The good, the bad and the ugly in books, exhibitions, cinema, TV, dance, music, podcasts and theatre.
In which Robert Macfarlane goes for a walk, again. But, as admirers of his previous works will know, Robert Macfarlane never just goes for a walk. This book’s four parts, each divided into three or four sub-sections, tell the stories of 16 expeditions: their declared intention to investigate ‘walking as a reconnoitre inwards’. His theme
One of the unanticipated benefits of British rule in India is the body of distinguished writing in the English language coming from the Indian diaspora — Naipaul, Seth, Rushdie, Mistry, Mishra and Pico Iyer. Iyer, however, is atypical in that he was born in Oxford, lived in California, and was educated at Eton and Oxford.
It is winter 1936. Every weekday morning a group of young people travel by train from Ferrara, their home city, to Bologna where they are studying at the university. Theirs is a six-carriage stopping train, often infuriatingly late because of delays on the line, thus contradicting the famous Fascist boast about improvement of Italian railways.
What to make of Banksy? Artist or vandal? Tate Modern holds no Banksys and, other than a redundant phone box that he folded in half and pretended to have reconfigured with a pickaxe, Banksy has never destroyed anything. So I ask my 15-year-old son what he knows of him: ‘He’s the guy who did the
William Brodrick’s crime novels have the great (and unusual) merit of being unlike anyone else’s, not least because his series hero, Brother Anselm, is a Gray’s Inn barrister turned Suffolk monk. The plot of The Day of the Lie (Little, Brown, £12.99), Anselm’s fourth case, is triggered by the discovery of files relating to Poland’s
On 26 February 1969, Roger Mortimer wrote to his son, Charlie: ‘Your mother has had flu. Her little plan to give up spirits for Lent lasted three and a half days. Pongo has chewed up a rug and had very bad diarrhoea in the kitchen. Six Indians were killed in a car crash in Newbury.’
No sensible writer wastes good material. A couple of years ago Tim Parks published a memoir, Teach Us to Sit Still, a tale of chronic, debilitating back pain that appeared to have no physical cause. He tried everything, short of major surgery, and even toyed with that for a while. Finally, in desperation, this lifelong
Not bad, this life. Now 95, Bernard Lewis, is recognised everywhere as a leading historian of the Middle East.He is the author of 32 books, translated into 29 languages, able in 15 languages, consulted by popes, kings, presidents and sheiks, on good or argumentative terms with many Western and Middle Eastern scholars and politicians, husband
Confronted by the dead Athenian heroes of the Peloponnesian War, Pericles gave voice in his funeral oration to an idea that explains better than any other why we are so obsessed by our military past. The freedom intrinsic to democracy, he said, made the unconstrained decision of its citizens to risk their lives in war
For Watergate junkies, another raking of the old coals is irresistible. For those underage younger persons who never understood what all the fuss was about, here is the chance to get with it. Just to remind: in June 1972, a bunch of nasties, some of whose day job was with the CIA but currently working
Carla McKay’s The Folly of French Kissing (Gibson Square, £7.99) is a very funny, cynical tale about British expatriates in the Languedoc. The blurb says ‘Toujours Provence meets Miss Marple’, though the heroine, Judith Hay, is less maidenly than the nosy-parker of St Mary Mead. A middle-aged schoolmistress, she flees to the Languedoc because it
Before we begin, Paul Durcan produces a piece of paper. Just ten minutes previously, he felt a sudden urge, he says, to remember the last verse from W.H Auden’s ‘Fall of Rome’. He raises the note, which he’s scribbled on with black biro, projecting each word with a careful steady cadence: ‘All together elsewhere, vast/
The Orwell Prize was awarded this week, which gives cause to consider Orwell himself. Biographer D.J. Taylor tries to delineate the myths that have arisen around Orwell in the film above, but can provide only an impression. Lack of evidence is, of course, a major problem. Orwell’s archive, though extensive, seems incomplete, and no recording
‘Jordan’s fourth biography, that’s vanity. Only writers are subjected to this kind of inquisition about how their work reaches the viewer,’ quipped a panelist at a recent Birkbeck University event on self-publishing. Someone had mentioned the pejorative, ‘vanity press’ and the room of writers stirred. All were seated in neat rows in a wood paneled
