The good, the bad and the ugly in books, exhibitions, cinema, TV, dance, music, podcasts and theatre.
On 7 December 2015 the Kennedy Centre Honours were awarded to Carole King, George Lucas, Rita Moreno, Seiji Ozawa and Cicely Tyson. King sat by the White House Christmas tree during the afternoon reception wearing her medal and laughing as Barack Obama recited the most familiar of her thousands of song lines: ‘You make me
‘When people see the word “chef” on the cover of a cookbook, it can set off alarm bells. It’s intimidating, I get it,’ says Ben Lippett, a former chef. The statement does make one wonder. When does a cook become a chef or a chef become a cook? Recently I sulked, I don’t know why,
At the opening of The Hour of the Predator, Giuliano da Empoli describes Spain’s conquest of the Aztec empire, its doomed ruler Moctezuma II’s response (ineffective vacillation, delaying any course of action), its consequences and its relevance to politics today. It is a striking introduction to a brief, bracing and profoundly alarming book. The author
The fourth novel in Karl Ove Knausgaard’s spooky supernatural series differs from the others in that it is a standalone and doesn’t involve previous characters. Gone, too, are the multiple narrators; and there is only the briefest mention of a new star in the sky – which in the other three books coincided with all
A researcher arrives in Trieste to piece together the life of a well-known literary figure. In cafés, bookshops and hospitals he visits the friends and lovers who were part of the writer’s circle. Now dying themselves, they share echoes of a literary scene that has long since dispersed. Women recall how they were celebrated in
No one likes a pedant. But over the past few millennia, people have shunned pedants, bores and know-it-alls for a wide range of different, often conflicting, reasons. They have been accused of obscuring the path to true philosophical knowledge and of putting learning on too high a pedestal; they’ve been regarded as unfit to be
Simon Winchester has found an excellent subject. While invisible, wind makes itself apparent through its effect on other things. This may mean flying detritus, scudding clouds and the rustle of foliage; or it may mean the ways in which it irresistibly alters and directs larger movements in society and culture. Much of the history of
Religious conversions do not, for the most part, make for good anecdotes. An exception can be found in Patricia Lockwood’s memoir Priestdaddy, which describes the author’s father Greg’s road to Damascus experience in a nuclear submarine off the coast of Norway, where he watched The Exorcist 72 times: That eerie, pea-soup light was pouring down,
A beguiling cinema advert back in the 1970s showed a young man with a series of doors closing around him with resounding clunks. First, he was hemmed in by the boredom of school, then work, and finally a mortgage – but as soon as he got the keys to his first motorbike, he could hit
Love Divine, the debut novella by Ysenda Maxtone Graham, is set in the leafy, fictional parish of Lamley Green and weaves together a tableau of stories about the community. The title comes from the hymn ‘Come Down, O Love Divine’; but beneath this bourgeois Church of England world of round-robins and milky tea is a
‘He was the true Willy Wonka of film-making – I feel like I won the golden ticket getting the chance to work with him!’ The speaker is Lara Flynn Boyle, who played Donna Hayward, the friend of the murdered Laura Palmer in David Lynch’s small-screen masterpiece Twin Peaks. That comparison, cited in John Higgs’s terrifically
Rime Allaf takes the long view of Syria’s descent into hell. Her story begins with President Hafez al Assad, the architect of the socialist Baathist dictatorship that, from 1970 to 2000, immiserated and impoverished an entire nation before his son and successor Bashar utterly destroyed it. It Started in Damascus is part history, part memoir,
One day, according to a venerable anecdote, an earl pushed his way into Hans Holbein’s London workshop demanding that his portrait be painted straight away. Understandably annoyed, Holbein hit him. This nobleman then asked Henry VIII to punish the painter, but apparently the monarch replied: ‘I can make seven earls (if it pleased me) from
Penal Colony No. 2. A girl in a green coat. Red splashes of fireworks against the night sky. She arrives back in Moscow: photographers, a clamour of questions, what is it like to be free? Meetings, cops, her little six-year-old son with a sparkler, a video being recorded, her mother nearby, anxious. Like the flickering,
According to the German philosopher Arthur Schopenhauer (1788-1860), people prefer reading books about great thinkers rather than by the thinkers themselves because ‘like is attracted to like and the shallow, tasteless gossip of a contemporary pinhead is more agreeable and convenient to them than the thoughts of great minds’. Thankfully, this contemptuous attitude towards biographers
A foul-mouthed fantasist with a chin like an ironing board starts a wild conspiracy theory about the King’s brother. An alcoholic racing fanatic turns his gambler’s eye to the ballot box. A maniacal preacher gives such a polarising sermon that he paints himself as a second Christ and tours the country as a sex symbol.
