Culture

Culture

The good, the bad and the ugly in books, exhibitions, cinema, TV, dance, music, podcasts and theatre.

Alex Massie

Dick, Macdonald, Leonard (& Adam Gopnik too)

Readers with elephantine memories may recall a discussion on the merits of not-reading and on Oneupmanship. With regard to that latter cause, I present The New Yorker's Adam Gopnik, reviewing the Library of America's new and handsome edition of four Philip K Dick novels: While he served a fairly long apprenticeship—a series of almost unreadable realist working-class novels that he wrote in the fifties are now back in print—and struggled to make money, from the time “The Man in the High Castle” won a Hugo Award, in 1963, he was famous, admired, and read. He wasn’t reviewed on the front page of the Times Book Review, but so what?

11 August 2007

James Joll

He killed off Georgian style

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God’s Architect: Pugin and the Building of Romantic Britainby Rosemary Hill Pugin is not unknown in the way he was 50 years ago. Two major exhibitions in the 1990s, in New York and London, the formation of a flourishing Pugin Society and 3,000 people who one weekend last summer crowded in to see his highly original home in Ramsgate, lovingly restored by the Landmark Trust, attest to his growing popularity. However, he has hitherto lacked a considered full-length biography, despite the rumour of 1,000 pages going into Phoebe Stanton’s publisher’s office, from which they have yet to emerge.

Oliver Rackham

Child of the New Forest

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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 only sensible advice — do nothing — about what to do after the Great Storm 20 years ago. He died last year leaving this, his last work. It is not a book about wildwood, in the proper sense of woodland in the dim and distant past before the coming of settled humanity. Much of it is not even a book about trees.

Alberto Manguel

A gallery of pen portraits

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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 full of wild beasts, unapproachable bogs, Scythian ice or a frozen sea. History, for Plutarch, is the text we all can read, surrounded by an illegible flow of events too far in the past or too distant in the future. Clive James has reversed Plutarch’s layout.

Toby Young

Mamet blows his own trumpet

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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 to deal with all the bulk his opponent brings into the ring. Common sense should indicate he had better not bring one extra ounce of flab on him — that all the weight he brings into the ring had better be muscle. No one would argue with that — but doesn’t the same principle apply to books? Why, then, are the last 45 pages of Bambi vs Godzilla taken up with listing the films ‘referenced’ in the preceding 205 pages?

Hugh Cecil

Not forgetting the horses’ indigestion

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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 provocative statements. Coming from an expert on Great War Russia who has now settled in Turkey, the balance of the book is tipped refreshingly away from the conventionally favoured Western Front, and much more towards the Russian, Balkan, Asia Minor and Italian Fronts, though the Middle East (unexpectedly), Africa, and more far-flung parts do not get much attention.

Philip Hensher

And so to plot

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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 beginnings of a general pogrom take place; and for some reason a brief season of mayhem fails to carry on into the murder of thousands or millions. The nearest thing to observable mass hysteria in this country in recent years, the so-called ‘Diana week’ of September 1997, took many people by surprise and was said, then and more frequently later, to be fundamentally uncharacteristic of the national character.

4 August 2007

Sam Leith

A healthy enthusiasm for danger

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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 but somewhat unfortunate in his marriage: Mrs Haldane spoke more of duty than of love, disagreed violently with his rather liberal politics (she was a fierce imperialist, and in favour of concentration camps in the Boer war), and denied him sex, transferring her attentions instead to a green macaw called Polly. He was a kind father (his children were the geneticist J.B.S. Haldane and the writer Naomi Mitchison), a generous colleague, a doting grandfather.

Sarah Burton

The invisible woman

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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 spent long periods living or travelling apart. But it was before she married him that the event which marks her life as unusual occurred: in 1756 the ship on which she was travelling was boarded by Moroccan sailors and she was taken by force to Marrakesh and kept as the prisoner of the acting Sultan, Sidi Muhammed. Though her capture was political, there appears to have been a sexual element in Sidi Muhammed’s plans for her.

Honor Clerk

The school of hard knocks

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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 the woefully untalented and finally mad Gilbert Cannan. Given her previous record, it was probably only a matter of time before Pat Barker joined this list, and Life Class opens in the familiar world of Henry Tonks’s Slade. ‘Is that really the best you can do?’ the formidable Tonks demands, as he critically examines the most recent effort at life drawing by Paul Tarrant, Pat Barker’s protagonist. ‘Then why do it?

Ian Thomson

Dark heart of the deep south

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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 in Italy today. Inspector Zen, a Venice-born policeman, is portrayed as a sternly pensive slogger with health and marital problems, a sort of Mediterranean Inspector Rebus. From his début in Rat King (1989), Zen was in a bad way. He smoked too much, drank excessively and fell into lugubrious talk of his (and Italy’s) demise.

Tom Holland

Making the stones speak

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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 date for the end of Roman rule in Britain. Yet beyond the fact that the man in the coffin was in his forties, of average height and presumably elite status, there is little more that can be deduced with any certainty about him. As is the case with so many finds dredged up from the murk of Roman Britain, the urge to speculate is both encouraged and frustated.

