The good, the bad and the ugly in books, exhibitions, cinema, TV, dance, music, podcasts and theatre.
A Fine Line Between Stupid and Clever – credited to the late Rob Reiner, with Christopher Guest, Michael McKean and Harry Shearer, as well as to their Tap alter-egos Marty Dibergi, Nigel Tufnel, David St Hubbins and Derek Smalls – serves as a fitting companion to This is Spinal Tap (1984), the mother of all
For a time, Robert Colquhoun and Robert MacBryde were at the heart of the in-crowd. Stories of Francis Bacon, Lucian Freud and their wartime circle often make reference to the two young painters from Scotland. Feted in the 1940s for their modernist styles – Colquhoun typically portraying figures, MacBryde preferring still life scenes – they
Olivia Laing has had a productive couple of years. The Silver Book arrives hot on the heels of The Garden Against Time, a memoir-cum-environmentalist treatise published in 2024. It is a novel of stunning imaginative power that was apparently written in just three months. Set in 1975, during the making of two great works of
My passion for history was ignited by political biography when I was a teenager. You read the life story of a person who – if the writer is any good – captures your attention like the protagonist of a novel; and along the way, almost by chance, you learn about the great events in which
In 1920, the young Finnish architect Alvar Alto flew over Helsinki for the first time. He was aghast. ‘An aviator can see where the monkeys have been and destroyed so very much,’ he recalled. Alto’s aerial view reflected a story of fragmentation and occupation spanning some five centuries, now surveyed by the historian Henrik Meinander.
General Franco died on 20 November 1975, and with the 50th anniversary just passed, this biography – the first in years – of the man who ruled Spain with an iron fist for nearly four decades is timely, incisive and authoritative. Written by a former Madrid correspondent of the Economist, it’s also an up to
In the introduction to Book of Lives, Margaret Atwood recalls her initial response to the suggestion that she write a memoir: ‘Who wants to read about someone sitting at a desk messing up blank sheets of paper?’ Her autobiography was hardly the stuff of high adventure: ‘I wrote a book, I wrote a second book,
If Carlo Scarpa were as well known as Le Corbusier, modernism might not be so reviled. This architetto poeta grew up in Vicenza, whose 21 buildings by Palladio surely had a formative influence on his fast- evolving artistic intelligence. Scarpa studied building design at university, but, instinctively disobedient, never bothered with a licence to practise
‘On BBC 2 last Monday,’ noted the Sunday Telegraph’s TV critic Trevor Grove in February 1979, ‘the return of Fawlty Towers was immediately followed by a programme about faulty towers.’ He went on: This was odd, but on close examination turned out to be without significance. After all, what connection could there possibly be between
London has become the best place in the world to eat out. Of course, there are a thousand other cities with marvellous food, but for organic vitality, ethnic variety and nose-to-tail creativity, London is unmatched. New York and Paris are parochial by comparison. Two new books locate the source of this revolution of taste and
A century ago, the Orkney poet George Mackay Brown was settling into his first term at Stromness Academy. His schooldays were to prove a dismal grind, but English lessons brought moments of magic. He was especially intrigued by poems – ballads, mostly – signed simply ‘Anon’. The name of the poet was lost – and
Harper Lee’s writing career was brief, but her single novel became one of the most famous in American history. To Kill a Mockingbird (1960) won the Pulitzer Prize, sold tens of millions of copies and remains a fixture of classrooms and popular memory. She published almost nothing else until Go Set a Watchman – an
It’s tricky for writers to gather up pieces of old work and collect them in significant literary form. It’s risky for former politicians to publish outdated commentaries, with no agenda other than to show politics on the ground and as a record of their efforts and prejudices. Most hazardous of all is titling a book
Robert Langdon is a symbologist, and that is the meta joke – the only joke – of Dan Brown’s series of blockbusters, of which this is the sixth. Langdon, an Everyman – Frodo Baggins but taller, and with a professorship at Harvard – is a monied, moderate intellectual who likes swimming. And he is very
