The good, the bad and the ugly in books, exhibitions, cinema, TV, dance, music, podcasts and theatre.
It must have been hard to settle on a title for this book; but then this is not the book that Richard Cork originally had in mind. In his introduction to The Healing Presence of Art he describes how he was approached to write on the contemporary role of art in hospitals, but in beginning
Ursula Graham Bower belonged to the last generation of those well-bred missy-sahibs who came out to India at the start of the cold-weather season in search of genteel adventure and a husband. But unbeknown both to herself and to those about her, the gawky, ‘well-covered’, Roedean-educated Miss Bower was of that stern stuff upon which
In 1598, a certain Margaret Browne of Houndsditch gave a graphic description to the court of her neighbour Clement Underhill engaged in an adulterous act with her lover, as observed through a hole in the party wall. Some people have always been very interested in what the neighbours are up to; all of us can
‘Poets don’t count well,’ says Ian Duhig in his contribution to Jubilee Lines — an assertion unexpectedly confirmed by Carol Ann Duffy’s preface. Admittedly, if the book did contain one poem for every year since 1952, there’d be an annoyingly untidy 61. Even so, Duffy’s declaration that the Queen was crowned ‘on 2 June 1953,
Hard on the heels of the ecstatically received London revival of Michael Frayn’s Noises Off (currently playing at the Novello Theatre) comes this hilarious novel. It’s not easy to pull off farce on the printed page when so many of the laughs of the genre generally depend upon physical comedy. In Noises Off, for example,
At first glance, Be the Worst You Can Be (Booth-Clibborn Editions, £9.99) by Charles Saatchi (pictured above with his wife, Nigella Lawson) seems a rather distinguished book, with its gilt pages bound in what feels like genuine Gnomitex, and this impression persists until one begins to read it. The title page explains the format —
In June 1991 while working as a reporter in Rome, Ed Vulliamy received a phone call from his editor at the Guardian asking him to the travel to the neighbouring Balkan states to check out something strange that was happening in the region. Vulliamy spent the next few years immersed in the Bosnian War, the
Bond is back. William Boyd has agreed to don the garb of Ian Fleming and write the latest tale in 007’s story. Boyd will not be aping Fleming’s style. The recent franchise revivals by Sebastian Faulks and Jeffrey Deaver are singularly different to each other and the original canon, while remaining faithful to the (anti-)hero
William Boyd is to write the next book in the James Bond franchise. The as yet untitled novel will be published next autumn. To mark the announcement, Daisy Dunn casts her mind back to a recent encounter with Boyd, where he spoke about the art of imagining and writing a thriller. It’s an ambitious eight
Chances are you’ve read, seen, or at least heard about The Hunger Games, the young-adult book and film sensation by Suzanne Collins. The crux of the story centres on The Hunger Games itself, an annual event in a dystopia in which twenty-four teenagers are forced to fight each other to the death – the winner
Nigel Havers is in the hotseat this week. He tells us about his intimacy with the Racing Post and his dreams of playing Casanova. You can catch him tonight in Corrie. 1) What are you reading at the moment? Fifty Shades of Grey – EL James 2) As a child, what did you read under the
The Arab Awakening, Tariq Ramadan’s contribution to the fast-growing body of literature on the Arab uprisings, begins with a request for the Arab world to ‘stop blaming the West for the colonialism and imperialism of the past…and jettison their historic posture as victims.’ This is an encouraging start, and hopes for a refreshing change of
We all know the names Auschwitz, Treblinka, Belsen, and Dachau. But what about Pechora, Vorkuta, Kolyma and Norilsk? Why are the camps to which Nazism’s victims were deported household words, while the Gulag archipelago – the far flung network of Soviet labour camps and penal colonies where the victims of Stalin and Communism suffered and
‘A Drizzling Easter Morning’ And he is risen? Well, be it so. . . .And still the pensive lands complain,And dead men wait as long ago,As if, much doubting, they would knowWhat they are ransomed from, beforeThey pass again their sheltering door. I stand amid them in the rain,While blusters vex the yew and vane;And
