The good, the bad and the ugly in books, exhibitions, cinema, TV, dance, music, podcasts and theatre.
Roger Deakin was a swimmer, old-fashioned socialist, carpenter, broadcaster, tree-planter, chair-bodger, ‘quasi-hippie’, art critic, naturalist, Cambridge graduate, traveller, north-east Suffolk man, champion of local individuality, anti-globaliser and explorer of the links between nature and culture. (Guess how many of these attributes he shared with this reviewer.) He founded Common Ground, the organisation that gave the
Trying to explain the limits of his Parallel Lives, Plutarch compared the work of historians to that of cartographers who must crowd into the edges of their maps parts of the world which they do not know about, adding notes in the margin to the effect that beyond this lies nothing but the sandy deserts
It would be easy to be mean about this book — so here goes. It purports to be David Mamet’s practical guide to movie-making and one of the points he makes repeatedly is that films shouldn’t have any fat on them. The film may, perhaps, be likened to a boxer. He is going to have
The appearance of this volume is an important publishing event. It is the first book in ten years from one of the outstanding historians of our age. Its brevity and unflamboyant presentation are deceptive. Those who have admired Norman Stone’s work in the past will not be disappointed — it is full of surprises and
There’s a theory, no doubt implausible and based on selective evidence, that alone among the peoples of Europe the English are somehow immune from those fits of mass hysteria which break out with murderous effect elsewhere. It must be nonsense, but it’s very easy to find instances in English history where what looks like the
The picture on the dustwrapper of Suffer and Survive shows a genial-looking Victorian gent with a serious moustache — and it does not tell a lie. The physiologist J.S. Haldane was genial, serious, and extremely Victorian. He was an obstinate man of principle. He was a rigorous experimentalist with a philosophical bent. He was loyal
Elizabeth Marsh was an undistinguished member of an unremarkable dynasty. She was neither famous nor infamous and had no conspicuous talent except, perhaps, for survival. Her father’s family was involved in maritime activity but of her mother we know nothing. Elizabeth herself was married to James Crisp, an entrepreneur of uncertain fortunes from whom she
The Slade of the years immediately before the first world war has always been fertile ground for novelists. As Sarah MacDougall pointed out in her engaging biography of Mark Gertler, Gertler himself and his fellow students have provided copy for anyone and everyone from D.H. Lawrence and Virginia Woolf to Katherine Mansfield, V.S. Pritchett and
Last March, after an unexpected illness, Michael Dibdin died at his home in Seattle. His death came as a shock to fans everywhere of crime fiction. Dibdin had just turned 60. His Aurelio Zen mysteries are distinguished by their edgy, convincing police work, mordant dialogue and the picture they give of social unease and mayhem
The current must-see exhibition at the Museum of London, 150 London Wall, London EC2 (The Missing Link? until 8 August) includes a limestone sarcophagus containing a headless male skeleton. Discovered in the foundations of the church of St Martin-in-the-Fields, just off Trafalgar Square, it has been dated by archaeologists to around AD 410, the traditional
Francis King’s new novel was published a few weeks ago. Francis King’s new novel was published a few weeks ago. Nothing, you may say, remarkable about that. He is among the most professional of authors; writing novels is what he does. Well, yes, of course, but it is certainly worth remarking that his first novel
If you have read all seven of the JK Rowling books and still haven’t sated your appetite for knowledge of Potter and friends, then read this QandA between the author and some of her most dedicated readers. (Don’t click on the link if you haven’t yet finished Harry Potter and The Deathly Hallows and want
Naturally I should have mentioned this a month ago before the Tour de France began, not now that it’s finished – though thoughts on the Tour and the continued jackassery of much cycling coverage will be posted when my blood has recovered from a) boiling and b) my own EPO transfers (kidding). Anyway, sports buffs
We won’t know the Man Booker Prize longlist until 7 August, but Mister Pip had better be on it. It knocks the only New Zealand winner so far, the notorious Bone People, for six. It mightn’t win, because it falls to bits in the last 20 pages, but up to then it joins a fresh
Here is a remarkable novel, one which appears to be about nothing in particular, featuring barely half a dozen characters, several of whom have no names. Hardly anything happens. A boy dies, a man gets shot, another boy is given a new suit, and that, more or less, is that. There is a good deal
This book falls into two parts. The first is a brisk account of Britain’s involvement with India and of the backgrounds of those people who were principally responsible for unscrambling that relationship. It contains most of the facts that matter, if rather too much social trivia that does not, and is generally fair. Where it
In Grand Canal, Great River we enter a world that makes the moon seem familiar. It is also one of the most beautiful books I’ve handled and is a screaming bargain. Philip Watson read Chinese at Oxford and spent most of his working life in the Foreign Office, with postings in Hong Kong and Beijing.
