The good, the bad and the ugly in books, exhibitions, cinema, TV, dance, music, podcasts and theatre.
On a recent weekend I was thinking of taking my sons to downtown Istanbul to do some bazaar browsing. ‘Bad idea’, a fellow expatriate warned me, ‘revolution on Taxim Square. Again.’ Revolt has become the new normal in Istanbul, a constant of urban life to be followed like the weather. Every few months the ritual
Frog Music begins with a crime against a young mother, committed in a tiny space. Unlike Emma Donoghue’s bestselling novel Room, however, the setting is not present-day America but that of 1876. Blanche is travelling on a train with her new friend Jenny. She hears several loud cracks and feels something hot and wet fall
At the heart of this work is a startling and improbable statistic and the equally surprising and counterintuitive thesis that flows out of it. We are used to looking back on the 20th century as comfortably the most violent in all human history — the silver medal usually goes to the 14th — but if
It is of course shocking that the Justice Secretary Chris Grayling should ban prisoners from receiving books sent by their friends and relatives. We might all agree with author Philip Pullman who said that the ban is worthy of Hitler and Pol Pot and entirely typical of a government whose most senior members regularly eat
John Ford was the first of the five famous Hollywood film directors to go to war. He went expecting to get given a sword, which he could then brandish. After all, he knew about swords; they were things that came out of props baskets in his cavalry epics, but that was in films. Unfortunately in
Eschewing the biblical advertising of ‘the promised land’ or indeed ‘a land of milk and honey’, the Conservative colonial secretary William Ormsby-Gore presented a far grislier picture of Palestine on the eve of the second world war when he described it as ‘full of arms and bitterness, and there are few who do good and
As a sign of the way things have changed, nothing could better this. Hester Vaizey, Cambridge history don and ‘publishing co-ordinator’ at the National Archives, has collated this splendid collection of posters issued by various government agencies in the 30 years or so after the second world war. This was, of course, the heyday and
The clue is in the title: this is not about the blue-grey-green wet stuff that covers 70 per cent of our planet’s surface. Rather, it’s about how the sea and our use of it have influenced us economically, culturally, religiously and politically: Much of human history has been shaped by people’s access, or lack of
When presented with a 639-page doorstopper which includes 82 pages of closely-written sources, notes and index, most of us feel a bit like a patient about to swallow a strong dose of antibiotics: ‘This isn’t going to be pleasant, but it’ll be good for me.’ First published in Dutch in 2010, translated into French and
It isn’t very often that a writer’s work is so striking that you can remember exactly where and when you were when you first read it. I was in a parked car in a hilly suburb of Cardiff last summer when I first became aware of George Saunders, from reading a speech he’d addressed to
Paul McCartney says he can remember the exact moment he knew the Beatles had made it. Early one morning, getting home from a night on the tiles, he heard the milkman whistling ‘From Me to You’. This incident isn’t recounted in A Brief History of Whistling. The record in question was a huge pop hit,
In any list of the-best-prime-ministers-we never-had, the name of Roy Jenkins is likely to be prominent. He was intelligent, moderate, courteous, thoughtful: he was exactly the sort of man whom any civil servant would wish to see installed in No.10. That, no doubt, is why he never got there. John Campbell makes no bones about
You were on stellar form this week on the darker side of spring: the entry was full of wit and invention. There were references to Larkin, who could always be relied on to see the bleaker side of things (‘their greenness is a kind of grief’), as well as to Eliot and Thomas Edward Brown.
