The good, the bad and the ugly in books, exhibitions, cinema, TV, dance, music, podcasts and theatre.
The most influential authors, retailers, critics, agents, publishers, broadcasters and poets were all listed in The Guardian Book 100 this weekend. First prize went to the founder of Amazon, Jeff Bezos who – in addition to diversifying from books to groceries – is currently setting up Blue Origin, a company which offers space travel to the general
‘John Smith is dead.’ These four blunt syllables, as elemental and atmospheric as the first line of a classic novel, form the opening of Chris Mullin’s new collection of diaries. This is a fascinating read, crammed with gossip, jokes, insights and anecdotes, not all of them political. Mullin’s first disclosure is that the ‘decent interval’
In this compelling book, Matthew Hollis analyses how Edward Thomas, for years a frustrated literary critic and prose writer on rural themes, became all at once, at the age of 36, a poet of genius. It was his close friendship with the American poet Robert Frost which, in 1914, precipitated this long-delayed fulfilment. Married while
Carola Hicks was an acclaimed art historian, and, as she phrased it, a biographer of objects, exploring the ‘lives’ of art-historical subjects from the Bayeux tapestry to the stained-glass windows of King’s College Chapel, and now Jan van Eyck’s ‘Arnolfini Wedding Portrait’, deftly weaving together the history of the times in which the objects were
Almost two decades ago, as a junior political reporter on the Evening Standard, I heard the cabinet office minister William Waldegrave tell a parliamentary committee that in certain circumstances it was right for a prime minister to lie. The words made no impression on the committee itself, but I nevertheless dashed up to my office
To be the daughter of an enormously powerful man must always be an enthralling if sometimes daunting experience. To be close to that father when, almost single-handed, he is shaping the destinies of the nation, if not the world, is to be uniquely privileged. Mary Soames took no part in the decision-making that was happening
In numerical terms, British police procedurals about maverick inspectors in big cities are probably at an all-time high. Few of their authors, however, have Mark Billingham’s talent for reinvigorating a flagging formula. Good As Dead (Little, Brown, £18.99) is the tenth of his London-based Tom Thorne thrillers. On her way to work, Detective Sergeant Helen
Joan Collins first came to public notice in the 1950s, as a Rank starlet and sex kitten. In the 1970s she starred in film adaptations of her younger sister Jackie’s novels The Stud and The Bitch, and in the 1980s as Alexis Carrington in the American soap opera Dynasty. More recently she has reinvented herself,
David Jones has written the Bookends column in this week’s issue of the Spectator. Here it is for readers of this blog: Joan Collins first came to public notice in the 1950s, as a Rank starlet and sex kitten. In the 1970s she starred in film adaptations of her younger sister Jackie’s novels The Stud
That Used to Be Us: What Went Wrong with America? And How it Can Come Back Who’s it by? Thomas L Friedman (Pulitzer-winning New York Times columnist and author of The World is Flat) and Michael Mandelbaum (Professor of American Foreign Policy at John Hopkins University). What’s it about? How America lost its superpower status
Nothing in Stephen Kelman’s Booker-shortlisted novel suggests to me that he is a cynical man (quite the opposite in fact), so it seems churlish to marvel at the perfect timing of this summer’s riots for him and his book. For while Sky News has barely finished rolling the breaking story that we are an island
At face value, Asti Hustvedt’s Medical Muses is rather a niche tome, a faultlessly researched history of three female hysterics living in eighteenth-century Paris. However, it actually provides a broad and fascinating insight into the interwoven development of the arts and sciences during La Belle Époque – an age of rapid technological, medical and artistic
The BBC’s World at One recently asked five leading figures in the literary world for their thoughts on the ‘future of the book’. Here is what they had to say: 1.) Notorious literary agent, Andrew Wylie – aka ‘the Jackal’ – worried that the industry is at a crisis point. He argued the book industry is in
6,000 names on the petition and five tweets a week: the Society of Authors has launched its attack on Radio 4. BBC Controller Gwyneth Williams’ decision in June to reduce the BBC short story slots from three to one drove a cohort of objectors, including Ali Smith, Joanne Harris, Neil Gaiman and the SoA, to
