The good, the bad and the ugly in books, exhibitions, cinema, TV, dance, music, podcasts and theatre.
I’ve never been to Tokyo, but sometimes I wonder: why bother with the plane ticket? The imagined Tokyo is more real than the actual city. For westerners, it is a place whose USP is its unreality: its irreducible strangeness, its intense Japaneseness. It’s a city where lonely souls go to bump against other lonely souls
When she was an 11-year-old schoolgirl, the writer Gitta Sereny passed through Nuremburg while a Nazi rally was in full swing. She recalled being awed by ‘the joyful faces all around, the rhythm of the sounds, the solemnity of the silences, the colours of the flags, the magic of the lights’. She understood nothing of
If Robert Irwin had not existed, then Dan Brown, or better still Umberto Eco, would surely have had to invent him. In his Memoirs of a Dervish, the roller-blading, pinball-playing polymath reported: ‘It was in my first year in Oxford that I decided that I wanted to become a Muslim saint.’ Irwin, who died in
I’m lucky. I’ve only visited a family court once, and that was as a journalist rather than a party to a case. One detail stuck with me. On the wall in the waiting area was a poster preparing attendees for the layout of the courtroom: the judge goes here, the barristers go here, and you
The crusades bring up images of the ancient cities and harsh deserts of the Levant, of Saladin, Richard Coeur de Lion and King Louis IX of France. The crusades to the Holy Land were a consuming obsession of Latin Christianity for four centuries and remain among the most famous episodes of the Middle Ages. Yet,
Joanna Kavenna is very serious about games. Her novels have a certain playful quality, even her debut Inglorious, where the humour and allusions are Mittel-european. More markedly ludic are her Lewis Carroll-esque fantasy about quantum physics, A Field Guide to Getting Lost and the Philip K. Dickish tech-dystopia of Zed. In Seven, however, it’s not
This vivid account of a young English-woman caught up in the Russian Revolution was first published in 1919 as Under Cossack and Bolshevik, but it’s possibly even more gripping today. Rhoda Power, a political science graduate, was 26 when she was hired as a tutor to a 16-year-old Russian girl, Natasha Sabaroff, living in Rostov-on-Don.
A friendly admonition for the thwarted or struggling writer in your life: that tempting little job at the local bookshop might not be the best way to keep the show on the road until the Muse comes through. Would-be actors who take a front-of-house gig at the National Theatre aren’t constantly buttonholed by strangers raving
In June 1993, the Artist Who’d Just Decided He Didn’t Want to be Called Prince Any More handed his passport to his long-suffering tour manager Skip Johnson and told him to get the name on it changed to the squiggly symbol with which he’d decided to rebrand himself. It is ironic that he felt ‘oppressed’
Sometimes the term ‘lost masterpiece’ proves to be little more than a publisher’s puff. At other times, however, a long-buried book that is dug up, dusted down and branded a classic is worthy of the accolade. That applies to Gabriele Tergit’s The Effingers. Originally published – and then promptly overlooked – in the author’s native
Ron Rosenbaum is a man of galactic learning. Theology, neuroscience, American history, psychology, Shakespeare, cosmology, ‘all of Dickens’, nuclear weapons, quantum theory, iron ore – nothing escapes his hungry eye. Except, perhaps, Bob Dylan. Which is unfortunate, given that he’s written a book about him. What is it about Dylan that sends writers mad? Christopher
‘We continue to grapple as a species,’ writes Carl Morris, ‘with a knotty philosophical divide between anthropocentric and biocentric approaches to the natural world. Our bodies are both transcendent – seemingly beyond nature and capable of rationalised enhancement – but also immanent – that is within nature and therefore subject to the same frailties and
‘Talent borrows, genius steals.’ Do you like it? I just came up with it. No, honestly. Any resemblance to the work of anyone else is purely coincidental. The idea that taking someone else’s words and passing them off as one’s own constitutes a form of theft goes back to antiquity. Aeschines, one of Socrates’s disciples,
However many times one absorbs the brevity of the interlude between the first catastrophic worldwide conflict of the 20th century and the next, it was the not-knowingness of that timetable that allowed society to cope. In the 20 years between world wars that shattered several generations, Britain’s full emotional recovery was never really accomplished. But
Departure(s), whose publication co-incides with Julian Barnes’s 80th birthday, will be his last book, a thank you and goodbye to his readers. Barnes has blood cancer, but the condition is manageable and not terminal; when he dies, it will be with, and not of, the disease. Or rather, as he puts it: ‘I, in dying,
What did David Bowie mean by ‘No confessions/ No religion’ in his lyrics to ‘Modern Love’? Peter Ormerod proposes what at first seems an unlikely theory – that Bowie was talking about Gnosticism, the complex spiritual, though not religious, belief that God lies beyond the material world and that all humans carry a divine spark
As the poem goes: Water, water, everywhere, Nor any drop to drink – which might well describe how residents of the Owens Valley felt after Los Angeles stole their lake. Immortalised in Robert Towne’s screenplay for Chinatown, this early 20th-century water diversion via the 233-mile Los Angeles Aqueduct quickly led to an endless property boom
Gerald Murnane’s Landscape with Landscape opens with a splendidly disgruntled preface. The book is a collection of six longish stories and was originally published in 1985, when it was panned by a reviewer. ‘Some writers may claim not to be affected by reviews or even not to read them,’ he observes in his preface: ‘I
This terse, unsparing novel can be summed up thus: after nearly a decade’s absence, the successful designer Gabriele Bilancini returns home to suburban Rome, where he wrestles with an identity crisis. His family and friends – his intimates before he moved to Milan and raced up the social ladder – feel like shameful reminders of
The English rock band Pink Floyd was founded 60 years ago in Cambridge. Reading two new books about them, it struck me how much time and place matter to their story. Now in their eighties, the surviving members remain a product of the milieu in which they were formed: middle class, semi-boho, comfortably numb. First
This is the sixth novel and tenth book overall by the highly successful journalist and podcaster Elizabeth Day. She hit her stride as an author with her third novel Paradise City (2015), which was leaps and bounds ahead of her first two in terms of narrative propulsion. Her next was what might be considered her
In the centre of London’s Paternoster Square there is a tall column on a heavy octagonal base that provides a few seats and shelter from the winds whipping around St Paul’s. If you look closely, you see a mishmash of styles, with the Corinthian column topped by a gold-covered flaming urn and various baroque flourishes.
The filmmaker Cameron Crowe had the coolest childhood. Growing up in California, he started writing for Rolling Stone magazine at the age of 15. His big break came in 1973, when he had the chance to interview the Allman Brothers Band, then one of America’s biggest rock groups, for a cover piece. For days he
The great American activist Aldo Leopold once argued that to be a modern environmentalist was to suffer a world of wounds as you endured the losses inflicted on one cherished organism after another. No one, then, can suffer more anguish than the campaigner for the world’s fishes. In this wide-ranging, heartfelt, meticulously assembled account of
Half of the British political world thinks we are insufficiently scared about the present; the other half thinks we are insufficiently excited about the future. The latter is a non-partisan movement, or at least a cross-partisan one. From fully-automated luxury communism, through centrist Abundance, to the more right-coded Looking for Growth, all the way to
Today, a muscular Richard the Lionheart still sits manfully astride his warhorse, sword held aloft, outside the Houses of Parliament, courtesy of Carlo Marochetti’s 1856 statue of the Plantagenet king. Richard would have approved. As Heather Blurton points out in her livelybook, he was never shy of portraying himself as a valiant monarch – one
We often forget to ascribe agency to modern Tibet. Politically, it seems to lie mute in the behemoth shadow of China. Culturally, we encounter it more as the backdrop to journeys of self-discovery than a producer of modern culture in its own right. But the villages of the Tibetan plateau are defiantly cosmopolitan in Ning
Mark Z. Danielewski is best known for his House of Leaves, a typographically delirious horror novel about a manuscript written by a blind man describing a film which showed an impossible house. It seemed to exhaust a particular kind of postmodernism of footnotes, cryptography, metatexts, pop culture and more, yet remained at heart a story
To read Albert Camus’s Notebooks – comprehensive, newly translated and expertly annotated by Ryan Bloom – is to enter the engine room of the writer’s mind and to glimpse its complex workings and components stripped back to their essentials. They comprise an intellectual and spiritual autobiography, not an account of his life. But of course