The good, the bad and the ugly in books, exhibitions, cinema, TV, dance, music, podcasts and theatre.
Why does everything these days have to be a superlative? Why must writers scream for our attention, yelling that the guy in their book blows everyone else out of the water? Bob Hope, claims Richard Zoglin in this biography, was the most important entertainer of the 20th century. In fact, he adds, you could argue
They say never work with children and animals. They could just as well say don’t write about aliens and God. A raft of readers hate sci-fi, and probably more sheer away at the very idea of a novel about a missionary. And yet… And yet The Book of Strange New Things works. It is in
Why do people talk about ‘experimenting’ with drugs when mostly they just mean that they’re doing them? Perhaps, as I write this, I should experiment with a glass of beer. In any case, one day back in the 1970s — when rock stars were particularly prone to experimentation — Bob Dylan dropped in on Neil
Nancy Mitford would not call them ‘toilet books’, that’s for certain. Loo books? Lavatory books? One or two people I know favour ‘bog books’. And having written one or two books myself that teeter on the edge of frivolity, I know that for your book to be kept in what Americans call the ‘bathroom’ is
If nothing else, a private investigator who has learned his trade from the works of Simenon stands out from the crowd. Cayetano Brulé, the hero of The Neruda Case, sets himself a course of Maigret novels on the advice of his first client, Pablo Neruda. ‘If poetry transports us to the heavens,’ the aged poet
Women are ‘foolish, wanton flibbergibs, in every way doltified with the dregs of the devil’s dunghill’. So a cleric reminded Queen Elizabeth I. His sermon reassured her that her personal qualities made her exceptional. But Elizabeth was not merely an ‘exceptional woman’, snorts Lisa Hilton. She was also ‘an exceptional ruler’ — one who refashioned
In 1707 Scotland surrendered what it had of its independence by the Treaty of Union with England. That independence had been limited since the Union of the Crowns in 1603, and arguably for at least half a century before that. But the treaty was, as Lord Seafield, Chancellor of Scotland, said ‘the end of an
Phaidon pioneered the modern art-book in 1936. The formula was: large format, fine production, exceptional plates, and essays by the superstars of German art history. After Richard Schlagmann acquired the imprint in 1990 Phaidon maintained, even enhanced, its reputation for good design, but visual style was prioritised over editorial substance and writers were marginalised. That
Stefan Zweig wasn’t, to be honest, a very good writer. This delicious fact was hugged to themselves by most of the intellectuals of the German speaking world during the decades before 1940, in which Zweig gathered a colossal and adoring public both in German and in multiple translations. It was like a password among the
Jane Ridley 2014 has been the year of 1914. In the same way that Christmas puddings appear in supermarkets in October, many of the contestants in the publishing race for 2014 defied starter’s orders and came out pre-maturely in 2013. What has been striking about the bumper crop of first world war books is the
H is For Hawk (Cape, £14.99) is the most ‘A for Amazing’ book I’ve read in a long while. Helen Macdonald weaves together three separate but related strands to produce a majestic tapestry. No reader could fail to be more interested in its primary subject by the end — or to be impressed by the beauty
As the year unwinds I’m rebuked by hints all around me that a book I comprehensively panned in Literary Review is basically true. The Establishment and How They Get Away With It by Owen Jones (Allen Lane, £16.99) is an intellectual mess, paranoid, partial and partisan; and its central thesis — that we are unwitting slaves of a grand,
On September 6th, 2006, a mortar unit from 3rd Battalion, 3 Para, defending the Kajaki dam over the Helmand River in Afghanistan, spotted an illegal road block set up by the Taliban. The enemy were too distant for the unit’s sniper, Lance Corporal Stuart Hale, and to call in an airstrike would have caused civilian casualties,
I have always loved Arnold Bennett’s The Old Wives’ Tale. I now have an equal fondness for Sathnam Sanghera’s Marriage Material (Heinemann, £14.99), which is a reworking of the Black Country classic translated to a Punjabi corner shop in Wolverhampton. Every bit as rich and sad and comic as the original. Meanwhile, back in the subcontinent, M.J. Carter’s The Strangler
I’ve reviewed only a handful of books in 2014, but have struck lucky twice. Brian Moynahan’s Leningrad: Siege and Symphony (Quercus, £25) is one of the most moving books I’ve read for ages: a brilliant portrait of Leningrad in the Nazi blockade, culminating in the astonishing events surrounding the first performance of Shostakovich’s Seventh Symphony by a
I haven’t read any books published this year —or last year, come to that. That disqualifies me — doesn’t it? Read the other Spectator books of the year
We know what to expect from the Taylor Wessing Portrait Prize. Africans in tribal dress. Flame-haired girls posing with animals. Nudes, generally grotesque: obese hanging bellies, a limb missing here or there. Wizened (but wise!) faces. Low-level child pornography. In 2012 the National Portrait Gallery was fortunate to avoid the wandering gaze of Operation Yewtree.
