The good, the bad and the ugly in books, exhibitions, cinema, TV, dance, music, podcasts and theatre.
How curious that such an outsize man, in physique as well as personality, should be remembered today mainly for giving his name to a small fish. For the 19th century, Bismarck was no herring but a leviathan. Between 1862 and 1890 he created Germany, seeing off first the Austrian empire and then France. He dominated
Other People’s Money — and How the Bankers Use It by Louis D. Brandeis was a collection of articles about the predatory practices of big banks, published in book form in 1914. Nearly a century later, it remains in print. In 1991 Danny de Vito starred as ‘Larry the Liquidator’ in the film Other People’s
Jeremy Treglown finds something for everyone in Penguin’s new Mini Modern series It’s a cool silver-grey in colour, weighs two and a half ounces and fits flexibly into your pocket. It opens easily to reveal words imaginatively chosen and arranged in sequences so absorbing and surprising that they can make you miss your bus stop.
Mark Mason has written this week’s Bookend column in the magazine. Here it is for readers of this blog: London has been the subject of more anthologies than Samuel Pepys had hot chambermaids. This is fitting, as an anthology’s appeal — unexpected juxtaposition — matches that of the capital itself. But it does mean that
There are two prevailing views on Charlie Sheen: he has never fulfilled his potential, and he has never had any to fulfil. Either way, the meltdown of glorified soap star has received disproportionate attention – most of it a mix of faux-sympathy, awkward chuckling and superior disgust. However, Bret Easton Ellis has torn it all
David Philipps’ Lethal Warriors opens with the true story of the discovery of a dead body by the roadside in suburban, white-picket-fenced America. One naturally thinks, given the subject matter, that this dead man is a traumatised soldier who has taken his own life. It is not – it is the body of a traumatised
The bell seems to be tolling for the high street bookshop. The HMV Group, which owns Waterstone’s, has issued its third straight profit warning. Waterstone’s is supposedly on target for this financial year, but 11 of its branches were forced to close across the UK and Ireland in February alone and the company has conceded
Kazuo Ishiguro has written screenplays, but baulks at adapting his own novels. Faber and Faber are publishing Alex Garland’s script for the film, Never Let Me Go, which went on general release last week. Ishiguro has written the introduction to the edition of his friend’s script. It is a quietly evocative meditation on friendship, creativity
Much twittering and blogging occurred yesterday about a new publishing format called the “flipback” – a species of compact paperback. Word first reached me from Canada, and doubtless the conversation spread even further than that. The main talking point was the clever headline that a subeditor on the Guardian had given the story: Could this
The Telegraph has an exclusive extract from Henning Mankel‘s latest book, the last to feature Kurt Wallander. ‘When Wallander arrived at Ystad police station, there was a message waiting for him at the front desk, from Martinsson. Wallander swore under his breath. He was hung-over and felt awful. If Martinsson wanted to speak to him
The book world has been abuzz with the Arabic Booker. High-quality fiction is connecting with political conflict and the convulsions in the Middle East have revealed a literary culture often closed to the West. Boyd Tonkin describes how the ceremony itself was infected by the surrounding political drama: ‘Yet even here, under the obligatory tank-sized
At more than 700 pages including appendices, Guardian writer Dorian Lynskey’s 33 Revolutions Per Minute: A History of Protest Songs (Faber & Faber, £17.99) certainly can’t be accused of skimping on the details. Adherence to the pun of the title has resulted in a thorough if necessarily left-wing history of political dissent since the Thirties,
The collapse of the Soviet Union spawned an entire genre of literature: the Gulag memoir, produced by victims of the USSR’s concentration camps. A few masterpieces were published in the West, or in samizdat, before the 1980s, for example Evgenia Ginzburg’s renowned Into the Whirlwind and the works of Alexander Solzhenitsyn.But as Soviet-style communism fell
The distinguished writer Brian Masters in his handsomely produced book on the actors of the Garrick Club has set himself a formidable task. Not only, until he reaches the mid-20th century, does he have to assess the art of long-dead actors from contemporary accounts; he is also writing a history of the theatrical profession from
