The good, the bad and the ugly in books, exhibitions, cinema, TV, dance, music, podcasts and theatre.
As a devotee of Fay Weldon I was amazed but nonetheless delighted by the change of her usual style. Set in 1899, her latest novel charts the lives and loves not of She Devils but Lord Dilburne’s household, both above and below stairs. The trademark Weldon wit is very much in evidence, only this time
Nicola Barker’s new novel is set in Luton. You could hardly find a place in Britain more emblematic of non-being. It has an airport; it used to make something or other, it is not in London, not in the Midlands; its architecture is frightful, its pretentious but tatty hotels are full of middle management businessmen,
Enoch Powell was defeated. He condemned Edward Heath for being the first prime minister in 300 years who entertained, let alone executed, the intention of depriving Parliament of its sole right to make the laws and impose the taxes of this country. But Heath was victorious: in 1972 he led the United Kingdom into the
In 1992 the Roman Catholic historian Eamon Duffy of Magdalene College, Cambridge published a large book called The Stripping of the Altars. Deploying a wealth of evidence, Duffy argued that the English men and women of the 16th century, especially in the provinces, did not really want to be ‘reformed’. They liked their old Catholic
One of the fun facts you occasionally hear people brandish about Raymond Chandler is that he was at Dulwich College with P. G. Wodehouse. It’s a slight fiction —Wodehouse was actually there seven years earlier, so we can’t picture Chandler giving him a bog-wash — but one that sticks because of the contrast: good egg
“My shame was my father wasn’t there,” says Nick Makoha, the London poet who represented Uganda at the recent Poetry Parnassus. This frank vulnerability is at the core of his first collection of poetry and his new theatre performance, ‘My Father and other Superheroes.’ Uganda is a source of tension for Makoha as both the
Thanks to Twitter for alerting me to this small act of rebellion: Taken outside the display windows at Smiths, @HypnoPeter As Fleur Macdonald wrote a couple of weeks ago, it is a mystery ‘why people might want to read it [Fifty Shades of Grey] rather than Réage’s The Story of O, Bataille’s The Eye or
When it comes to choosing good books to read on holiday, I am a great believer in selecting reading matter to match the destination. What better to read in Sicily than Giuseppe Tomasi de Lampedusa’s The Leopard, for instance? And how wonderful to read Laurie Lee’s beautiful As I Walked Out one Midsummer Morning while
Tamsin Greig is so busy at the moment that Debbie Aldridge, the character she plays in The Archers, has to spend most of her time in Hungary. Star of TV shows like Black Books, Green Wing and Episodes, Tamsin Greig is also an accomplished stage actress and is about to reprise her role in Jumpy
The sea has always been a powerful stimulant for the literary imagination, most famously, of course, for the likes of Messrs Hemingway and Melville. Both, indeed, are name-checked in Monique Roffey’s novel Archipelago, a new addition to the canon of ocean-inspired work, taking the trope of the waters and recasting it for the twenty-first century.
