The good, the bad and the ugly in books, exhibitions, cinema, TV, dance, music, podcasts and theatre.
Comedians always like to claim that they started making jokes after childhoods made harsh by poverty; that at a formative age they were tormented by appalling cruelty and neglect. Griff Rhys Jones had to leave Wales at the age of six days, for instance. Nevertheless, the Chaplin family could afford a maid in Kennington. The
Queen Victoria was the inventor of official royal biography. It was she who commissioned the monumental five-volume life of Prince Albert, a controversial and revealing work. She wrote most of the personal sections herself. She also published bestselling volumes, such as Leaves from a Journal of Our Life in the Highlands. She was a gifted
One of the many charms of this book is its sheer unexpectedness, which makes it hard to review, for to reveal the brilliancies too fully would spoil their effect. My copy is splattered with exclamation marks. For example, on page 65 the author is working on a piece of delicate silver jewellery that will become
There aren’t many jobs that allow a nice middle-class Jewish boy to say ‘fuck’ in front of his parents. But Jonathon Green found one: compiling slang dictionaries. This memoir of a life spent exploring the grubby margins of the English language reveals plenty about both that language and Green himself. When a man loves reading
In his new novel, Children of Paradise, Fred D’Aguiar, a British-Guyanese writer, returns to the Jonestown massacre, previously the subject of his 1998 narrative poem, ‘Bill of Rights’. D’Aguiar often examines brutal historical episodes from the perspective of a survivor or escapee. In Feeding the Ghosts (1997), the drowning of 140 slaves in 1798 so
In his preface to The Joy of Gay Sex (revised and expanded third edition), Edmund White praises the ‘kinkier’ aspects of homo-erotic life. Practical advice is given on frottage, spanking, sixty-nining, cruising, blowjobs, fisting, rimming and three-ways. Of course, Proust-inspired poetic exaltations to homosexual love have long characterised White’s fiction, from A Boy’s Own Story
Historians have generally not been kind in their assessment of Britain’s first two Stuart kings. Their political skills are regarded as meagre; their objectives malign; their one undisputed talent an unerring ability to alienate their subjects — with rebellion and civil war as the result. To his credit, Tim Harris, in his formidably large and
Rana Dasgupta, who was born and brought up in Britain, moved to Delhi at the end of 2000, principally to pursue a love affair and to write his first novel. He soon found himself mixing in bohemian circles, spending his evenings in ‘small, bare and, in those days, cheap’ apartments, talking with ‘artists and intellectuals’.
The British Library isn’t the first place I associate with contemporary fiction. For me, it’s about the Tudor manuscripts: the support and expertise of the manuscript room staff is second to none, and to the academic mind, few thrills compare to finding Elizabeth I’s distinctive handwriting on an unexpected document, or deciphering treacherous correspondence in
A week or two ago, author Philip Hoare wrote an article for the Independent, describing Derek Jarman as ‘a modern-day John Dee, the Elizabethan alchemist’, ‘an Edwardian Andy Warhol, a Victorian Jean Cocteau’ (huh?), and, inevitably, ‘a national treasure’. It’s symptomatic of the way that artists, writers and celebrities of a certain age haven’t been
Spectator literary competition No. 2840 You were excellent this week on the horrors of the reunion dinner. But these gatherings no longer have the allure they once enjoyed. While in days gone by, they offered the opportunity to see, and, more enjoyably, to assess, former classmates in their adult incarnations, in an age of social
‘On the whole I think you should write biographies of those you admire and respect, and novels about human beings whom you think are sadly mistaken,’ said Penelope Fitzgerald in 1987. The South African novelist Damon Galgut has reversed this formula — with mixed results. He has written a novel about a fellow novelist, E.M.
Any new book by Lorrie Moore is a cause for rejoicing, but her first collection of short stories for 16 years demands bunting, revelry and tap-dancing. She is one of a handful or two of writers (I’d nominate Anne Tyler, William Trevor, Martin Amis, Kazuo Ishiguro among the rest) whose work is always worth buying.