As a new series of Desert Island Discs gets underway, we investigate the least talked about but most fascinating aspect of the show: the castaway’s book choice… This March, in the most momentous archival unveiling since Glasnost, the entire back catalogue of the world’s longest-running factual radio programme, BBC Radio 4’s Desert Island Discs, went
Edna O’Brien (pictured here on the right with Margaret Drabble in 1972), the grand dame of Irish literature, has just won the The Frank O’Connor prize for her latest collection of short stories Saints and Sinners. Established in 2005, the €35,000 prize is run by the Munster Literature Centre as part of the Cork International Short
One of the literary excitements of this week, The Fear Index by Robert Harris, showed that the journalist and novelist continues to mine both the ancient and modern world for inspiration. His latest thriller revolves around a mad scientist who’s created a beast he can’t control. So far, so Shelley, but this monster is unmistakably
Shakespeare and Milton: unsurpassable in the English canon. Milton’s mature poetry stands for perfection, Shakespeare’s for a wholeness of vision verging on the truly religious. Their examples cannot be rivalled, only followed. Dickens chose to follow Shakespeare. And now D. J. Taylor trails Dickens. Derby Day is a story about—wait for it—the Derby. A spectacular
There’s a passage in Willy Russell’s wonderful novel, The Wrong Boy, which could almost be funny — except, wisely, Russell doesn’t play it for laughs. The book chronicles a childhood blighted by adult misunderstanding, and describes an instance of it in which zealous ‘educationalists’ observe that the Boy’s artwork is harshly, relentlessly black: echo and
Edward Burne-Jones was the archetypal literary-minded Victorian. Born in 1833, the son of a Birmingham picture-framer and gilder, he developed a taste for the Romantic poets while at school. Then, whilst an undergraduate at Oxford, he found a lifelong friend in William Morris. The university was supposed to be their route towards holy orders, but
In an appendix to this powerfully poetic and beautifully produced little book, A.S. Byatt explains that when Canongate invited her to write a myth, she knew immediately which one to choose: the myth of the Icelandic sagas and Wagner’s operas — ‘Ragnarök: the myth to end all myths, the myth in which the gods themselves
It is several years since Anna Funder published Stasiland, her acclaimed book about East Germany. Her new book is a novel concerning a group of German political activists surrounding the writer Ernst Toller, who is now almost forgotten but once was well known and was president of the short-lived Bavarian Republic in 1919 for about
An escaped convict who took part in a slave-ship mutiny and a Liverpudlian banker hungry for land in a north-eastern pit village are the main characters of this novel set in 1767, which is a sequel to Sacred Hunger, Barry Unsworth’s excellent, Booker-sharing yarn about the slave trade (it and The English Patient won in
Kwasi Kwarteng is a young Tory MP and it is right and proper that he should begin his analysis of the British Empire with a quotation from Disraeli. The fact that he is of Ghanaian origin shows merely that we live in an unpredictable world: In the European nations there is confidence in this country
One of the great books to have come out of the British-West Indian encounter is Journey to an Illusion by the Jamaican journalist (and former London bus conductor) Donald Hinds. Published in 1966, the book is made up of a series of interviews with Jamaicans and other West Indians resident in Britain. Throughout, Hinds is
Accounts of the secret world usually fall into one of two camps, the authoritative or the popular. The authoritative — such as Christopher Andrew’s history of MI5 and Keith Jeffery’s of MI6 — are officially sanctioned, based on the file record and reliable. They are incomplete because, inevitably, there are episodes the authors are not
It’s debatable whether politicians of the Left or the Right are better at handling the public finances. But we do seem to learn more about economics under a Labour government. Alistair Darling’s memoir chronicles his turbulent years at the Treasury as he watched the world slithering into a financial volcano. Though the material is extremely
This is not a book likely to figure in the lists of the reading circles of Home Counties England. There is for a start the little problem of a title, which on the spine is How to Disappear but then itself does, for the centre of its frontispiece is A Memoir for Misfits. A dedication
One day in the late 17th century, goes the legend, a French monk named Pierre called out to his colleagues: ‘Brothers, I am drinking stars!’ The French for ‘monk’ is Dom. Pierre’s surname was Perignon. He had invented champagne, and the world had changed forever. Which explains the appear-ance, over 300 years later, of Champagne: