The good, the bad and the ugly in books, exhibitions, cinema, TV, dance, music, podcasts and theatre.
I’ve realised what the perfect non-fiction book is. You’d think that as someone who writes non-fiction books for a living I’d be excited by this discovery, and would even now be scribbling feverishly away so as to hit the top of the bestseller lists before anyone else has the same idea. Trouble is, the perfect
In the US, Simon Mawer’s new novel The Girl Who Fell From The Sky is rather more optimistically entitled Trapeze. It opens as a girl with three aliases hurls herself through an aircraft hatch into occupied France. She’s an SOE spy, and the life she’s fallen into has all the surrealism of a circus. During
However often rehearsed, the facts remain eye-popping. Inequality has bolted out of control over the last three decades. Democracy has proved increasingly powerless to check the unaccountable runaway oligarchy that fails even to pay its taxes. Ferdinand Mount gives a lucid account of political decay alongside all this looting, a disengaged electorate and a cult
It is disconcerting to discover that a novelist a generation older than oneself has been trying to write ‘a sort of Margaret Drabble effort’, even if the book ‘hadn’t turned out like that at all’. This is how Barbara Pym described her then unpublished campus novel An Academic Question in 1971 to her friend and
Turnaround Books, the publishers of Timothy Mo’s remarkable Pure, are revealed to operate from Unit 3, Olympia Trading Estate, Coburg Road, London N22. From this we may deduce that the publishing history of the three times Booker-shortlisted Anglo-Chinese novelist continues on its maverick way. Imagine if Mo had approached a conventional publisher with a proposition:
At the end of Dreaming in French, in ‘A Note on Sources’, Alice Kaplan terms her narrative ‘this pièce montée’, which is the only time she neglects to supply an English translation. From a scholar of her eminence — she is a historian and critic of French modernity, a professor at Yale, and the acclaimed
Even nowadays, a 50-year career in pop music is a rare and wondrous thing, and for a woman triply so. And yet Carole King’s golden jubilee passed a couple of years ago without a murmur, let alone a box set. You get the impression from A Natural Woman (Virago, £20) that that’s the way she
Mark Haddon is in what must sometimes seem like the unenviable position of having written a first (adult) novel which was, and continues to be, a smash hit. Drawing in part on his own experiences of working with the autistic, The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night Time has become one of those
Martin Palmer is without doubt one of our leading authorities on the subject of Nature and sacred writing today — among his previous publications being Sacred Gardens and The Sacred History of Britain. One of the primary aims of his latest book is to teach us how to ‘read’ our surroundings; for, he believes, like
Jeremy Clarke, our Low Life correspondent, has sobered up to answer our impertinent questions this week. His latest book, One Middle Aged Man in Search of The Point, is available in hardback. 1) What are you reading at the moment? Classic Crews: A Harry Crews Reader 2) As a child, what did you read under
Some war veterans slip back into civilian life with reasonable ease, stiff of limb, stiff of upper lip. If at first it’s a case of concealment and self-restraint, there’s at least some chance that play-acting can infiltrate reality. The protagonist of Toni Morrison’s new novel, Home, is called Frank Money. He has just returned to
A major business deal took place in the United States yesterday that could revolutionise the books market. Microsoft has invested $300 million (£185m) in Barnes and Noble’s Nook eBook reader. The two companies have created a subsidiary, named Newco for the time being. Microsoft controls 17.6 per cent of the equity. The standard analysis is
‘A Short Song of Congratulation’ Long-expected one and twenty Ling’ring year, at last is flown, Pomp and Pleasure, Pride and Plenty Great Sir John, are all your own. Loosen’d from the Minor’s tether, Free to mortgage or to sell, Wild as wind, and light as feather Bid the slaves of thrift farewel. Call the Bettys,
Don’t be fooled by the incessant rain and your resurgent rheumatism, the summer literary festival season is upon us. The line-up at the Hay Festival is old news; the hotels of Edinburgh are preparing; and anticipation fills tea rooms from Warwick to St. Ives. The festival market is flooded, but there is one new festival
When Hannah Rothschild first met her great-aunt Nica it was 1984. Hannah was 22, and Nica, then 70, had asked her to come sometime after midnight to a basement jazz club in an area of pre-Giuliani downtown Manhattan ‘known for its crack dens and muggings’. She was able to find the venue, as promised, by
On my desk is the vertebra of a narwhal. It was given to me by a man in Canada after a convivial dinner. Narwhals are Arctic whales with long spiky tusks on their noses. This vertebra is about three inches across, embedded in bone expanding into waisted wings, like a propeller. If I were the
It’s odd, but we mostly go about as if death were optional, something we could get out of, like games at school. Philip Gould, in When I Die, admits that he never gave it much thought. Then he got oesophageal cancer. He had a horrible operation, got a bit better. Then the cancer came back.
