The good, the bad and the ugly in books, exhibitions, cinema, TV, dance, music, podcasts and theatre.
When it comes to national stereotypes, the modern mind remains thoroughly medieval. The Death of King Arthur, which Simon Armitage has translated from Middle English, contains two insults that sound down the centuries. An enraged Frenchman says, ‘These Britons were always blusterers and braggarts. Lo, how he swaggers in his shining suit/ As if to
There has been much furore this afternoon about the bookshop formerly known as Waterstone’s. The company has decided to drop the apostrophe from its name to make it more ‘versatile and practical’ according to its managing director, James Daunt. The company is also restoring its old branding. The suspicion is that apostrophes are not digital friendly.
It was an abiding moment of the Arab Spring. As Colonel Gaddafi’s mauled corpse was paraded through the streets of Sirte, al-Jazeera cut to what it described as ‘wild street celebrations in Tripoli’. The screen showed a dusty compound, with three blokes lolling around a burned-out car, diffidently firing pistols into the air; a stray
Opening presents is tough: hiding greed, masking disappointment and feigning gratitude. You’re also probably being filmed for the family time capsule and you’ll be on YouTube within hours. That’s what happened to a poor American woman called Emily this Christmas. She’s starting 2012 as the latest social media sensation. The video has been removed, but
‘Open the book to page ninety-nine and the quality of the whole will be revealed to you.’ So said Ford Madox Ford. Whether that applies to any of his own books I don’t know (my shelves seem to be a Ford-free zone — anyone?). But at least one blog applies the test to various tomes,
A flurry of new reviews of Stephen Kelman’s Pigeon English has landed in recent days, coinciding with a new edition of the book. Kelman’s debut divides opinion. Lewis Jones thinks it ‘miraculous’. Catherine Nixey thinks (£) that it’s ‘exuberant’ but ‘miss-steps’ occasionally. And I found that a pigeon is a less than engaging narrator, even if
I have a review of Pity the Billionaire by Thomas Frank, one of the few left-wing writers I believe conservatives can read with pleasure. He is old fashioned, so old-fashioned indeed that most American leftists would not call him left-wing. He has no time for the culture wars, which still stir the passions of so many on
This week’s Shelf Lifer is the indefatigable Joan Collins. She tells us which literary character she’d pick to share a bed with and exactly how many self-help books she’s written. What are you reading at the moment? Frank Sinatra: The Boudoir Singer by Danforth Prince and Darwin Porter As a child, what did you read
Christopher Reid’s A Scattering — a collection of poems written in honour of his dead wife, the actress Lucinda Gane — won the 2009 Costa Award. Reid will be reading selected poems from that collection at the South Bank Centre later this month, as part of the forthcoming exhibition examining attitudes to death and grief.
You may remember that 2012 will see the launch of a new literary award. On Tuesday 7th February, the Coach and Horses in Soho will host our friends The Omnivore’s Hatchet Job of the Year. The aim is to reinvigorate literary criticism by rewarding the ‘angriest, funniest, most trenchant’ book review of 2011. The aim is
Few non-fiction writers’ books fly off the shelves as fast as Tom Holland’s. He’s a renaissance man — an overused phrase, but merited in his case. He began professional life translating ancient classics for Radio 4 and is best known for his histories of the ancient world: Rubicon, Persian Fire and Millennium. This back catalogue
Morality plays began in the Middle Ages. They were intended to explain Christian precepts and encourage a mostly illiterate audience to lead a Godly life. Typically, they describe the progress of an Everyman who falls into temptation and then is redeemed. In modern times it’s our newspapers who stage our morality plays. The press coverage
When I consider how my light is spent Ere half my days in this dark world and wide, And that one talent which is death to hide, Lodged with me useless, though my soul more bent To serve therewith my Maker, and present My true account, least he returning chide, Doth God exact day-labour, light
Last Thursday saw a major publishing event in Britain: the release of The Art of Fielding, the debut novel by American Chad Harbach. The book has been received with rapture in the States: the phrase ‘Great American Novel’ is being whispered and Harbach is routinely compared to Jonathan Franzen, the literati’s present infatuation. The comparison has migrated
