The good, the bad and the ugly in books, exhibitions, cinema, TV, dance, music, podcasts and theatre.
John Gerard, a Jesuit priest immured in the Tower of London in 1597, and tortured by being hung from manacles until he temporarily lost the use of his arms, was a resourceful as well as courageous fellow. Dependent on the kindness of his jailer, a warder named Bonner, for such intimacies as washing, dressing and
In his time, Gerald Hamilton (1890–1970) was an almost legendary figure, but he is now remembered — if at all — as the model for the genial conman in Christopher Isherwood’s novel Mr Norris Changes Trains (1935). ‘There are some incidents in my career, as you doubtless know, which are very easily capable of misinterpretation,’
When Margot Asquith’s name crops up these days, it is usually in a retelling of the story about her meeting Jean Harlow, sexy star of the silver screen, who repeatedly called her Margotte. Eventually, Margot became irritated. ‘No, my dear,’ she corrected. ‘The “t” is silent, as in Harlow.’ It’s a good story, but apocryphal
Do movie musicals matter? Most readers, even those who love them, will embark on Richard Barrios’s short history of the genre with the thought: not much. They’ll very likely, I’m afraid, finish it holding much the same opinion. But not mattering much doesn’t prevent the best film musicals from being captivating. This is a book
Nadezhda Alexandrovna Lokhvitskaya was a literary celebrity in pre-revolutionary St Petersburg. She chose the pen-name ‘Teffi’ because it was androgynous, and because it was the kind of name a ‘lucky’ fool would have; in Russia, fools were held to tell truths, albeit obliquely. ‘Teffi’ wrote for newspapers, most notably the Russian Word. By 1911 she
Spectator reviewers over the years have had a difficult time with Nadine Gordimer’s books. Gordimer (1923 – 2014), who won the Nobel Prize for literature and was one of the leading campaigners against apartheid, has died at the age of 90. Her books are passionately political and sometimes maddeningly abstract; some found them poetic, others
I was at the Way with Words literary festival in Devon last week, reading from my new book. Afterwards I was led to the authors’ tent to do signings. As I approached I was delighted to see a long queue snaking around the gardens, everyone clutching my book, eagerly waiting for me to sign them.
No one owns a Kindle for very long without becoming obsessed by its social highlighting feature: unless you go into the preferences to turn it off, the glibbest and most epigrammatic sentences in any popular book begin to appear with dotted lines underneath them and the words ’19 [or however many] people highlighted this’. Our
Genghis Khan, unlike most Mongols in history, is a household name, regularly misappropriated as a right-wing totem. If we recall the genocidal killing sprees of, say, Stalin and Mao, perhaps it would be more historically accurate to say ‘to the left of Genghis Khan’. In the popular imagination he is the despot’s despot, a one-man
Over the past 12 months, I’ve proposed to my girlfriend, moved house, got married, and become a father. The most stressful of these tests, without a doubt, was moving house. Forget strappado (a torture whereby you’re strung up by your arms behind your back) or flagellation or sensory deprivation. Moving to Acton: that’s what’ll break
Sybille Bedford all her life was a keen and courageous traveller. Restless, curious, intellectually alert, she was always ready to explore new territories, her experiences recounted in a sophisticated style that Jan Morris in her introduction refers to as ‘a kind of apotheosised reportage’. Bedford’s first book, A Visit to Don Otavio, describing an expedition
Once upon a time, a powerful unkillable beast menaced the nation. It had to be tamed. It could only be tamed by a robust ethos of the common good. This gradually emerged: a new democratic spirit was born! But soon critics popped up, complaining about aspects of the new order, calling it stifling, limiting, pompous
A calculated ordinariness unites the protagonists in Graham Swift’s new collection of short stories. In each of these mini fictions, as in his novels, Swift revisits his conceit of the narrator as man (or woman) on the Clapham omnibus. Invariably he endows these blank ciphers with aspects of the extraordinary — percipience, insight or understanding
With Elvis has Left the Building, the longstanding editor of GQ has inexplicably written a book that could serve as a handy, if perhaps overly comprehensive, compendium of bad journalistic habits: from the over-arching flaw of failing to decide what you want to say to such specifics as the excessive use of the phrase ‘American
