The good, the bad and the ugly in books, exhibitions, cinema, TV, dance, music, podcasts and theatre.
If you were left a legacy by a friend would you tuck it away, blow it on art, or buy something for your home or the person you share it with? Notting Hill-based writer Duncan Fallowell decided to do what it says on the cover and go as far as he could. Why? ‘So that
At the outset of this rich, dense and polemical primer on the modern history of political violence Michael Burleigh has the good sense to define his terms. He describes terrorism as ‘a tactic primarily used by non-state actors, who can be an acephalous entity as well as a hierarchical organisation, to create a climate of
Another splendid obituary from The Daily Telegraph that offers a splendid view of a rather different, if also gruesome, world than with which most of us are familiar. Funny too, of course, in the way in which the sadnesses of ghastly people often can be. (I also liked the understatement here: “Like his father, however,
I gave up writing novels in my mid-twenties, when I was halfway through my third, convinced I had not enough talent for fiction. Sometimes I wish I had persisted. There is one particular reason. The point is made neatly by W. Somerset Maugham in Cakes and Ale: These remarks need qualification. I’m not sure that
‘I am sorry to say that the generality of women who have excelled in wit have failed in chastity,’ wrote Elizabeth Montagu in 1750, after looking over the memoirs of her contemporary, the witty Mrs Pilkington. Mrs Montagu, learned, respectable and rich, curled her lip at poor Laetitia Pilkington, who started writing for pure pleasure
Readers are defined by what they don’t read as much as by what they do. George Moore shunned works of reference. ‘An encyclopedia in this house!’ he spluttered indignantly at the enquiry of a friend. Mark Twain was not an enthusiast of Emma and Pride and Prejudice. ‘The best way to start a library,’ he
‘Being Roman,’ declares Catullus, the poet protagonist of Counting the Stars, ‘is a state of mind’. As in earlier novels — The Siege, House of Orphans — Helen Dunmore allows the reader to enter the ‘state of mind’ of a specific moment in history. Here, Julius Caesar’s Rome, in all its squalor and grandeur, brutality
The conquering white male, guiltily plundering, seduced by exoticism and abundance but never quite sure that he’s not just the clueless foreigner being taken for a ride: so we have Tony Parson’s pugnacious hero Bill, clad in his designer suit. He is the ambitious corporate lawyer, billing for every hour he breathes, hoping to ‘make
Ian Thomson reviews a collection of Malcolm Lowry’s poems, letters and fictions Malcolm Lowry was a ferocious malcontent, who free-wheeled towards an early grave with the help of cooking sherry, meths, even bottles of skin bracer. From skid row to bedlam and back, it was a Faustian dissipation. Lowry died in 1957, at the age
Peter Carey’s fictions are like a powerful old-fashioned car driven with the modernist hand-brake on — revved-up narrative that stutters, stalls, leaps in unexpected spasms. With a less good writer this would be intensely annoying. Carey runs through many of the tricks of post-modernism — the tricksy shifts, the dislocations of chronology and viewpoint, the
Klaus Mann’s Journals don’t pretend to be a work of literature; they are jottings, records of day-to-day existence, full of names many of which will mean nothing to readers today, even, I suppose, to German ones. ‘I suddenly thought,’ he wrote in January 1933, ‘that these notes could seem terribly superficial to anyone who chanced
The Wessex novels of John Cowper Powys — Wolf Solent (1929), A Glastonbury Romance (1933), Jobber Skald (also published as Weymouth Sands, 1935) and Maiden Castle (1937) — must rank as four of the greatest ever to be written in our language. Even those who do not feel ready for the 1,000-page novel based on
When, after his exertions on behalf of the love-struck Gussie Fink-Nottle, Bertie Wooster hears himself compared to Cyrano de Bergerac, his literary knowledge rises to the occasion: ‘the chap with the nose’. It was Edmund Rostand’s play of 1897 that brought Cyrano and his protuberance their modern fame. The 17th-century soldier and writer who gave
‘I’m not going to pay good money’, Groucho Marx famously quipped, ‘to join a club that lets in people like me.’ In the case of the Carlton Club on St James’s Street, whose 175th anniversary last year was marked by this handsome history, requirements were quite explicit. Membership depended on opposition to the 1832 Reform
No one would be allowed to have J. G. Ballard’s career nowadays. When you consider the life of the average English novelist, what Cyril Connolly called the poverty of experience seems almost overwhelming, as the budding writer moves from school to university to a creative writing MA and on to the two-book contract. It is