Richard Ford published his debut novel A Piece of My Heart in 1976. But it was The Sportswriter — which introduced the world to Frank Bascombe, and other marginalised characters trapped on the edge of the American Dream — that distinguished Ford as a serious literary force. The two books that followed, Independence Day, which
EL James has a lot to answer for. Yesterday brought news that a British publishing house, Total-E-Bound Publishing, will sex-up some of the classics in the hope of cashing in on the Fifty Shades of Grey phenomenon. In the forthcoming editions: Cathy and Heathcliffe will do a little bondage. Sherlock Holmes will bed down with
Any idea what an Ouroboros is? It’s not the name of the cloud hanging over London at the moment but, according to Will Wilkinson, in his review of Joseph Stiglitz’s The Price of Inequality on the Economist blog, a perfect symbol for the ‘progressive master narrative’ championed by a new technocratic coterie (which also counts
Metamorphosis, a temporary exhibition at the National Gallery, London, showcases a range of contemporary artistic responses to Renaissance painter Titian’s Diana and Actaeon and Diana and Callisto metamorphosis paintings, inspired by Ovid. Daisy Dunn looks at the new poetry inspired by the collaboration. When the hapless youth Actaeon peeled back a curtain dangling in
One of the great tragedies of political history is that the foresight, clarity and prescience of Enoch Powell are too often viewed though the murky prism of his notorious Rivers of Blood speech. His kindness, courtesy, love of his family, nation and the House of Commons can be so easily overlooked. And his dry and
This week’s Bookbencher is Stewart Jackson, the Conservative MP for Peterborough. He tells us which Chilean communist poet he read recently, which children’s classic has stayed with him since childhood and which three books he would save from a burning British library. 1) Which books are at your bedside table at the moment? All Hell
The husband-and-wife team that is Nicci French wrote 12 standalone psychological thrillers before switching to a series with last year’s Blue Monday. Their central character, Frieda Klein, a psychotherapist who moonlights as a quasi-detective, returns in Tuesday’s Gone, together with a number of other characters, including the melancholy DCI Malcolm Karlsson and his team. The
Whereas it is generally agreed that music has charms to soothe a savage breast, Congreve might have added that music also has the power to inflame bellicose fervour. Patrick Bade, who lectures at Christie’s Education and the London Jewish Cultural Centre, has written a commendably exhaustive history of how all sorts of music were used
Reg Harris by Robert Dineen (Ebury Press, £16.99) is about a man who was once Britain’s number one athlete: a professional cycle track sprinter who dominated the worldwide sport for 15 years. And what is cycle track sprinting? It is racing on a prepared track with one or more opponents. It is also a form
This is an entirely pointless but curiously engaging and even tantalising book. A youthful love affair in Montreal with a girl of Latvian descent plants the word ‘Courland’ in the author’s mind. He finds it mellifluous and somehow magical. The girl’s beauty and otherworldliness add a sense of mystery. An Alsatian cousin whose father, drafted
In real life, Stephen Spender was gentle and very tall, with wide-open pale blue eyes and a persistent air of slight hesitancy, as if he expected to be violently contradicted at any moment. He had one of the nicest voices I’ve ever heard, a voice which might have been made for poetry: impossible to imagine
Elizabeth Taylor, the best-kept secret in English fiction, wrote novels and short stories in the 1950s and 1960s and thus contributed to the nostalgia for that modest period so keenly felt today by those who lived through it. She is an honourable writer; no publicity, no interviews, no mission statements — merely an unwavering production
If a pollster were to ask us which country we thought had produced Europe’s greatest artists, which had built its most beautiful cities and which had provided the world with it finest singers and composers, most of us would put Italy in first or second place. And if we were asked which country had developed
In ‘He Fell Among Thieves’ Henry Newbolt describes a young man’s voyage to service in India: He watch’d the liner’s stem ploughing the foam. He felt her trembling speed and the thrash of her screw; He heard the passengers’ voices talking of home. He saw the flag she flew. And, with any luck, as ‘the
As 1930s Europe moved towards the catastrophe of the Second World War, much of the greater part of the continent — for Jews — was being turned into a giant concentration camp. Bernard Wasserstein’s On the Eve, The Jews of Europe Before the Second World War, captures the sorrows and glories of European Jewry in
One of the puns that circulated the cultured elite of Italy during the Renaissance compared the potency of an artist’s paintbrush, his pennello, with his penis, il pene. Raphael, who by all accounts liked his women, perhaps embodied that duality best of all. The artist’s fascination with female kind, Antonio Forcellino suggests in his brilliant
Unpredicted Consequences of the eBook Number 371: more people are reading as they walk along. I say ‘more’. Actually I’ve seen two, in as many weeks. So this is a prediction rather than an observation. But it’s one I’m pretty confident about. It struck me as I watched the people in question — both 20-something
This week’s Shelf Lifer is Richard Bean. The British playwright recently won joint best new play at the Evening Standard Theatre Awards last year for both One Man, Two Guvnors at the National and The Heretic at The Royal Court. He tells us what he used to read to spite his father, which character in
‘It is time for me to chuck in the sponge,’ said Peter O’Toole with characteristic singularity. The 79-year-old has announced his retirement from stage and screen, after a career that will span 56 years: with two films in post-production to be released next year. He goes, he said, ‘dry-eyed and profoundly grateful.’ He will devote