The Great Grisby: Two Thousand Years of Exceptional Dogs by Mikita Brottman (William Collins, £16.99). I have read thousands of books in my 81 years and this is the only one that has made me happy. Brottman, a psychoanalyst, contends that her French bulldog, Grisby, ‘forms a bridge between my inner life and the real world
Sheridan Morley was an old enemy of mine, so I was thrilled to see him brilliantly denounced and called to account by Jonathan Croall in his first-class book about writing a book, In Search of Gielgud: A Biographer’s Tale (Herbert Adler Publishing, £10.95). Morley is called an ‘arrogant, self-important and spectacularly lazy hack’, whose work was ‘sycophantic
I couldn’t work out whether Caitlin Moran’s How to Build a Girl (Ebury, £14.99) was aimed at mature adolescents or immature adults, but I loved it anyway — even before I came across the very pleasing mention of myself in Chapter 20, and the even better one in Chapter 24. Tamar Cohen’s The Broken (Doubleday, £6.99) was that miracle
Behind the Mask: The Life of Vita Sackville-West by Matthew Dennison (Collins, £25). Brave man to take on the biography of Vita, and he has brought it off superbly. So many facets, so many talents, so rich and full a life. Where do you start? Aristocrat, writer, greatly underrated novelist, garden creator, poet, wife, mother, friend, lover —
Inside the Dream Palace by Sherill Tippins (Simon & Schuster, £20). We’ve had biographies of great artists and writers, their spouses and children and their children’s pets. Here’s one about the place where most of them, from Jack Kerouac to Sid Vicious, seem to have hung out: the glamorously seedy Chelsea Hotel in New York. Not
Tristram Hunt’s Ten Cities that Made an Empire (Allen Lane, £25) is a stylish history of the British empire, told through its cities in sunny, civilised prose. He begins with the bungling of the American colonies and ends with Britain’s bewilderment as its own cities in turn become ‘colonised’. Constantine Phipps’s What You Want (Quercus, £20) is a verse
Being a slow reader, I first try the shortest, or anyway shorter, works of famous novelists unknown to me. This year, with many misgivings, I read The Confusions of Young Törless by Robert Musil (Penguin, £8.99) and was shocked and impressed by the intensity of the sex and violence he describes at a military boarding school in
Monsieur Dior: Once Upon a Time by Natasha Fraser-Cavassoni (Pointed Leaf Press, £47.50) is the most exotic book I have seen this year. It came in a box, with a slinky silk ribbon. The text, by Antonia Fraser’s fashion-expert daughter, is excellent, but it is the superb photos which make the book. They show Dior dressing
Misery loves company. Anyone who doubts this old adage should pop into their local bookshop, because besides celebrity chefs and Fifty-Shades-of-Grey-style erotica, what keep the tills ringing are misery memoirs. The shelves are groaning with them. Their titles can vary from the merely toe-curling (Cry Silent Tears) to the queasily exploitative (Please, Daddy, No), but
I had the misfortune to meet Lord Richards on probably the darkest day of his 42 years in the military. In July 2009 I went to visit the then Commander-in-Chief UK Land Forces in his office on the edge of Salisbury plain and we spoke about his career, and the army in general. All the
A severed head, argues Frances Larson in her sprightly new book, is ‘simultaneously a person and a thing… an apparently impossible duality… an intense incongruity’. History is ‘littered’ with such heads. Pilgrims visit them: the heads of St Peter and St Paul, for example, are thought to be in the high altar of the Basilica
We live in a world in which nuance is trampled on and cannot survive. Is that true? I don’t know. But the further point is, must authors now preface their novels with introductory letters, in which they carefully explain the central themes of their work? Epistolary prefaces in general are not remotely new: you often
