The good, the bad and the ugly in books, exhibitions, cinema, TV, dance, music, podcasts and theatre.
Out of Mao’s Shadow: The Struggle for the Soul of New China by Philip Pan In 1952 the 20-year-old Maoist fanatic, Lin Zhao, ordered that a Chinese landlord be immersed in a vat of icy water overnight. She said this filled her with ‘cruel happiness’. Later she wrote to a friend about how she had
I’m now back from my fortnight in Sweden where I kept my word to give up Coffee House for a fortnight. There’s something about the country that makes it a lodestar for left and right, and the reasons why hit you as you travel around. Here are a few of my notes:- 1. At a café
Handel: The Man and His Music by Jonathan Keates Since 1985, when Jonathan Keates first published this exhilarating critical biography of Handel, there have been enormous advances in the study of the composer and his oeuvre — not least the publication of two major volumes by the doyen of Handel scholars Winton Dean — and
So I Have Thought of You: The Letters of Penelope Fitzgerald, edited by Terence Dooley ‘I can’t remember whether you said you liked Barbara Pym,’ Penelope Fitzgerald wrote to an old school friend around 1980, ‘but am sending Quartet in Autumn in case you haven’t got it, otherwise it can go to the Mothers’ Union
I asked Henry Kissinger recently whether he had been to see the hit play Frost/Nixon. He told me that he made it a rule never to see plays that included characters he knew in real life, which I guess must mean that he hasn’t seen much post-war political theatre. He also said that he doubted
Dreaming Iris by John de Falbe Love, whether originally mental or glandular, a coup de foudre or a gradual smouldering incandescence, fulfilled or not, constitutes the basis for most readable fiction. In Dreaming Iris, John de Falbe, abiding by this tradition, examines the effects of imaginary love on two real but fragile relationships. He has
Maurice Yacowar, Emeritus Professor of English and Film Studies at the University of Calgary, begins his ‘portrait’ thus: ‘John Bratby was an overachiever who fell short of his potential.’ Rather like this book really. Instead of a balanced assessment of one of the most interesting postwar figures in the British art world, we are offered
Sir Thomas More was the most dedicated of Henry VIII’s Chancellors before becoming the most famous of his victims. Sir Thomas More was the most dedicated of Henry VIII’s Chancellors before becoming the most famous of his victims. Nearly 30 years ago, John Guy wrote what is still the best biography of this fascinating and
For those who haven’t leafed through a copy, or read the extracts in the Guardian this week, Polly Toynbee and David Walker’s new book is effectively an extended diatribe against the Unjust Rewards of those who, say, work in the City, or who went to Oxbridge universities. It’s a one-note attack – with scant room for subtleties – and Giles
In Russia, writers are more than just writers. Russians look to their literary heroes not simply for beauty and entertainment, but for a philosophy of life. Writers do more than simply tell the truth to the temporal power — they are Russia’s spiritual legislators. The stern old God of Orthodoxy provides an immutable baseline of
This short novel was first published in a tiny edition at the end of last year. Since then it has won the McKitterick Prize (for the best first novel by an author over forty), and now it is reissued with a glossy picture on the cover and a quote by Mick Jagger saying that he
Andrew Taylor reviews a selection of recent crime novels The Murder Farm (Quercus, £8.99) is Andrea Schenkel’s first novel and has been hugely successful in her native Germany and elsewhere. Based on a real case, it is set in the 1950s and deals with murder of a farmer, his wife, daughter, grandchildren and maid. It
Late one night many years ago I was in a bar round the corner from the Roman offices of the newspaper La Stampa. After a few grappas I gave my friend Anthony something I had written that day. He read it without evident appreciation, and, handing it back, said, ‘Can’t you write anything that isn’t
We’ve just updated the Spectator summer reading list with some selections from our literary editor, Mark Amory. You can see them – and the rest of the list – here.
We’ve just updated the Spectator summer reading list with recommendations from Liz Anderson and Henrietta Bredin. You can see the full list here.
