The good, the bad and the ugly in books, exhibitions, cinema, TV, dance, music, podcasts and theatre.
There was no catch because no one wanted out. The late Joseph Heller has been in the news today. The auction of letters he wrote to an American academic in the ‘70s has revealed that he “enjoyed” the war, which may come as a surprise to those who thought Yossarian, the US Army Air Force
“We think we know what the British Empire did to the world. But what did it do to us?” asks Jeremy Paxman in Empire: What Ruling the World did to the British, the tie-in book to his forthcoming TV series. Paxman’s aim is to look at how the empire shaped Britain, tracing its influence in
David Wilson’s The Lost Photographs of Captain Scott opens with a jolting reminder that even on Antarctica, the past’s another country. Captain Scott’s crew on the Terra Nova expedition (1910-13) were susceptible to sailor’s hoary superstitions. They searched for the root of all bad luck on their voyage; the ‘Jonah’. The consensus settled on the
This is one hell of a statistic: In Britain, taxes on all types of alcohol contributed 36 percent of national revenue in 1898-99, but they were also 19 percent in France (1898), 18 percent in Germany (1897-98), and 28 percent in the United States (1897-98). That’s from a new book by James Simpson Creating Wine,
Who’s it to be? Becky Bloomwood, Sophie Kinsella’s blabbering shopaholic? Or Old Big ‘Ead in David Peace’s The Damned Utd? The list of 25 titles that are to be given away on World Book Night (23rd April 2012) was unveiled in Waterstone’s Piccadilly shop last night. They are 25 varied books, with a mixture of established
With one eye on as yet empty Christmas stockings and the other on cold winter’s nights, here is a short list of essential non-fiction titles recently released in paperback. 1) The Emperor of All Maladies by Siddhartha Mukherjee This “biography” of cancer by a New York oncologist whisks readers from the first documented appearance of the
I’m hoping that when Daniel Craig steps out as Mikael Blomkvist in The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo, he will do for journalists what he did for Speedos in Casino Royale: make them (almost) fashionable. Blomkvist, Steig Larrson’s crusading reporter, is already a poster boy for old school journalism and may inspire a new generation
It’s a shame The Sense of an Ending won the Booker. Not because the prize wasn’t deserved — based on that shortlist, I’m sure the judges made the right decision — but because I don’t think it shows its author in his best light. In time, probably around now, people will forget the hoo-ha over
It was a quiet weekend on the literary front. The Sundays bristled with reviews, most of them about Murakami’s 1Q84. The voluminous novel has already acquired the sobriquet ‘epic masterpiece’ and breathless weekend reviewers have conferred more epithets on it: read Anthony Cummins in the Telegraph, although he sounds a note of caution, urging the
Haruki Murakami’s latest tale of good and evil has a thrilling, broad sweep, but the delicacy of his early work is missing, says Philip Hensher The scale of the celebrity of the Japanese novelist Haruki Murakami is impossible to convey. From 1987, when his enchanted love story Norwegian Wood sold millions, he has been a
It has become a cliché that the great increase in material wealth over the centuries has not been accompanied by any corresponding moral advance. Human nature, it is said, remains the same — with the implication that much of it is pretty nasty. Here, however, comes a leading evolutionary biologist, Stephen Pinker, to claim that
Michael Lewis’s first book on the current financial crisis, The Big Short (2010), was both a bestseller and a hit with most reviewers — but not with me. I felt Lewis had strained but failed to recapture the voice of Liar’s Poker (1989), the wonderfully entertaining account of his own career as a Salomon Brothers
‘For you Russia is closed’. One can imagine the satisfaction with which a border control official pronounced these words to the Guardian correspondent, Luke Harding, who had just flown back to Moscow after a visit to London last February. Harding, who had been covering Russia for nearly four years, became the first foreign journalist to
There was a time when every alpha-male tyro author had to read Hemingway. He was an amalgam of Stephen Crane, François Mauriac and Errol Flynn, roistering war reporter, existential swaggerer and sexual aggressor, and a superb prose stylist to boot. When in 1978 Bruce Chatwin identified the literary masters whom an aspirant novelist should emulate,