It’s a misleading title, because there is nothing unexpected about Professor Carey, in any sense. He doesn’t turn up to parties uninvited, like some of his less organised colleagues. As for his appointment, he was tailor-made for the job. Right class (middle); right school (grammar); right military service (guarding sand); right religion (books). An unsullied
Siri Hustvedt’s new novel isn’t exactly an easy read — but the casual bookshop browser should be reassured that it’s nowhere near as punishing as the opening pages might suggest. In the ‘editor’s introduction’ we’re told that what follows is an anthology of writings by and about the late artist Harriet Burden — known to
If ever there was a time to write a book about self-portraits, this must be it. ‘Past interest in the genre,’ James Hall tells us in his introduction to this cultural history, ‘is overshadowed by the obsession with self-portraiture during the last 40 years.’ What he could not have foreseen was that self-portraiture would feature
Karl Ove Knausgaard was eight months old when his family moved to the island of Tromøya; he left it aged 13, because of his father’s higher-grade teaching appointment on the mainland. As they drove over the bridge linking the island with the southern Norwegian port of Arendal, ‘it struck me with a huge sense of
In the first sentence of the first chapter of this book, Henry Marsh, a consultant brain surgeon, says, ‘I often cut into the brain and it is something I hate doing.’ What a compelling start! Marsh takes us through an operation. First, he looks at a scan. A middle-aged man has a tumour of the
The troubles of Richard Pryor’s life are well known — from his childhood in a brothel to his self-immolation via crack pipe — but arranged in a biography their impact is renewed. So grotesque was his upbringing that an early encounter with a dead baby in a shoebox warrants but a single sentence in David
Here’s a book co-authored by one dead woman and one living one. Sarah Raven is the second wife of Adam Nicolson, grandson of Vita Sackville-West. In 1930 Vita bought Sissinghurst, the ruins of a great 16th-century house, and with her husband Harold Nicolson created the world-famous garden. Tell me the old, old story. Vita died
In her early days on Fleet Street, Mary Kenny, as she herself admits, was cast as ‘the wild Irish girl’, and did her best to live up to it. She held her own with the drinkers at El Vino’s, gave new meaning to the phrase ‘talking about Uganda’ when discovered in flagrante with an African
Anyone brought up as I was in a Daily Express household in the 1950s — there were approaching 11 million of us readers — knew the writings of Chapman Pincher. His frequent scoops, mostly defence- or intelligence-related, sometimes political, scientific or medical, were unusually well-sourced and headline-grabbing. Now, aged 100, he has written his autobiography.
‘In ancient times … hundreds of years before the dawn of history, lived a strange race of people … the Druids. No one knows who they were … or what they were doing. But their legacy remains … hewn into the living rock … of Stonehenge.’ The unforgettable opening of Spinal Tap’s song ‘Stonehenge’ was
Blithe Spirit Gielgud Theatre If you’d asked me before this week, I’m afraid I’d have guessed Angela Lansbury had already reached the spirit world. I’ve always imagined her eternally inhabiting the mid-twentieth century, as the prim but decidedly experimental home front heroine in Bednobs and Broomsticks (1971) or the icy Cold War matriarch in The Manchurian Candidate (1962). Yet at
Wilfred Owen, the poet whose work epitomises the horror of the First World War for most people in modern Britain, was born in Oswestry in the Shropshire Marches, close to his Welsh ancestral homeland, one hundred and twenty-one years ago today. His brief life ended just a quarter of a century later, on November 4th
For a man who claims to be apathetic about politics, Russell Brand is rather noisy. Not content with guest editing the New Statesman and getting crucified by Jeremy Paxman, all in the name of his revolutionary cause, Brand is now writing a political book. ‘People keep asking me how The Revolution will work?’ ‘We all
Kate Colquhoun sets herself a number of significant challenges in her compelling new book, Did She Kill Him? Like Kate Summerscale before her, Colquhoun mines the rich seam of legal archives to give her readers the fascinating tale of a Victorian courtroom drama: that of Florence Maybrick, accused, in 1889, of murdering her husband. Colquhoun
The genesis of The Road to Middlemarch was a fine article in the New Yorker about Rebecca Mead’s unsuccessful search for the origin of the remark, sometimes attributed to George Eliot, that ‘it’s never too late to become the person you might have been’. To Mead this seemed at variance with the concentration in Middlemarch
In 1944, when he was 22, Jack Kerouac lost a manuscript — in a taxi, as he thought, but probably in Allen Ginsberg’s room at Columbia University — and it stayed lost until 2002, when it was auctioned at Sotheby’s. Now it has been published, all 70 pages of it, together with some youthful sketches