You may have seen the summer reading list that Tory MPs have been issued with. But here’s an alternative set of book recommendations for you, this time from Spectator staff. Not all the books will be newly-published. But they’re generally books that we’ve read – and enjoyed – recently. Hopefully, we’ll unearth a few gems for you. If so, please
It’s pretty seldom that, only a few pages into a novel, you know you’re in the hands of a writer who does what he does as well as anyone else alive. Lush Life is that sort of book: entirely imagined, dense with life, and written sentence by sentence without a false note or a moment
Was it Wordsworth who discovered the ‘real’ rural? Later, the Georgian poets celebrated its passing, giving rise to what Edward Thomas called ‘the Norfolk Jacket school of writing’. The poets of the 1930s took up politics instead, and nowadays poets are mostly urban. These scatter-shot generalisations, riddled with exceptions, are only meant as an introduction
Simon Baker reviews a collection of short stories by Tobias Wolff This book contains ten new stories from Tobias Wolff, plus a selection from the three volumes of short stories he published between 1981 and 1997. It affords the reader a fascinating panorama of Wolff’s entire career, and shows that, like Bach’s variations, Wolff’s stories move
Philip Hensher on Peter Martin’s biography of Samuel Johnson Thanks to Boswell’s inexhaustibly interesting biography, Samuel Johnson is deeply familiar to us, even in his most extreme eccentricities. It’s easy to forget how bizarre and alarming he must have seemed to most of his contemporaries. His involuntary movements were such that modern scholars have often wondered
In Wild Mary, his biography of the irrepressible Mary Wesley, Patrick Marnham describes Cornwall in the 1930s as ‘a lost world, a world that had its own rules and customs and mysteries’. While Wesley was bed-hopping on the Lizard peninsula, around the Atlantic-battered rocks at Newquay, Emma Smith was enjoying a most peculiar childhood in
Jonathan Mirsky on Nancy Kohner’s new book What could be more poignant than this? ‘You know nothing of what is happening here, and I can’t explain it to you. Just be glad that you’re as far away as you are. What is happiness? Happiness is what once was, once upon a time when we lived such a
Blair Worden reviews Ophelia Field’s latest book What a wonderful subject Ophelia Field has found, and how adroitly she has handled it. In the Kit-Cat Club, the coterie of Whig writers and politicians that began in the last years of the 17th century and lasted into George I’s reign, she finds both a mirror and a source
Philippa Stockley on the new book by Ruth Butler Hortense Fiquet, Camille Doncieux, Rose Beuret. Who are they? The wives of Paul Cézanne, Claude Monet and Auguste Rodin.The third is the best known; the others have largely been omitted from history. Demonstrably, in Fiquet’s case. Cézanne’s first biographer, Georges Rivière, was Fiquet’s daughter-in-law’s father. Rivière
Contributers to multi-volume national histories are usually straitjacketed, expected to keep to well-trodden paths. But Robert Gildea’s subtitle is ‘the French’, not France, and in the third volume of the New Penguin History of France to be published he wanders freely. Foreign policy, for example, gets short shrift. Instead, a chapter is devoted to the
Vermeer’s Hat turns on its head the conventional relationship between a history book and its illustrations. The seven paintings and one plate reproduced here are not intended to give us clues as to what the period and people in the narrative looked like, but are themselves the starting points for the web of narratives that
Molly Guinness reviews Wendy Perriam’s latest collection of short stories Wendy Perriam’s latest collection of short stories tends to focus on the lonely, the mousy and the underachieving, and she combines serious and comic elements with varying degrees of success. The combination works well in ‘Birth Rage’, where a woman loses her temper with a
This book opens with a bang; things are suggested rather than described, in short paragraphs, mostly dialogue; the impression is of a (very English) Hemingway. A party of six inmates, two orderlies and a newly arrived doctor, Irvine, are being taken on a bus from Dartford Asylum to view a whale beached on the Thames
Charles II apologised for being ‘an unconscionable time a-dying’, and, if it could speak, the novel might do the same. Its death has been so often decreed. More than sixty years ago J B Priestley called it ‘a decaying literary form’ which ‘no longer absorbs some of the mightiest energies of our time’. Does this