‘Phlogiston’ is an interesting, if obsolete, word. Of Greek origin, it referred to the ‘fire-making’ quality thought to be present in, among other things, the ashes gathered by London dustmen. In the mid-18th century these ashes were mixed with earth and even ‘excrements taken out of the necessary houses’ to create the vast numbers of
Vladimir Putin calls it ‘the greatest geopolitical disaster of the 20th century’, a viewpoint which explains much of his recent behaviour. Few others anywhere in the world, particularly people who live around Russia’s borders, would agree that the collapse of the Soviet Union was anything to lament. From Riga to Tbilisi and from Kiev to
The Emperor Waltz is long enough at 600 pages to be divided, in the old-fashioned way, into nine ‘books’. Each book has a date, sliding from 1922 to 1979 to next year to 203 ad to last month. This might suggest an overly systematic novel in the mode of David Mitchell’s Cloud Atlas or Eleanor
‘Curious to see Mrs Aveling addressing the enormous crowd, curious to see the eyes of the women fixed upon her as she spoke of the miseries of the dockers’ homes, pleasant to see her point her black-gloved finger at the oppression, and pleasant to hear the hearty cheer with which her speech was given.’ So
It takes a special sort of talent to be able to make drawings of your own 97-year-old mother on her deathbed funny. The person with that gift is Roz Chast. Subscribers to the New Yorker will already be familiar with her marvellous cartoons, which often feature elderly and over-neurotic parents shouting dire imprecations to their
Lillian Hellman must be a maddening subject for a biographer. The author Mary McCarthy’s remark that ‘every word she writes is a lie, including “and” and “the”’ wasn’t far off. Navigating through the hall of mirrors that Hellman left behind, trying to sort fact from self-aggrandising fiction, seems to have worked Dorothy Gallagher into a
At a time when feminism is grimly engaged in disappearing up its own intersection (two transsexuals squabbling over a tampon is the image that comes to mind) Caitlin Moran is to be bravo’d till the sacred cows come home for bringing her super-brightness to bear on this most vital of subjects. Like the rest of
This is the Real Thing, an evocative account of English upper-class life throughout the 20th century. It begins amidst the Edwardian feudal splendours of Belvoir Castle, where Ursula d’Abo spent much of her childhood with her beloved grandfather ‘Appi’. At the coronation of George VI she was a maid of honour to the Queen. During
Few subjects generate as much angst, or puzzlement, among Western policymakers in Africa as China’s presence on the continent. In his new book, China’s Second Continent, the American journalist Howard French recalls meeting US officials in Mali to sound them out on the matter. Instead, he finds himself barraged by questions. ‘It would really be
For most Russians, Boris Pasternak is one of their four greatest poets of the last century. For most Anglophone readers, he is the man who won the Nobel Prize for Doctor Zhivago. The first four chapters of The Zhivago Affair give a full picture of Pasternak’s life and the Soviet literary world up until the
Are you the sort of man – or is your man the sort of man – who’s always meaning to read more novels but never gets round to it? Proper novels, I mean, rather than your John Grisham/Andy McNab stuff. Well the book you’ve been waiting for is soon to be published: A Man Called
Who could possibly choose hay fever, insect bites and heat rash over an open fire, cashmere blanket and hot chocolate laced with brandy? Although I love the bright early mornings and blue sky I can’t bear the heat and all that comes with it. Give me winter over summer any day. But to admit my
We all have what Andy Miller calls a ‘List of Betterment’: 50 or so books that, if read, would surely make us a better person – book clubs, gulp that Pino down, and discuss. Granted, it’s tough being a bastard if your nose is always in a book. And from The Year of Reading Dangerously:
Steven D. Levitt was a Harvard economist who specialised in politics and spent a lot of time watching cop shows on TV. Then he had an idea: why not switch from politics, which he found dull, to crime? Soon he was studying the crack cocaine economy. Stephen J. Dubner was the guitarist in a rock
Reading Dante is an experience of a lifetime. You never come to the end of it. But, like Dante himself, at large in the frightening wood, you need a companion for the journey, and it is difficult to imagine one more enlightening than Prue Shaw. The Emeritus Reader in Italian at the University of London,