Culture

‘Paris, like many old cities, is saturated with blood.’ The food writer Chris Newens certainly knows how to draw the reader in. A Londoner who has lived in Paris for the past ten years, he sets out to eat his way through all the arrondissements, starting with the 20th and spiralling backwards through the coil of the capital. Each chapter evokes the history and atmosphere of a different neighbourhood and focuses on one dish, which the author then attempts to cook in his authentically cramped Parisian kitchen. Newens, who read anthropology at the LSE, comes from a family that ran a bakery and tearoom for six generations and had their own recipe for the custard tart known as Maid of Honour.

As bombs rain down on Nazi-occupied Prague, Georg Wilhelm Pabst shoots a film – a romantic courtroom drama adapted from a pulp novel by a creepy Third Reich hack, Alfred Karrasch. Although the leading man finds it strange to make any movie ‘in the middle of the apocalypse’, his director insists that ‘art is always out of place’. In retrospect, Pabst assures the star, it will look like ‘the only thing that mattered’. The discoverer of Greta Garbo and Louise Brooks, and the director of The Joyless Street, Lulu, Westfront 1918 and other prewar masterpieces, Pabst really did attempt to film The Molander Case in Prague in 1944-45. The bizarre, chaotic shoot furnishes Daniel Kehlmann with the climactic scenes of this novel, inspired by the great director’s compromised career.

Though I’d never read any books about Oasis before this one, I’d have bet it would be impossible to write boringly about the band – for two reasons: namely Noel and Liam Gallagher. As the most entertaining men in music, the former could be talking to a goldfish and still end up riffing in an entirely fresh, witty and profound way, while the latter is probably the greatest natural clown since Buster Keaton. I’ll put my cards on the table and admit that I’ve got a chronic crush on Noel. When I interviewed him for the Sunday Times nearly ten years ago, the simpering, gushing and giggling on the tape sounded as though a coachload of Japanese schoolgirls had joined us. He has spoken of how he enjoys the company of journalists – the mark of a reckless man with nothing to hide.

The sea, as you might expect, looms large in Benjamin Wood’s finely tuned novella Seascraper. Thomas Flett – one of the most touching protagonists I’ve encountered in recent years – is barely out of his teens, but he’s already battered by toil. His days are spent shanking – gathering shrimps on the beach – with only a horse and cart for company. The setting, gorgeously evoked, is Longferry, a grim coastal town in 1950s Britain. Tom himself appears as if he’s been transplanted from the 19th century. The sea, though, brings change, when hidebound past comes crashing against thrusting future. Tom has a stifling oedipal relationship with his mother, who gave birth, aged 16, after an affair with her history teacher.

There isn’t another actor alive whom I’d rather watch than Michael Douglas. Just as Pauline Kael once said that the thought of Cary Grant makes us smile, so the thought of Michael Douglas makes me grin, smirk, nod, wink, cackle, cheer – and walk a little taller, too. Even his anti-heroes are heroic in their truth to self. From the sly, ophidian sneer of his washed-up money man in A Perfect Murder to the salty, satanic leer of his trigger-happy cop in Basic Instinct, Douglas has embraced self-destruction, stared down absurdity and made plain what Nietzsche meant when he said that man is either a ‘laughing stock or a painful embarrassment’. But no matter how much Douglas means to me, he means a whole lot more to Jessa Crispin.

Nathalia Holt’s book begins irresistibly. The year is 1928. Two sons of Theodore Roosevelt called Ted and Kermit – yes I know we’re thinking it’s a Wes Anderson movie – have smoothed a map out on the table in front of them. Let’s imagine the setting is a bit like the Explorers’ Club in New York, with exotic anthropological curios on the walls – poisoned spears and wooden shields – and globes the size of beach balls lit up from within. The land they are examining is mainly coloured in greens, browns and greys. But running across the map, like the stripes of a tiger, are irregular white blotches. Each of these blank spaces represents terra incognita. This is China, or what was then known of it.