The good, the bad and the ugly in books, exhibitions, cinema, TV, dance, music, podcasts and theatre.
In a tiny town tucked into the desert an hour’s drive out of Nevada, a legal brothel operates. Its ‘menu’ of services range from less expensive sexual intercourse to the most expensive, ‘the White Whale’, starting at $20,000. Dr Justin Garcia, there with his colleagues doing research, asked the manager, a woman with bright yellow
‘Pinball games, with their flashing lights and unforgettable names, are the one thread that runs together my otherwise fragmentary life.’ So writes Andreas Bernard in the last sentence of this touchingly Proustian memoir. He hymns a life spent flipping small steel balls up and down machines which, despite their clamorous lights, bleeps and honks, amounted
We all know that an Englishman’s home is his castle, or at least it was. Looking back, it is easy to see how the castle walls were breached – first by mobile phones and wifi, then by the smart speakers and other gadgets that help and also harvest us. The idea that our homes are
Lionel Shriver is a first-rate storyteller. And yet… A Better Life is a satire on the immigration problem that particularly faces the US. All the clichéd arguments on both sides of the debate are laid bare. In fact, the whole novel is a cliché. Yet clichés come into existence because their substance is what everyone
Japanophiles, look away now. A country renowned for inspiring fascination, warm feelings and not a little envy in its rapidly rising numbers of visitors – from crime-free streets to clean and plentiful public toilets – is in the grip of problems deeper and darker than you might imagine. The classic Japan itinerary reveals little of
If it is true that a serious artist is one with the capacity to go on reinventing who they are in their work, Leonard Cohen unquestionably counts as serious. Not that anyone is likely to think of him as frivolous, exactly. While the famously acid description of his songs as ‘music to slit your wrists
‘You can’t pick your parents, but they get to pick your life,’ Jonathan Tepper points out at the beginning of this extraordinary coming-of-age story. And: ‘If your parents are missionaries, it changes everything… They decide where you’ll live, when you’ll pack your bags and go, and you’ll get roped into their work saving the lost.’
When Rupert Murdoch divorced his fourth wife, Jerry Hall, in August 2022 he made her sign an agreement that she would not give any story ideas to the writers of Succession. Frankly he need not have bothered, because it’s all here in this utterly gripping book. The award-winning journalist Gabriel Sherman has been reporting on
Michael Moritz, one of Silicon Valley’s most successful venture capitalists, really has got it in for Donald Trump. America is currently in a ‘dark age’ of authoritarian governance, he claims, which spurns legality and liberal do-gooders everywhere. As a lifelong Democrat, Moritz was appalled when, in 2017, Trump failed to denounce the alt-right protestors who
This is a book that many of us might like to have on our coffee tables – beautifully produced, not too heavy and full of pictures of pretty ladies, many of them with no clothes on. Its purpose is to show not only how artists have viewed the female body from the Renaissance to the
Ian McGuire’s previous historical novels, The North Water (2010) and The Abstainer (2020), tightly plotted literary thrillers with Shakespearean bodycounts, embodied the Schopenhauerian creed that to be human is to suffer. His latest, White River Crossing, is no different. Canada, 1766. A pedlar appears at Prince of Wales Fort, a Hudson Bay Company trading post
From skylarks and bumblebees to the changing seasons and the sea, composers have long drawn inspiration from the natural world. In Discord, Jeremy Cooper’s eighth novel, Rebekah Rosen goes a step further, seeking inspiration not in nature itself but in a wartime diary chronicling the annual crops on a Peckham allotment. She intends to use
A familiar defence of Anglicanism holds that flowers of principle bloomed in the mucky soil of compromise. Yes, this idea runs, the Church of England that evolved from Henry VIII’s marital strife was indeed a theological hotchpotch; but there is nevertheless much to be said for a tolerant strand of Christianity forming a middle way
On the outskirts of Fort Worth, Texas, there is a two-storey factory churning out a vast number of dollar bills every day for the United States Federal Reserve. When Oliver Bullough visited, he counted 129 pallets in one room, collectively containing more than $4 billion. He also watched a woman use a jack to casually
