The good, the bad and the ugly in books, exhibitions, cinema, TV, dance, music, podcasts and theatre.
Whenever I give lectures on my book on censorship – Whaddya mean you haven’t read it? Buy it here at a recession-beating price – I discuss the great issues of the wealthy to silence critics, the conflict between religion and freedom of thought and the determination of dictators to persecute dissenters. These themes have animated
Yoram Kaniuk was born in Tel Aviv in 1930. After his experience in Israel’s 1948 War of Independence, Kaniuk moved to New York where he became a painter in Greenwich Village. Ten years later he returned to Tel Aviv, where he has lived ever since, working as a novelist, painter, and journalist. He has published
I suspect I might not be the only one who finds it unnerving to be at the start of a year that features, so prominently, the number thirteen. 2013 – it feels like bad luck just to read it in my head, let alone say it aloud! But worry not, I have assuaged my fears
‘Mary and Geordie have lost a child …Why should they feel they are entitled to grieve? It’s so commonplace.’ Paul Torday’s latest novel is full of such assertions. We are in the Border country, in 2010, and three children have disappeared. Neither the police nor social services can be persuaded to take much interest. ‘Tell
If you consider ‘gripping metafiction’ a self-contradictory phrase (surely metafiction disables tension through its wink-at-the-audience style?), Nicholas Royle’s First Novel (Cape, £16.99), which is in fact his seventh, may change your mind. Royle (pictured above) teaches creative writing at Manchester Metropolitan University, and in this book he gives us Paul Kinder, who teaches creative writing at
It is rare to encounter a writer whose work can be so neatly divided into two halves. George Saunders is known as a satirist with an interest in consumerism and the technology of the near future, but occasionally he will publish moving, sometimes brutal social realist tales. Early stories such as ‘Christmas’ were like strange,
With nice ecumenical parity, Peter Somerville-Large derides equally both Ireland’s principal Christian churches as they compete for the soul, or at least the membership, of young Paul Blake-Willoughby. His discordant Ascendancy parents, a Catholic father and a Protestant mother, are on what the late Brian Inglis, an esteemed Spectator editor, called ‘a descendancy course’. Somerville-Large,
Acquainted with Stravinsky, friend of Ravel and Poulenc, prolific composer and well-loved man, Lennox Berkeley (1903-1989) remains an enigma to most of us even if we know little of his enormous output of songs, symphonies, ballets and spiritually inclined choral music. His close friendship and early collaboration with Britten, a decade his junior, will ensure
In his introduction, James Fergusson apologises for the title of his book. Somalia, he writes, may no longer be the most dangerous place on earth. Since the summer of 2012, a newly elected government under a former university professor who once worked for the UN is bringing stability to the country, exiled Somalis are going
On 10 June 1840 an 18-year-old out-of-work Londoner named Edward Oxford cocked his pistol and fired two shots at Queen Victoria as she made her daily carriage drive with Prince Albert on Constitution Hill. Oxford was mobbed by the crowd, who shouted ‘Kill him!’ He was charged with high treason. Though he claimed that his
The subtitle of Deirdre David’s life of Olivia Manning, ‘A Woman at War’, has a resonant double meaning. She was, as we are repeatedly informed, a unique example of a woman novelist who wrote as well about war and battles as a man. But she was also at war with herself, with her colleagues, and,
Lots of people have subsequently discovered this important imperial maxim: ‘Don’t invade Afghanistan.’ But the first western power to demonstrate the point of it was the British, in the late 1830s. The First Afghan War is the most famous of Queen Victoria’s ‘little wars’ for its almost perfect catastrophe. The British went in, installed a
Tis the season for shopping mall scuffles. A man with a red face prized the last Magimix (steel, 600 rotations per minute) from my hands yesterday, citing ‘the stress of January sales’. I got an apology, but not the blender. What is it that makes us so quick to flip? In a far bleaker arena,
I’m conducting an experiment: Life of Pi concerns a basic metaphor about faith, how is that metaphor rendered in print and on screen? I’ve re-read the book. I’ve deliberately (at this stage) not watched Ang Lee’s film; rather, I’ve found a reviewer of the film (Jonathan Kim of the Huffington Post) who has not read the book,