One frequently reads of chaps for whom their epiphany was the first sight and sound of Julie Andrews. Mine happened a good few years earlier, lying bed-bound with polio, just after the war. Someone had sent my mother a boxed set of the Broadway cast of Annie Get Your Gun. Ethel Merman’s flamboyant voice belted
Grandmother’s Footsteps is about three generations of women. When Evelyn died she left a diary for her daughter, Verity, and granddaughter, Hester, to find. They don’t actually discover the revelatory document until years later when Verity’s husband has died, leaving another mysterious paper trail. The tagline of the book muses, ‘Will the past ever let
‘A satisfactory novel should be a self-evident sham,’ in an opinion Flann O’Brien (1911-1966) shared with one of his fictional characters, ‘to which the reader could regulate the degree of his credulity’. Furthermore, the inhabitants of novels should be allowed ‘a private life, self-determination and a decent standard of living’. The distinction between reality and
This book shows how successive cabinets have handled the deadliest secret of modern times, what to do about nuclear bombs, since the first ones went off in 1945. As the subject was so secret, not much has ever been allowed out into the public domain; but Hennessy’s scholarly skills have been such that he has
Are books dead? No, just different. Or, rather, story-telling adapts to new technology. To wit, Japan. As the New York Times reports: TOKYO — Until recently, cellphone novels — composed on phone keypads by young women wielding dexterous thumbs and read by fans on their tiny screens — had been dismissed in Japan as a
Norm’s poll of your favourite English-language novelists has reported its findings. Not a great surprise that Austen and Dickens come first and second. But really, how can Norm’s erudite readers have placed Philip Roth third (albeit a very distant third) and Ian McEwan sixth? This suggests a serious lack of, well, judgement. Wodehouse, for the
Richard Shannon has been writing about Gladstone on and off for almost 50 years. His first book, a study of Gladstone and the Bulgarian Agitation, was published in 1963. He is the author of a major biography of Gladstone in two exceptionally hefty volumes, which appeared to critical acclaim in 1982 and 1999. So why
Forget John McCain – on the evidence of this morning’s Press Conference it is Hillary Clinton who is getting inside David Cameron’s head. Talking about Britain’s UNICEF rankings, Cameron concluded, “We must live by the words of the famous African saying: It takes a village to raise a child.” As any American will tell you,
Weimar lasted 14 years, the Third Reich only 12. Yet Weimar is always seen as a prelude to the Third Reich, which appears to have been created by Weimar’s failures. Actually, as Eric Weitz argues, the Weimar Republic (1919-1933) was not responsible for the Reich; it was a democratic, socially aware and progressive government, way
However loaded or coded, ‘Greek love’ is one of our more misleading cultural terms of convenience. It refers to an aspect of classical civilisation whose existence many people continue to find either embarrassing or reprehensible. Even now Hollywood chooses to present Achilles and Patroclus as best buddies US-Army style rather than as lovers unabashedly showing
The late Alan Coren once called a collection of articles Golfing for Cats, in order, he claimed, to maximise his sales by tapping in to two profitable markets at once. Michael Moorcock has lavishly adopted this stratagem. The cataloguing data for this book defines it as: ‘1. Detective and mystery stories. 2. Fantasy fiction.’ The
This book exposes newspapers to the same merciless, lethal and sometimes unfair scrutiny which the press itself has long shone on politicians, the royal family and numerous other targets. The results are devastating. Nick Davies has amassed an overwhelming weight of evidence that the British media lies, distorts facts and routinely breaks the law. It
Jane Rye on William Feaver’s biography of Lucien Freud Lucian Freud describes his paintings as largely autobiographical, which seems to imply some sort of readiness to expose his private life to the public gaze; but he does so on his own terms and is notoriously reluctant to let anyone else poke about in it. At the
Between 1975 and today, under the direction of Professor Wm. Roger Louis, the British Studies Seminars of the University of Texas has organized 60 seminars on the modern history of Britain and has published a selection of the lectures in five volumes of which this is the most recent. It includes personal reminiscence. Graham Greene,