Christmas is prime time for cosy crime and the excellent thriller writer Nicola Upson offers a short, pleasing contribution with The Christmas Clue (Faber, £10). As in her longer novels, where she uses the real-life figure of Josephine Tey as her heroine, here she fronts a couple – Anthony and Elva Pratt – who also
It comes as a surprise for anyone assuming that ghosthunters are easily fooled scaredy cats to learn that there was once a Society for Psychical Research based at Cambridge University. Undergraduate members would gather on Sunday evenings to hear the latest reports of investigations into supernatural phenomena. It sounds quaint; but to judge from Ben
I had searched for it for the better part of 20 years. An enormous trove of lost maps, the 800 or so sheets of an immense and madcap Victorian project known as the International Map of the World at the Scale of One to a Million. It had taken its makers 70 years of costly
How many can you spot? For answers, click here
After Handel introduced Italian opera to London, Georgians and Victorians went to performances to wear their diamonds and meet friends. As Victoria’s reign progressed, opera percolated down, via brass bands, organ grinders, music hall warblers and whistling delivery boys. In 1869, the Leeds impresario Carl Rosa set up ‘a sort of operatic Woolworths’, a touring
Gilbert White’s Natural History of Selborne is a true classic in that it has never been out of print since its first publication in 1789. It was based on the daily journals White kept for years in which he noted first the weather (‘Rain. Rain. Rain’) and wind direction, then the progress of his garden
I once interviewed the late Enoch Powell for this magazine (the article never appeared, for reasons I forget). One thing he said on that occasion stuck with me. He remarked that loyalty to one’s country should be unconditional. I asked him what he thought people should do if their country were taken over by a
This book collects 58 pieces of fiction that Anton Chekhov published between the ages of 20 and 22. Many appear in English for the first time. In her introduction, Rosamund Bartlett refers to the material with disarming candour as a ‘wholly unremarkable debut’. Is there ever any point in publishing juvenilia? In his first years
It is hard to write the history of a subculture without upsetting people. Events were either significant or inconsequential depending on who was there, which leads to absurdities. When Jon Savage wrote England’s Dreaming, his history of punk, Jenny Turner berated him in the London Review of Books for being ‘a bit of a Sex
Do you have one of those friends who is uncannily conscious of the most subtle signs of insincerity; who quietly witnesses selfish and narcissistic behaviour and drily expresses their observations with devastating wit in a few well-chosen words? Well, Harriet Lane is like that friend, and you don’t have to know her to enjoy her
Why another book about Maundy Gregory? The spiv who in the 1920s acted as middleman between David Lloyd George and potential peers, baronets and knights – the former desperate for money to fund his campaigns, the latter greedy for status, irrespective of any merit they might have – has been documented extensively. Gregory also features
In a German war cemetery to the north-east of the Belgian town of Diksmuide is the grave of a young soldier called Peter Kollwitz. He once lay among the 1,500 dead of the Roggevelde cemetery and it was there, in 1932 – the same year that Lutyens’s memorial to the dead of the Somme was
In 1755, Samuel Johnson (this was before his honorary doctorates) defined the herring as ‘a small sea-fish’, and that was it. By contrast, Graeme Rigby has spent 25 obsessive years documenting the cultural and economic importance of this creature. The resulting omnium-gatherum is like the bulging cod-end of a bumper trawl net, farctate with glistening
‘It is a truth universally acknowledged that any essay about Jane Austen… must be in want of a poorly rendered paraphrasing of her most famous opening lines,’ writes Ella Risbridger in this sharp, gleefully obsessive field guide to romantic fiction. For her, Austen is the genre’s ‘mother’, and she crisply notes that while George Eliot
On the evening of 6 May 1527, Henry VIII entertained an embassy from France at a lavish party in Greenwich. The festivities took place in a banqueting house and a theatre, both built for the occasion. At the feast’s end, Henry led his guests out through a great archway. After a moment, he invited the