The good, the bad and the ugly in books, exhibitions, cinema, TV, dance, music, podcasts and theatre.
Once, while travelling in an odd part of Siberia, I was told of a place called ‘the English colony’. A remote spot — it was said to be several hours from the nearest town, but trains were infrequent and roads non-existent — the ‘English colony’ was the site of a former Soviet camp: a small
In four years London will host its third Olympic Games. It is the first time it will have done so as the winner of a competition between bidding cities as fierce – and some say as suspect – as any that take place in the stadium. Before that London was volunteered as a stage only
What do you make of this texting business? It took me on a surprisingly complex journey. First I felt revulsion, then doubt set in, then I sensed a developing acceptance and finally I embraced it with utilitarian enthusiasm. At one point I was even touched by a Shavian zeal that texting might usher in a
This is a curious book: not exactly likeable, but certainly intriguing, and definitely accomplished. It is a debut novel, but doesn’t feel like one at all. It is smart, bold and surprising, with nothing of the crowd-pleaser about it; in fact it might irritate, or disgust, just as easily as it amuses. A disgraced professor
Montaigne wished for a library of deathbed chronicles. ‘If I were a maker of books,’ he wrote, ‘I would assemble an annotated registry of various kinds of dying.’ Such a collection exists. Its ancestors are the ars moriendi of the Middle Ages and its modern manifestations bear uplifting titles such as The Year of Magical
Mugging, according to a popular theory, is a consensual act. Split seconds before the assault takes place victims supposedly establish some sort of complicity with their attackers, thus turning the robbery into a contractual arrangement. The same principle is just as easily applied to political assassination. Along the lines traced by Hardy’s famous poem ‘The
Here are two books by anthropologists — Sam Gosling, from the University of Texas, and Daniel Miller, from the University of London. Both are British. Both set out to explore one of anthropology’s central questions: what is the relationship between people and their possessions? At the start of his book, Gosling says, more or less,
In his Christmas broadcast for 1942, Pope Pius XII spoke of the ‘hundreds of thousands of innocent people who have been killed or condemned to a slow extinction only because of their race’. As part of a wider denunciation of the Holocaust this would have been brave and useful, but in fact it was to
Like Angus Wilson, Julian Maclaren-Ross immediately grabbed the attention of Forties reviewers and readers with a series of short stories at once ruthlessly observant and irresistibly entertaining. However, unlike Wilson, admirably self-disciplined in the organisation of a career that eventually carried him to the centre of the literary establishment, Maclaren-Ross, alcoholic and wasteful of his
A correspondent has a confession and a question: “I have, shamefully, never read Wodehouse and want to read all the Bertie and Jeeves stories. But where does one start?” There is no shame in this. Indeed there’s a sense in which one might (almost) envy the Wodehouse novice; how splendid to be able to cast
BEEN SICK IN BED FOUR MONTHS AND WRITTEN AMONG OTHER THINGS TWO GOOD SHORT STORIES ONE 2300 WORDS AND 1800 BOTH TYPED AND READY FOR AIR MAIL STOP WOULD LIKE TO GIVE YOU FIRST LOOK AND AT SAME TIME TOUCH YOU FOR 100 WIRED TO BANK OF AMERICA CULVER CITY CALIFORNIA STOP EVEN IF ONLY
No book can be entirely bad that tells you a zebra is basically black with up to 250 white stripes, that Princess Diana’s colonic irrigation treatment required ten gallons of water or that the height of the Eiffel Tower grows seven inches during a normal summer (although in this one it has probably shrunk). So
Think about your knickers. Your bra, shoes, socks, running shoes, anorak, television, towels, light bulbs, computer, and, sooner rather than later, your car or its parts. If they were made here they would be far more expensive. But they’re made in China, so that’s all right then. OK, workers here lose their jobs, but that’s
Karl Marx wrote that history repeats itself, the first time as tragedy, the second as farce. It’s tempting to adapt that and say that historians also often repeat themselves, first as biographers, second as novelists. Having written a book about Stalin’s court, and then a biography of Stalin himself, Simon Montefiore now publishes Sashenka, a