There are still some sizeable holes in early modern English history and one of them is what we know — or, rather, do not know — about the aristocracy. Of course, peers who held high office under the Crown often have their biographers. But there is still a rooted assumption among scholars that the aristo-cracy
How do you write a new book about T.E. Lawrence, especially when the man himself described his escapades, or a version of them, with such inimitable genius? Scott Anderson’s answer is to intercut Lawrence’s extraordinary story — the camel raids and blown-up bridges, the rape and torture, the lies and shame — with those of
The single most terrifying moment of my adult life occurred at 8.55 a.m. on the morning of Tuesday 5 August 2008. I had a written a novel, Typhoon, in which disenfranchised Uighur Muslims in China’s Xinjiang province riot against the Han government. By coincidence, a few days before publication, large numbers of Uighurs started doing
Last summer a National Security Agency (NSA) contractor called Edward Snowden leaked a vast trove of secret information on the mass data-gathering of his erstwhile employer and Britain’s GCHQ. He was widely lauded on the political left and libertarian right as a principled whistle-blower. Elsewhere he was derided as a naïve enabler of America’s enemies
The story of Kim Philby is, of course, like so many English stories, really one of social class. He was one of the most scandalous traitors in history, and from within the security services sent specific information to the Soviets during the early years of the Cold War that resulted directly in the deaths of
I yearn for expertise, in the way that only an arts graduate can. At university I learned how to read books (as long as they were written in English). But now, two decades on, people who can read books (as long as they are written in English) are not quite such the hot ticket that
Spectator literary competition No. 2839 The recent call to coin collective nouns for tweeters, hackers, hoodies, WAGs, environmentalists, bankers, MPs and contrarians pulled in a record-breaking entry and there were lots of unfamiliar names in the postbag. Inevitably, there was also a fair amount of repetition: nest/cacophony/outrage/triviality of tweeters came up more than once, as
Whatever happens to David Cameron, he will have some reading material post 2015. Dr Anthony Seldon has announced that he will be writing about the Cameron years, just as he did for the Blair and Brown premierships. Seldon plans to publish two books: The Cameron Effect, written with Dr Mike Finn, and Cameron at 10,
The traditional story told about the first world war is that it changed everything: that it was the end of the old world and the beginning of the modern age, and that art and poetry could never be the same again. So it is refreshing to find, not far into Lance Sieveking’s amiable and haphazard
George Kennan, the career diplomat and historian best known for his sensible suggestion that the United States try to resist the Soviet Union ‘without recourse to any general military conflict’, is much in vogue these days, at least in Washington, where Senator Rand Paul is presenting Kennan’s theory of ‘containment’ as an alternative to George
I have a confession to make. I really enjoyed this book. It’s been a while since I admitted something of the sort, and I feel ashamed, because, although it’s smartly, smoothly written, my pleasure was partly based on titillation. I smirked — I occasionally snickered — at the madder facts of self-mortification, whereby in the
Stuart MacBride’s new novel, A Song for the Dying (HarperCollins, £16.99, Spectator Bookshop, £14.99), is markedly darker in tone than his excellent Logan McRae series. Set in a fictional Scottish city where a miasma of corruption oozes out of the very stones, most of its characters are sadistic, victimised or both. The narrator, Ash Henderson,
A preview of Helen Oyeyemi’s Boy, Snow, Bird appeared in Granta’s Best of Young British Novelists issue in April last year, the decennial list identifying 20 writers under 40 as the names to watch. The previous four novels of the Nigerian-born Oyeyemi (who was first published at the age of 18) revolve around deeply psychological
What an unedifying affair the war in the North African desert was, at least until November 1942 and the victory at El Alamein. As the author of this brisk study of one of its more admired practitioners writes: In no particular order, the following were casualties [i.e. sacked]: Wavell, Cunningham, Auchinleck, Norrie, Ritchie, Lumsden, Gatehouse,
When Richard Mabey was researching this biography of Flora Thompson, author of Lark Rise to Candleford, he happened to stay at a farmhouse B&B near Bath. Ambling around, he found something very curious … There were two rows of cottages facing each other, with a dusty track between them …There were clean curtains in the
Shelfie [n.]: a bookshelf selfie Has the shelfie replaced the selfie as the most fashionable use of a camera phone? I’ll admit it; I’m a fan of the odd selfie. What better way to record a social occasion — so everyone knows you were there — than to take a squashed photograph at arms length