In the second world war, Joseph Heller was an American airman based in Corsica. He flew 60 missions over Italy and the south of France. He was the guy who pressed the button to release the bombs. Sometimes, he was terrified; at one point, he had a kind of existential crisis at the thought that
When Scotland’s rugby team landed in Invercargill for the World Cup, they were greeted by a piper in full Highland fig and a cheering crowd of more than 500 New Zealanders, bedecked in tartan and waving St Andrew flags. The significance of both welcome and dress went beyond sport or nationality. Two important currents of
Has the Mitford saga delighted us long enough? Some 17 non-fiction books about the family, mostly by its own members, have now been published; the first, in 1960, was Jessica Mitford’s memoir Hons and Rebels, and the latest is this biography. In between there have been four fat books of letters, five individual biographies (the
You want the two-word review of this new book about the City? ‘London porn.’ For those of you with more time, The City of London by Nicholas Kenyon (Thames & Hudson, £40) is as comprehensive a photographic record of London’s financial centre as you could wish for. If a building is impressive or important, or
The start of What Am I Still Doing Here? finds Roger Lewis in a state of deep gloom. But then so does the middle of the book — and indeed the end. This, of course, is just as it should be. The last thing one wants from a professional curmudgeon is brimming red-cheeked jollity, and
It’s hard to stop quoting Flann O’Brien, once you start. The Irish man of letters was born a hundred years ago and to celebrate the centenary there are at least three conferences in his honour, the latest of which takes place this weekend at the Irish Cultural Centre in Hammersmith, with another in the Irish
Here is A.D. Miller, whose book Snowdrops was shortlisted for this year’s Booker prize, talking about the art of writing fiction. Snowdrops, if you haven’t read it, is very definitely worth reading and not just because it’s “readable”. Charlotte Hobson wrote in her Spectator review that Miller’s book was “a heady noseful of Moscow, an intoxicating
A certain literary prize announced earlier this week received a lot of flak because the shortlist was deemed too readable. I want to know what books they were reading. The Barnes was as cold as a washed up kipper; the Kelman featured a pigeon as a narrator and most of the praise heaped on deWitt
The news from Libya is bound to spark a flood of literature about Gaddafi, Libya and the Arab Spring in general. Here is a selection of published books and forthcoming releases on the subject: Gaddafi’s most famous work is The Green Book, which details his political philosophy. Its subjects range from breastfeeding to racial supremacy, and
Michael Morpurgo became a story-teller when teaching London primary school children in his late twenties. “There were 35 children in the class. I found that using a book [to teach] came between them and me.” He felt he needed to speak to them directly, with tales that grew from the “common ground” of experience between
Fleet Street’s reaction to Julian Barnes’ Booker win appears to be one of relief and no small amount of applause: The Times’ literary editor Erica Wagner and the Guardian’s Mark Brown both sound an enormous “phew” in their columns this morning. The dissent about the Booker Prize in general and “readability” seem to have subsided for the moment as Barnes soaks up the
If you’ve always loved audio books but never stopped to wonder how they are made, then give yourself a slap and continue reading. Maggie Ollerenshaw described her world to a modest audience at the Guildford book festival, revealing the production process with some of the anecdotal colouring-in that makes listening to veterans talking about their
It wasn’t a turn up for the books in the end: Julian Barnes, the odds-on favourite, has won this year’s Booker prize for his novel, The Sense of an Ending. The award has been marred by controversy this time round, with a rival prize now expected to be established, one that recognises outstanding literary achievement.
Who’s Jeffrey Sachs? Leading American development economist and United Nations adviser, Sachs is broadly on the left of the political spectrum. His most famous book is The End of Poverty. What’s the book about? Another analysis of the current financial crisis, the book is a mixture of diagnosis and prescription, focusing on America. What are
When Gordon Brown became Prime Minister in 2007, the Labour party was split into three camps: those who genuinely adored Brown, those who believed he could change (elected as New Gordon, govern as New Gordon?) and a deflated Blairite rump that had given up the ghost. It is not immediately clear which of these camps