When, ten years ago, you bought for Jack or Chloe a jolly-sounding novel about a schoolboy getting up to all sorts of pranks at an academy for wizards, I don’t suppose you could have predicted the tone of the seventh and last book in the series. It is apocalyptic, redemptive, Wagnerian and quite extraordinarily keen
As a coda to yesterday’s posts on Not Reading Books, it was remiss of me not to quote the man who may make a decent claim to being the greatest newspaper columnist of the 20th century. I refer, of course, to Myles na Gopaleen (“Myles of the Ponies”) better known to posterity by one of
Does this sorry tale demonstrate a) the dangers of reading, b) the extraordinary idiocy of local government or c) both? I’d say it was extraordinary except for the fact that nothing local nincompoop politicians do should cause so much as a raised eyebrow these days. WILKES-BARRE, Pa., July 25 A bookstore owner’s obsession with the
On the subject of not reading books, commenter Jim Barnett has an excellent idea: How about a new category: LR, for “Livres que je regrette d’avoir lus” – books I have regretted reading. I’d put Nabokov in that category – “The Gift” was just the sort of prissy, self-satisfied blather that I had always suspected
Megan links to the now almost famous Not Reading post and recalls a conversation we had: Me: I’ve never read Camus in English. Alex: That’s brilliant! I’m going to use that. Me: “I’ve never read Camus in English?” Alex: No, like this: “I’ve never read Camus in English” . . . That way I don’t
There’s been a lot of hype – justifiably – around P J O’Rourke’s book on Adam Smith’s Wealth of Nations Indeed, we posted on it weeks ago. But Coffee Housers should not miss out on Eamonn Butler’s splendid new guide, Adam Smith – A Primer (IEA, £7.50), which is a thorough and well-written introduction to
Coffee House guru Seth Godin has a great parting thought on the Harry Potter phenomenon, why books are useless for keeping secrets, but why they’ll survive as a still-treasured medium in the digital age.
Coffee House has a review of the latest, and final, Harry Potter book here. The review doesn’t give too much away, but if you’re a dedicated Potter fan I’d recommend finishing the book first.
Everyone, I suppose, now knows that Gordon Brown was the first student rector of Edinburgh University. Though based on Continental models, the rectorship is a peculiarly Scottish institution. The rector is elected by the students, and elections have often been lively affairs. (The plot of John Buchan’s Castle Gay turns on the kidnapping of a
For the most part political diarists are located on the fringes rather than at the centre of power. The two finest British journals from the 20th century were written by failures — Alan Clark and Chips Channon. Only rarely did they gain the sustained access they craved to the great figures of their day. They
Connoisseurs of the short story will welcome this new collection by William Trevor, his first since 2004. Trevor has been compared with Chekhov, not without justification. He works by indirection, avoiding judgment, his sense of tragedy well concealed by a partiality for unfulfilled lives left free to exist on the page without the author’s intervention.
‘Give me the cheque, you look like a decaying oyster’ — thus Roger Hilton accepting the John Moores First Prize in 1963, at the height of his career. At the dinner afterwards, very drunk, he was so rude to an alderman sitting next to him that the poor man had a heart attack and died