, which narrates the rivalry between Britain and the United States in the Middle East from the end of the second world war through to 1967, is the quotations that are liberally strewn across its pages. They have been culled from memoirs or official documents