The excellent Moscow-born journalist Julia Ioffe’s first book recounts a well-known slice of Russian history from a fresh perspective – that of the mighty Russian woman who, it’s said, can ‘stop a galloping horse and run into a burning hut’. And how superhumanly brave and resilient they have had to be. Women were granted sweeping
It is hard to believe that the 1983 Nobel Prize in Literature would have been awarded to the author of titles such as The Chinese Have X-Ray Eyes, Here Be Monsters or – yes – An Erection at Barchester. But if William Golding had had his way, so it might have proved. Charles Monteith, his
Pizza is the Italian food that has conquered the world. From Brussels to LA, from Beijing to Buenos Aires, pizzerias are everywhere. But what are the origins of this food, and how did it become so popular? Reading Luca Cesari’sbook made me hungry not only for a thin crust margherita but also to digest the
According to the literary critic Harold Bloom, male writers have daddy issues. So keenly do they feel the oppressive influence of their forefathers that when they take up the pen it is to use it as a sword. To produce something new, they must engage their predecessors in a writerly duel to the death. Bloom’s
The Christmas gift book market is a fascinating thing. Things come into fashion, other things drop out, although the desire to amuse and/or make the mind boggle is pretty much constant. This year’s book that performs both tasks admirably is The History of Art in One Sentence (Bloomsbury, £14.99) by Verity Babbs, which I am
This year marks the centenary of Britain’s National Pinetum at Bedgebury in Kent, originally founded to rescue the smog-ravaged collection of the Royal Botanic Gardens, Kew, and now part of a global conservation effort: one third of all conifer species are currently threatened with extinction. To celebrate the birthday, we have Bedgebury Florilegium by Christina
Sylvain Tesson’s White unfolds the story of a gruelling ski journey across the Alps during which the author aims to fulfil ‘a long-held dream of transforming travel into prayer’. Born in Paris in 1973, Tesson is a well-known adventure writer whose previous books include The Consolations of the Forest: Alone in a Cabin on the
It’s a good job Anthony Hopkins is only an actor, as think what he’d be like as a dictator or grand inquisitor. ‘I could turn very nasty,’ he tells us in his memoir. Doing National Service: ‘I was beginning to enjoy the fisticuffs in my life.’ Encountering a Scotsman: ‘I felt a surge of hatred
Philip Hensher I have a theory that Mick Herron’s Slow Horses novels are an ingenious variation on Shakespeare’s Henry IV plays. If, in a future episode, River Cartwright ascends to his kingdom renouncing Jackson Lamb, and if Catherine tells us of Jackson/Falstaff’s death offstage, don’t be surprised. In any case, Clown Town (Baskerville, £22) is
We are familiar with the myths and realities of French resistance and German occupation, but less so with the story of Belgian resistance. It was highly creditable, spanning both world wars, and has long deserved to be better known. This book should help ensure that it is. The title refers to the legend of the
With his three-piece suits, poodle hairdo and bizarrely bendy physique, Tom Gilbey looks like he was created in a secret laboratory beneath the streets of Turnham Green by the Wine Marketing Board. But I have it on good authority that he is a real person. Gilbey came to prominence last year as the self-styled ‘wine
Few readers can claim to be what Samuel Taylor Coleridge called ‘Mogul diamonds’ – those who not only ‘profit by what they read’, but ‘enable others to profit by it also’. If such people were rare in Coleridge’s time, then today, when reading is in dramatic decline, they are scarce enough that even the white
At the end of the 1970s, the Illustrated London News printed a special edition to commemorate the decade. What did it focus on? Music, from David Bowie to Bob Marley? Some of the best films Hollywood has ever produced, from The Godfather on? Political crises, such as Watergate and the end of the war in