Allan Massie

‘Keep all on gooing’

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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 appeared in 1946. A career spanning six decades: not many can match that. What is equally remarkable is that this new novel, With My Little Eye, is as fresh, perceptive, lively and moving as anything he has written. Ford Madox Ford, in one of his splendid books of rambling reminiscences, wrote admiringly of an old Kentish countrywoman, Meary, who, near the end of a hard life, used to tell him that the only thing to do is to ‘keep all on gooing’.

1 August 2007

The Spectator

Everything you ever wanted to know about Harry Potter and some

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 the ending to be a surprise) Hat tip: New York magazine.

31 July 2007

Alex Massie

Whatever happened to Robert Millar?

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 shouldn't miss out on the best cycling book of the year. True, it's written by a friend of mine but don't hold that against Richard Moore. His In Search of Robert Millar is a terrific rendering of the rise, triumph, disappointment and eventual disappearance of Britain's most successful Grand Tour cyclist.

28 July 2007

Carole Angier

Pied Piper of Bougainville

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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 voice and gripping plot to profound and Booker-worthy themes. It has already won the Commonwealth Writers’ Prize. Mister Pip is set on the real South Pacific island of Bougainville, which fought a separatist war against Papua New Guinea that cost 20,000 lives. The war began in 1990. We join it in 1991, when Matilda, our narrator, is 13.

Jonathan Keates

Into the Norwegian wood

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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 of description, though of the plainest kind, several emotions are registered after an understated fashion, but the author makes no attempt at centring these elements on a complicated plot. Having reached the middle of the book in the perfectly comprehensible expectation that Something Really Important will take place if only we hang on long enough, we are scarcely surprised when after all it doesn’t.

Philip Ziegler

When Edwina met Nehru

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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 is unfair is in its dismissal of Mountbatten as a trivial playboy. It is permissible to make fun of some of the wilder schemes which he championed during his time at Combined Operations — notably the iceberg-aircraft carrier Habbakuk — but unreasonable to dismiss the ingenuity, energy and formidable organising powers which created the machine that made possible the invasion of Europe in 1944.

Jonathan Mirsky

Tales of the Yangzi

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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. In his retirement he sharpened up his skills in that endlessly difficult subject, classical Chinese. He has firm control of a slightly old-fashioned narrative style, in which he apologises for raising arcane matters of Chinese style, geography, military matters, history, poetry, painting and mandarin manners, which he then lays elegantly before you. This is a work of meticulous scholarship in the English tradition of the amateur scholar, or ‘much learning lightly worn’.

Philip Hensher

No more school

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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 on violent death. I think there are 24 named characters who meet a specified death through violence in this volume, and over 50 others, we are told, are killed anonymously. To the adult reader, the routine nature of all these deaths, the inability to register much in the way of a fresh response will be troubling. We are promised grief when somebody on Harry’s side is killed, and ‘screams and cheers and roars’ when an enemy dies.

26 July 2007

Alex Massie

The Greatest Non-Reader of Them All

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 his other pseudonyms, Flann O'Brien.  Here's his solution to the reading problem:THE WORLD OF BOOKSYES, this question of book-handling. The other day I had a word to say about the necessity for the professional book-handler, a person who will maul the books of illiterate, but wealthy, upstarts so that the books will look as if they have been read and re-read by their owners. How many uses of mauling would there be? Without giving the matter much thought, I should say four.

Alex Massie

Department of Dangerous Books

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 written word has cost him his Pennsylvania home after local officials deemed his book collection a fire hazard. Authorities in Wilkes-Barre, Pa., condemned John Puchniak's apartment this year when a routine inspection raised concern the bookstore owner's collection of nearly 3,000 texts could cause a fire, The (Wilkes-Barre) Times Leader reported Wednesday.

25 July 2007

Alex Massie

Remembrance of Time Wasted

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 Nabokov had produced. I should have known better and left it as an LE [a book you have heard discussed], but I foolishly took it on a trip and got stuck reading it.

Alex Massie

Stephen Potter’s Guide to Reading

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 have to tell them I've never read Camus in French, either. Grand stuff. My recollection, however, is subtly different: Megan:  I've never read Camus in English. Alex:  That's brilliant!  I'm going to use that. Megan:  "I've never read Camus in English?" Alex:  No, like this:  saying "I've never read Camus in English" carries the implication that you have read Camus in French.

The Spectator

Essential reading

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 the thoughts of the great economist and philosopher. Given our new Prime Minister’s fascination with Smith, it is a book to keep at one’s side in the months ahead.

22 July 2007

Matthew Dancona

Why we’ll remain fully booked

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.

21 July 2007

Allan Massie

Beware the lie of the lips

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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 newspaper magnate in the course of one such election, though this is a case of mistaken identity.) The rector is entitled to chair the University Court and serves as the representative of the student body in relations with the university authorities. A new rector’s inaugural address used to be fully reported in the Scottish press and some of them became famous — J.M.

Peter Oborne

A dark tale of insider dealing

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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 were looking in hungrily from outside, yearning for advancement which never came. Both journals gain a great deal of narrative pace and comic structure from this frenetic search for power and status. The reader knows, but the diarist does not, that the quest is doomed. Alastair Campbell, by contrast, was at the centre. His comparatively lowly title of press secretary, enhanced to director of strategy and communications after 2001, gave no hint of his true importance.