I happened to be with some family friends the other day. The daughter, just out of school, is soon to go travelling to various far-flung destinations and to this end she was busy assembling her backpack — a stage I remember all too well from my own first big trip. Trying to fit everything you
The journalist and author Mary Killen is in the limelight this week. In addition to writing the Dear Mary column in the Spectator every week, she has written a self-help book about the loving Queen. How the Queen Can Make You Happy will be published on 1 June. 1) As a child, what did you
Allan Bloom’s famous book, The Closing of the American Mind, opens with the following sentence: ‘There is one thing a professor can be absolutely certain of: almost every student entering the university believes, or says he believes, that truth is relative.’ In the twenty-five years that have passed since the book’s publication, that belief has
Britain can look back with pride and nostalgia to the great Olympic Games of the past. London in 1908, and the so-called ‘austerity Games’ of 1948, were great triumphs. Against the odds of time and money, these were Games to savour — etched in the memory with flickering black-and-white images of hope. This is the
Well, that was a turn up for the books. The expectation was that Waterstones would join forces with Barnes and Noble to compete in the digital market; it was almost a certainty. But, those predictions were dashed yesterday when Waterstones announced that it is going to get into bed with the digital devil itself: Amazon.
Sun Tzu is responsible for the age-old cliché about knowing your enemy. I wonder, then, what he might have made of Poetry of the Taliban, edited by Alex Strick Van Linschoten and Felix Kuehn. This is a new collection of verses translated from Pashtun and Urdu. The poems originally appeared on Mujahedeen websites, in newsheets
It’s a fact of life: death and destruction make for compulsive reading. The latest tome in the apocalypse genre is Callum Roberts’s, Ocean of Life: How our seas and changing. The book describes how man has ravaged and defiled the oceans, and explains how our rapacious stewardship is damaging us. Thanks to over-fishing, fossil fuels
It is easy, especially if one is not American, to feel ambivalent about the fictions of John Updike. The immaculate clarity of his prose style, the precision of his vocabulary, the tenderness underlying his Wasp comedies of manners, the puckish wit rising above a sorrowful temperament — none of these can be gainsaid. But the
The other evening my wife came home to find me watching re-runs of Steptoe and Son. The washing up had not been done, and everything was in a state of bedragglement (including Olga, the family dog). ‘How can you bear to watch that stuff? Steptoe’s got a face like a squeezed lemon. He’s perfectly horrible.
In 2009 a magazine survey found that many women in their twenties wanted to stay at home baking while their husbands went out to work: ‘I’d love to be a captive wife.’ Jessica Mann’s thoughtful and emphatic book is a riposte to this, an overview of the Fifties, which she calls a polemic and a
Sartre tried to prove that hell is other people by locking three strangers in a room for eternity and watching them torture each other. Similarly Will Cohu seems determined to show that hell is our own families. What is remarkable is that Cohu’s family members were not a collection of horrific monsters. On the contrary,
Christopher Isherwood kept diaries almost all his life. The first extant one dates from 1917, when he was 12, and like most schoolboys he used it more to measure than record his days: ‘Work in morning, walk in afternoon. In choir. More work. Nothing special.’ At Cambridge, however, inspired by the W.N.P. Barbellion’s The Journal
I was racking my brains, trying to understand money, trying to grasp exactly what it is, when I came across these two books. One is written by Aaron Brown, who is the risk manager of a large Wall Street hedgefund. The other is by David Graeber, the anarchist who has been called the leader —
In his introductory eulogy, Peter Parker calls In the Making: The Story of a Childhood (Penguin, £8.99) G. F. Green’s masterpiece, which, though not popular, attracted the admiration of E.M. Forster, Christopher Isherwood, Stephen Spender, J.R. Ackerley, John Betjeman, Philip Toynbee, C.P. Snow, Pamela Hansford Johnson, Frank Tuohy and Alan Sillitoe. According to Elizabeth Bowen,
‘I did not know about sympathy or sadness. They educated us from birth so that we were not capable of normal human emotions. Now that I am out, I am learning to be emotional. I feel like I am becoming human.’ You may have heard of Shin Dong-hyuk, the man who feels he is becoming