Why would anyone want to buy this dreadful book? The frightful Simon Cowell appears to have co-operated with the author, and it is littered with repellent photographs — chiefly of a smirking Simon surrounded by beautiful ‘ex-girlfriends’. (Cowell is keen to inform us that he has had lots of girlfriends. He is not gay. Not.
The London Underground is methadone for people with nerd habits. Were it not for its twisty, multi-coloured map, its place in the capital’s history, its tendency to throw up facts such as ‘the QE2 would fit inside North Greenwich station’, we’d be on the hard stuff. The smack of nerd-dom. We’d be on the platform
In the early 1990s, when Boris Johnson was making his name as the Daily Telegraph’s Brussels correspondent, Sonia Purnell was his deputy, and last year she published a biography of him — the second, and surely not the last — entitled Just Boris: A Tale of Blond Ambition. Now follows Pedal Power: How Boris Failed
Nigeria is called ‘God’s own country’, and well it might be because no one else is on its side. Eliza Griswold, who has spent several years exploring religious divisions in the country’s interior, tells me that billions of oil dollars are embezzled each year, leaving the vast majority of the population to fend for themselves
‘Oh yes, Dracula,’ said a colleague. ‘Two splendid bits at either end, and 200 boring pages in the middle.’ It was exaggeration, but only slight. Dracula sags in the middle, but that is a reflection of the knockout opening and conclusion. Film adaptations have the luxury of cutting out the fat to concentrate on Jonathan
Classics were predicted to be one of the first things to fall at the feet of eBooks. Traditional booksellers — like me — have been in a perpetual cold sweat, wondering how to make up the lost revenue for around a third of our sales. Classics publishers must have been positively feverish with worry. The
Penguin has launched a new design for the Penguin English Library. The press blurb says, ‘Each cover is a crafted gem, they’ll look and feel lovely in your hands.’ And they do. Steal into a bookshop in the next couple of days and hold one. The covers are individual and relevant to the book —
Editor-in-chief of The Lady, judge of the inaugural Hatchet Job of the Year Award, author of Shire Hell and a keen skier, Rachel Johnson is this week’s Shelf Lifer. She has eminently sensible suggestions for the English curriculum, reveals the guilty literary secrets of the Johnson dynasty and tells us about the downside of having
It is fitting that Bram Stoker is more celebrated in death than life. This week marks the centenary of his death. Numerous events have been held in his honour. It’s a typical jamboree. Horror writer Stewart King has explained how Stoker’s legacy is being sustained by a new wave of vampire fiction, which, for those
An elderly woman receives a phone call from a once eminent publishing house. The nice man on the phone tells her that his company is going to reprint her deceased father’s books. Wonderful news, she says — delighted that her old man is not quite dead and buried yet. Hope for us, she thinks. The
When an unpublished diary or book of letters from a celebrated writer comes to the attention of the reading public nowadays, there is often a sense that a game is being played between two parties. Writers — being the megalomaniacs they invariably are — dream of grandiosity and world domination, therefore these documents are predominately
St. George’s Day, 23rd April, is Shakespeare’s birthday. You may get a present, if you are in the right place at the right time. World Book Night, the event where enthusiasts give a book to passers-by, will take place this evening. The organisers hope that 2.5 million copies of 25 books will be given away by 78,000 volunteers in