In 1969, the Slovak writer Jan Kalina published 1001 Jokes, a collection of (mainly) anti-Communist stories which sold out within a couple of days. This was during the permafrost that descended on Czechoslovakia following the Russian suppression a year earlier of the Prague Spring. The ruling regime’s retribution was predictable. Listening devices were placed in
Magic and fantasy seem to occupy an odd tract of land in the world of the novel. Despite an honourable lineage that includes William Morris, Lord Dunsany and J. R. R. Tolkien, there persists a feeling that fantasy is really for children and geeks; it is not a serious art. Perhaps this is why publishers
In the spring of 1865 Washington was celebrating victory in a bitterly fought civil war. It had begun in 1861 when six southern states had seceded from the Union, setting up the separate Confederate state with its capital in Richmond. For Southerners, the Union threatened to abolish the ‘peculiar institution’ of slavery without which, they
Olivia Cole on Victoria Hislop’s second novel Married to a permanently well-lunched Englishman, Sonia Cameron, the half-Spanish heroine of Victoria Hislop’s second novel The Return, seeks escapism — first in a local dance class (to which she becomes unexpectedly addicted) and, more compellingly, in a chapter of her family history by which she becomes distracted
No disrespect to Jeremy Lewis, this third amiable volume of autobiography or his hopeful sponsors at the Harper Press, but it is extraordinary that books like this still get written. Here we are, after all, in the age of the Waterstone’s three-for-two, the novels of Miss Keri Katona and the cheery philistinism of the man
As we now know, the unimaginably awful Third Reich did not spring fully formed from Hitler’s mind. Its antecedents can be traced to the predominantly upper-class and reactionary parties of the late 19th century, to Bismarck’s Slavic preoccupation, to a long history of racial and mythical obsessions with Deutschtum or German-ness, and on into Weimar
‘To enclose the collected works of Cocteau one would need not a bookshelf, but a warehouse,’ W. H. Auden wrote in 1950. The same isn’t quite true of Auden — a warehouse wouldn’t be necessary — but it has to be said that only a bookshelf of substantial proportions would be capable of accommodating the
The last time all five James children were in the same room was at their mother’s funeral, in 1882. It must have been a strange gathering. Even by then, their lives had followed such extraordinarily different paths that, to the reader of their collective biography, they seem to have become randomly assembled strangers. Henry James,
William Cecil, Lord Burghley, would be delighted that in his historical afterlife he remains the old man he died as, after 40 years of power. The frail flesh and white beard projects the image of the dull bureaucrat we remember: ideal cover for an ideologue who makes Donald Rumsfeld appear warm and fuzzy, and a
There is a moment in the introduction to this book, when, after the grand statement of its aim ‘to encapsulate a country’s material, natural and cultural essence’, you come on this, amongst the usual thanks being extended to archivists and professors: ‘To Roy Morgan of Mertec Evesham Ltd., Swansea, who kindly loaned the project a
On 29 May 1989 Brigadier Tariq Mehmood, formerly head of Pakistan’s Special Forces, was taking part in a freefall demonstration in Gujranwala. His parachute failed and he crashed to his death in front of a large crowd that included his wife. TM (as he was always known) was the arche- typal Special Forces officer, almost
Stephen highlights Bill Gates’ tips for success. Well worth a read.
Via Chris Orr and Ross Douthat, I see there’s a trailer for the new Bond flick Quantam of Solace. First impressions? Could be good! Anyway, it has to be better than the latest Bond novel… The first Bond novel, “Casino Royale, was published in 1953. And yet, dated and hackneyed as some of the novels
Douglas Hurd on James Fergusson’s new book Des Browne, our Defence Secretary, has recently returned from another visit to the British Army in Afghanistan. Once again he issued an optimistic statement on military progress. He should read the devastating account in James Fergusson’s book of his previous visits. The purpose of this excellently written book is to
You may have caught Jonathan Dimbleby on television recently travelling across Russia, picking potatoes with doughty Russian women, baring all for a steam bath in Moscow, looking alarmed as a white witch from Karelia promised to heal his bad back with a breadknife, etc. Here is the book of the series, in which Dimbleby, drawing