Posterity has always embellished Thomas Becket. After his death in Canterbury Cathedral in December 1170 the Church idealised and canonised him; his tomb inspired miracles and became the most famous shrine in Christendom; the local monks grew rich and fat on the tourist trade that would attract Chaucer’s pilgrims. The 18th century invented Henry II’s
The late squarson, Henry Thorold, was fond of pointing out that his Shell Guide to Lincolnshire was the bestselling of the series, not because of any intrinsic merit but because no guide to the county had been produced since the early 19th century. The same might turn out to be true of the latest volume
I used to read NME when I was young. Of course I did. I was obsessed by pop music in its every colour and my youth happened to coincide with the old inky’s heyday, or certainly one of them. In the late 1970s and early 1980s, the New Musical Express was one of four weekly
As you cross the Trent, you are very much aware that you have moved from the south to the north country. The next great divide is the Tyne, with the dramatic straggle of Newcastle stretching east and west. Beyond lies mile upon mile of Northumberland, all the way to the Scottish border, arable land for
In 150 BC, Cato the Elder arrived in the Senate House in Rome with an eye-catching basket of figs. This redoubtable statesman — often referred to as ‘censorius’, an epithet I have coveted since my childhood — was famous, apart from his censoriousness, for his conviction that the most important thing for Rome at any
Michael Spicer is too honourable to be a brilliant diarist. As he himself says, ‘I eschew tittle-tattle or small talk.’ These diaries cannot be read, as Chips Channon’s or Alan Clark’s can be, because they offer a joyful cascade of indiscretions. When Clark dies in September 1999, Spicer writes of his fellow Tory MP: ‘We
To the French, Albion’s expertise in perfidy will come as no surprise. But centuries of warfare have given them time to learn. With their experience only dating back to 1914, the Germans clearly found it difficult to grasp during the second world war that nowhere is the truth more expertly and instinctively spun than in
The question of what artists actually get up to in their studios has always intrigued the rest of us — that mysterious alchemical process of transforming base materials into gold, or at least into something marketable in the present volatile art world. Today’s studio might as likely be a laptop as laboratory, factory, hangar or
I wanted to find a YouTube clip of a classical British actor reading of Christ’s Passion from the KJV. There must be such a thing, but I can’t find it among the morass of American, Spanish and Pentecostal recordings. That seems to signify the growing irrelevance of Anglicanism and Englishness in this digital world. But,
In the fifth century BC Herodotus of Halicarnassus set out a history of hostilities between the Greeks and the Persians. For all his quirky non-sequiturs (Ethiopians’ skin is black, so must be their semen…) he fulfilled his not-so-modest objective to immortalize the deeds of Greeks and non-Greeks alike, in particular, the reason they warred against
Most of the time life is messy. But sometimes — just occasionally — it all comes together. I’d been reading Howards End. One of the classics I’d never got round to. Hadn’t even seen the film starring Emma Thompson, on account of it being a film starring Emma Thompson. By two-thirds of the way through
Marina Lewycka has broken her busy reading schedule to answer this week’s Shelf Life questions. She admits to a fascination with Biggles and Paddington Bear. Her latest book, Various Pets Alive and Dead, is published by Penguin. 1) What are you reading at the moment? Old Filth by Jane Gardam (almost finished — would have
The disappointment of second place at the Dionysiac festival might have been easier to bear had Sophocles known his Oedipus would eventually give credibility to a slew of neuroses and skew the literary canon forever. Even Hamlet, Othello, and Macbeth would be lined up for a session on the couch. But he could never have imagined,
Acclaimed author Evgeny Morozov is in London promoting the new edition of his book, The Net Delusion: How Not to Liberate the World. It argues that internet freedom is an illusion and that everyone’s freedom is at stake. It is timely, then, that his trip has coincided with the web surveillance row that has been shaking the coalition. Morozov
Simon Mawer’s The Glass Room gave Hilary Mantel and J.M. Coetzee some stern competition on the 2009 Booker shortlist. Mawer’s evocation of place stays long in the memory, but his crowning achievement was the description of the glass room itself — a minimalist house, built in the countryside above Prague, through which the savage history of 20th