Fancy a walk into London’s past? How about a stroll down Fleet Street in 1895? Or Oxford Street in 1899? It can be done. I can’t promise pictures, but I can offer more detail on the residents of each building than Google would risk publishing today. The secret: from the mid-1830s, a man named Frederic
‘Prayer’ Prayer the Church’s banquet, angels’ age, God’s breath in man returning to his birth, The soul in paraphrase, heart in pilgrimage, The Christian plummet sounding heaven and earth; Engine against the Almighty, sinner’s tower, Reversed thunder, Christ-side-piercing spear, The six-days-world-transposing in an hour, A kind of tune, which all things hear and fear; Softness,
It was a placid start. A tubby kid with peroxide blond hair approached the crease in 6 easy steps. He skipped into the air and pulled his arms backwards to build forward momentum. His left leg hit the ground and he began to rotate his shoulders from right to left. This motion brought his right
Which words in current use would you ban? Lake Superior State University answers this question each year, with its famous ‘List of Words to be Banished from the Queen’s English for Misuse, Overuse and General Uselessness’. Words are recommended by members of the English speaking world, and then selected by the university. Top of the
My favourite joke of all time concerns Diana Dors, whose real name was Diana Fluck. She was invited back to Swindon, her birthplace, to open a fete. The vicar, terrified he’d mispronounce her name, mispronounced her name. ‘We have with us today Diana Dors, whom many of you here in Swindon will remember as Doris
Margaret Evison spent Easter 2009 with her 26-year-old son Mark, who was about to go to Afghanistan as a lieutenant in the Welsh Guards. They walked around her garden talking about death in a general sort of way; Mark was worried that he might make a mistake which would lead to someone else dying. ‘He
Ronald ‘Trader’ Faulkner is that relative rarity: an unassuming actor. In their memoirs most actors, after the obligatory two or three chapters describing the hardships at the outset of their careers, indulge in a paean of self-glorification — mentioning their failures, certainly, but only so as to highlight their far more considerable successes. Faulkner is
Michael Gorra’s Portrait of a Novel is a lucid critique of how Henry James came to write a book that would permanently change the art of literary fiction. The Portrait of a Lady was first published in 1881, with a second revised version appearing in 1908. James’s heroine is the spirited Isabel Archer — a
When Ellen Fein and Sherrie Schneider read this review, they’ll exchange a pitying smile and quietly start waiting for my distress call. For woe betide any woman who thinks she can live without the Rules: they are hard and fast and apparently foolproof: ‘You can truly do the Rules on any guy, in any situation,
Reading this new edition of W.G. Sebald’s discursive meditation upon the blanket bombing of German civilians during the second world war took me back to Berlin in the early 1960s when German writers from the Gruppe 47 were in the ascendant, and no self-respecting avant-garde author wrote novels with stories or plots. They did not
There are already two excellent books about the Profumo Affair — An Affair of State (1987) by Phillip Knightley and Caroline Kennedy, and Bringing the House Down (2007) by David Profumo — as well as five not-so-excellent ones by poor old Christine Keeler. Now Richard Davenport-Hines has marked the scandal’s 50th anniversary with An English
The Costa Book Awards has made its own history tonight by selecting, according to its press release, an all women shortlist* for the first time. Here are the category winners, each of whom bags £5,000: 1). Mary and Bryan Talbot win the Costa Biography Award for Dotter of Her Father’s Eyes, a book that examines
The children who grew up when Christopher Martin-Jenkins began to commentate on cricket (both in print and on the air) have got old. CMJ’s 40-odd year career has been brought to a premature end by cancer; and the cricket writing world has paid tribute to its companion. The pieces by Mike Selvey, Jonathan Agnew and
2012 is done. Here is the final selection (published in the magazine last month) of the Spectator’s best books of the year. Happy 2013. Susan Hill Spitalfields Life by The Gentle Author (Saltyard Books, £20). The writer started a daily blog about his life in Spitalfields — people, jobs, buildings, street life, monuments. A whole
2012 is very nearly finished. Here is a selection (published in the magazine last month) of the Spectator’s best books of the year. Matthew Parris There’s been a fad for publishing ‘biographies’ of entities that are not human beings: everything from longitude to the mosquito, and the format can prove forced. But Robert Shepherd’s Westminster,