The long war between France and the US has its liveliest consequence in the world of film: Hollywood does movies, the French do cinema. In terms of equipment, the Yanks were the pioneers, but France’s Charles Pathé was the first tycoon and — more importantly — George Méliès was the inventor, by accident, of the
The first thing to be said about this remarkable book is that it has nothing to do with animal rights. The title is borrowed from the archaic Greek poet Archilochus, who is known mainly for a single aphorism: ‘The fox knows many things, but the hedgehog knows one big thing.’ Isaiah Berlin borrowed this gnomic
In the late 1960s I grew up in the London borough of Greenwich, which in those days had a shabby, post-industrial edge. Behind our house on Crooms Hill stood a disused London Electricity Board sub-station. Broken glass crunched underfoot and buddleia grew amid the fly-tipped junk. I went there chiefly to shoot at pigeons and
The title of this first novel refers to a version of childhood as a magical kingdom where evil can be overturned and heaven and earth remade at the whim of a power-crazed infant. In fact our narrator’s world has already been darkened by the time she is presented by her beloved elder brother with the
Andrew Petrie has written the Bookend column in this week’s magazine. Here it is for readers of this blog. At more than 700 pages including appendices, Guardian writer Dorian Lynskey’s 33 Revolutions Per Minute: A History of Protest Songs certainly can’t be accused of skimping on the details. Adherence to the pun of the title
That, anyway, seems to be one of the things to come out of Terry Eagleton’s new book, Why Marx Was Right. It’s not published until May but Tyler Cowen reports that it contains these winning arguments: But the so-called socialist system had its achievements, too. China and the Soviet Union dragged their citizens out of
James Ellroy has been awarded the French Order of Arts and Letters by French Culture minister Frederic Mitterand. According Le Point, Mitterand venerated Ellroy as a ‘master of dark dreams and counter history, truly one of the great names of modern literature’. In turn, Ellroy paid homage to French literary culture, citing Stendhal, Proust, Camus,
Susan Hill once wrote that ‘a prize is a prize and when it is a lucrative and highly publicised prize, it matters a lot in the book world. Not many affect sales directly and hugely but one which now does is the Orange Prize for women writers.’ This year’s Orange Prize longlist has been released.
Foreign fiction gets a raw deal. It’s usually quarantined away in the dustier enclaves of the bookshop, along with all the other worthy but immovable fare: short story collections, regional poetry and non A-level drama. Perhaps buyers and sellers think that ‘non-UK stuff’ has been dealt with by that merrily inclusive idea of ‘world
Strand magazine is to publish a recently discovered short story by Dashiell Hammett, ‘So I Shot Him’. ‘He gave us both Sam Spade and Nick and Nora Charles — so for a generation of readers, Dashiell Hammett more or less defined both “hard-boiled” and “suave.” Not bad, that. Now, from the long-deceased author of The
There used to be two rules of successful imperialism. First, don’t invade Russia. Second, don’t invade Afghanistan. As Rodric Braithwaite points out, invading the latter country itself offers no real difficulties. The Afghans abandon their strongholds and take to the hills, allowing the invader to enjoy the illusion of power in Kabul, with a puppet
This remarkable book is the account by their lawyer of the trial, imprisonment and sentencing to death in the late Eighties of a group of young men who came to be known as the Delmas Four. It is also a wonderfully vivid and at times alarming account of the inner workings both of ANC ‘operations
Tom Bower’s fearsome reputation as a biographer preceded him in the Formula One paddock. Tom Bower’s fearsome reputation as a biographer preceded him in the Formula One paddock. His devastating treatment of subjects such as Conrad Black, Mohamed Al-Fayed and Richard Branson was well known. So here, at last, was a writer who would unravel
Hisham Matar is a Libyan-American writer whose father, Jaballa — an opponent of Gaddafi — was kidnapped in Cairo in 1990. Hisham Matar is a Libyan-American writer whose father, Jaballa — an opponent of Gaddafi — was kidnapped in Cairo in 1990. He is believed to be in jail in Libya; Matar campaigns from London
‘La justice flétrit, la prison corrompt et la société a les criminels qu’elle mérite’ — Justice withers, prison corrupts, and society gets the criminals it deserves. ‘La justice flétrit, la prison corrompt et la société a les criminels qu’elle mérite’ — Justice withers, prison corrupts, and society gets the criminals it deserves. With that terrifying