When was the last battle fought on English soil? The traditional answer, still sanctioned by Wikipedia, is Sedgemoor, in 1685, when the Duke of Monmouth’s rebellion was defeated and more than 1,000 combatants were killed. But there are other candidates, such as the Jacobite encounters at Preston and Clifton Moor in 1715 and 1745, reminders
Northern Italians sometimes speak of Sicily as the place where Europe finally ends. The island was conquered in the 9th century by Arab forces from north Africa, who left behind mosques and orchards of pistachio and almond. The Arab influence remains strongest in the Mafia-dominated west of Sicily where the sirocco blows in hot from
In the Kolkata of Megha Majumdar’s gripping second novel, set over seven days in an unspecified ‘ruined year’, restaurants deliver meals to the rich under cover of darkness. Others in the pestilent, depleted city do what they must to feed their loved ones – storming ration shops, looting the pantries of the well-to-do, even battering
Our appetite for true crime is nothing new. The Victorians devoured it and, as Lottie Moggach’s fourth novel shows, they were as gawking and prone to erroneous judgments as any crowd on social media. Mrs Pearcey is about two women in 1890s London: sparky young Hannah Teale, engaged to a rising journalist on the Star
The Marquis de Morès (1858-96) was a man of many abilities, but balancing a chequebook was not one of them. Bested (savaged, frankly) by the Chicago meat-packing lobby and frustrated in his attempt to build a railroad across Indochina, the soldier, duelist and self-styled ‘economist’ returned to his native France in 1886, caused havoc and
The courage of women dropped into Nazi-occupied Europe in order to work for Special Operations Executive (SOE), was immense. Trained as spies in Britain, they were tasked with sabotage and subversion of Nazi military rule and operated covertly with Resistance fighters and other British agents. It was a hugely risky job. Thirty-nine entered occupied France
Growing up in the 1960s at 288a Main Road on the outskirts of Northampton, Mark Haddon spent hours alone in the bathroom, the only lockable room in the house, trying to figure out the universe. In this dark, sui-generis memoir he writes: Even now, insoluble conundrums such as ‘Why was I born as me and
Madeleine Gray’s first novel, Green Dot (2023), was a witty account of a messy office affair, whose fans included Nigella Lawson and Gillian Anderson. Her follow-up, Chosen Family, is an altogether more expansive book. She has described it as the result of years of thinking obsessively about two things for a long time. First, why
The world divides between creeps and jerks. History can be seen as a long, unedifying creep, or what one of Alan Bennett’s characters called ‘one fucking thing after another’. Alternatively, it might be seen as consisting of jerks – that’s to say, big events that revolutionise the world (the invention of the printing press, the
Glyph (whose sibling, Gliff, was published last year) is Ali Smith’s 14th novel and her fifth since 2016, when her ‘Seasonal Quartet’ saw the beginning of her project to use fiction to comment on contemporary events. It takes as its subject two sisters. Petra and Patricia (‘Patch’) negotiate their difficult childhood by retreating into a
The fundamental purpose of science is to view the world from a different perspective. In the age of modern science, however, in which each academic discipline represents a world in itself, this is hard to remember. The field of ‘tribology’ would appear to be a perfect example. But such opacity is merely a front for
Before the 1989 revolution, Romania had seen nearly a century of polarisation – a fascist regime swiftly replaced by a communist one. In Blinding, Mircea Cartarescu’s first instalment of an ambitious, surrealist trilogy, that duality, along with other antagonisms central to existence, is represented by the motif of a butterfly. The novel was originally published
In the sphere of British environmentalism, Paul Kingsnorth is admired as a maverick in thought and deed. Starting out as a journalist with the Ecologist magazine, he co-founded the Dark Mountain Project, an online portal devoted to stories about the more-than-human world in a time of ecological collapse. On resigning from both, he retreated as
In 2007, two Russian submersibles descended from the ice at the North Pole to plant a small Russian flag on the sea floor more than two miles down. While the aquanauts were greeted as heroes in Russia, the reaction of other Arctic nations was somewhat less positive. ‘This isn’t the 15th century,’ complained the Canadian
George Saunders is at his most lively in the company of the dead. At ease with ghosts. In the 2022 Booker-winning Lincoln in the Bardo, Abraham Lincoln mourns his young son in a graveyard surrounded by a clamorous crowd of the newly deceased trying to be helpful. Grief, handled with sweet humour. But Saunders has