Let me nail my colours clearly to the mast: I would prefer to eat my own spleen, or listen to a Gordon Brown speech, than read the memoirs of a barrister/politician. The remaindered lists are groaning under these unsellable, unreadable, dusty monuments to over-inflated egos. They should be pulped and moulded into bed pans. However,
A new biography of ‘Papa’ has deeply impressed Sam Leith, although its thoroughness — like its subject — ‘teeters on nuts’ Hemingway’s Boat is just what it sounds like. It takes as its conceit — and it’s a good one — that writing about Hemingway’s boat Pilar (now up on blocks in Cuba) is a
One hundred and fifty years after Anglo-Saxon England was invaded by the Normans, Anglo-Norman England was invaded by the French. On 21 May 1216 King Philip Augustus’ eldest son, Louis the Lion, landed at Stonor on the Isle of Thanet, kissed a crucifix, planted it in the ground and began an 18-month war for the
It is probably hard to enjoy this new big novel from America without some understanding of the shortstop’s position on the baseball field. But that is easily remedied, thanks to YouTube, where searching for ‘shortstop, fielding’ arouses multiple videos that compete for attention, with stars of the game in their infield position between second and
Autobiography is a tricky genre to get right, which may be why so many well-known people keep having another go at it. By my reckoning Tales from an Actor’s Life (Robson Press, £14.99) is Steven Berkoff’s third volume of autobiographical writings, although I might have missed one or two others along the way. This one,
Tessa Hadley’s previous book, The London Train, was one of the best novels of last year, though overlooked by prize committees. It concerned the gently disentangling lives of a pair of middle-class couples, and found its strengths in numinous revelations of the everyday. These short stories (all previously printed in magazines such as Granta and
We are all tourists now, and there is no escape. The first thing we see as we jet round the world is a filth of our own making. Resort hotel seepage. Takeaway detritus. Travel, in its pre-package sense, can no longer be said to exist. Airports even have ‘comfort zones’ with dental clinics, cinemas and
In 1969 an author in his early thirties published his first book. The Rise and Fall of the Man of Letters won the Duff Cooper prize, delighted the reading public, introduced them to the name of John Gross, and marked the beginning of what would be an illustrious and fascinating literary career. It ended with
If Time Magazine declared 2011 the year of the protester, then it seems quite fitting that, in a public vote, the Galaxy Book Awards crowned Caitlin Moran’s How to Be a Woman their book of the year. Touted as a modern day feminist call-to-arms, it is also the memoirs of a former music journalist turned Times
The English National Ballet’s performance of the Nutcracker was especially enchanting this year, but I left wondering what the story’s original author, E.T.A. Hoffmann would have made of it all. Hoffmann was long dead when his short story, Nussknacker und Mausekönig (The Nutcracker and the Mouse King) (1816) came to inspire the ballet a
Have you ever wondered how a Nobel Prize committee works? If so, then look no further than Swedish journalist Andreas Ekström, who has disinterred the 1961 literature panel’s minutes, the Guardian reports. There is little mystery: the judges convene to discuss nominees just as any other prize panel would, although with perhaps more self-regard than is customary.
The same question arises every year: what on earth to buy my uncle for Christmas? Crisis was averted in 2011 by the admirable Mark Forsyth, whose book The Etymologicon (Icon) is a jaunty stroll through idiomatic English, guaranteed to tickle the avuncular tendency. The Etymologicon was the sale of the season, so popular that bookshops
Amazon reported that Christmas Day was the ‘biggest ever day for Kindle downloads’. Evidently, this year, many people are going to begin to read eBooks. Shaking off the doom-and-gloom that a seller of printed books inevitably feels at such a prospect, I can’t help but notice the nice timing. All these people are trying out
New Year’s Eve, among its other distinctions, is the date when copyright terms tend to expire: with the beginning of each new year, at least in this country, the public domain gets a little larger. In 2012, this has had a couple of effects in the world of digital bookchat. One was a flurry of
This week, Paul Torday tells us about his fear of appearing on the stage, and reveals what he’d put on the GCSE English Literature syllabus. His new novel, The Legacy of Hartlepool Hall, is published today. 1) As a child what did you read under the covers? I used to read the Narnia books by