The good, the bad and the ugly in books, exhibitions, cinema, TV, dance, music, podcasts and theatre.
At a Clapham dinner party recently I was offered marijuana. Nothing unusual in that, only the joint took me to a far continent of anxiety; I had been inhaling skunk, a modern Special Brew strain of marijuana and about as beneficial. Next morning, still mildly hallucinating, I craved to reread T. S. Eliot’s Four Quartets.
Tenn — as friends and sycophants called him — Williams was one more of those American writers whose lives have spectacular first acts, but dwindle away, more or less slowly, into repetition, sterility and self-pity eased (and exacerbated) by sex, alcohol and drugs (‘Way to go’, some might say). Williams was born in 1911, in
The young Evelyn Waugh, it’s said, once declared in a newspaper article that the writing of novels in the first person was a contemptible practice. One would like to think he gave his reasons, but, according to Somerset Maugham, ‘he threw out the statement with just the same take-it-or-leave-it casualness as Euclid used when he
Browsing through a Christie’s catalogue, I came across the description of a pen-and-wash drawing by Rowlandson, c. 1800, ‘Elegant company in a park’. It set me thinking. One knows very well what was meant by ‘elegant company’ at the beginning of the 19th century. It applied perfectly to the party Mr Bingley brings to the
When The Spectator recently said goodbye to 56 Doughty Street, we said goodbye to more than three decades of memories. Whatever else we were any good at under Alexander Chancellor’s editorship, we knew how to throw a party, from the great sesquicentennial ball in 1978 to the summer garden parties to the Thursday lunches. Among
The Order of Merit is the only honour which almost everyone would like to possess. The Garter is picturesque but would be felt by some to be anachronistic and somewhat pompous. Gs, Ks, Cs, Os and Ms are handed out with the rations and can anyway probably be bought. Companions of Hon- our are respectable
The 1960s brought in the Beatles, drugs, long hair, hippy communes, eastern gurus and the alternative culture, so called. Against all this was the ‘straight’ world whose denizens were short-haired Frank Sinatra fans in suits. The two types seemed quite different from each other, but one thing they had in common was their obsession with
As Hitchcock knew, the best thrillers use the very simplest materials to achieve their sinister purpose of enthralling and terrifying their audience. Nicci French’s previous novels have shown an impressive ability to dramatise the darkest concerns of her readers. Her latest book taps into the universal fear of parents: what do you do when your
This week sees the centenary of the birth in York of W. H. Auden. All over the world this season, Audenites should at 1755 hours precisely prepare a very cold, very dry Martini and at 1800 hours, six o’clock, again precisely, down it in praise and memory of a giant of English letters. Vital to
Perhaps the only drawback to this highly enjoyable biography is the shadow of utter banality that it throws over one’s own life by comparison. Princess Sofka Dolgorouky, the author’s grandmother and namesake, began life as scion of one of the great ruling families of Russia and a playmate of the Tsarevich. She was brought up
The British empire in North America was not founded in a fit of absence of mind, though it might be said, in its beginnings at least, to have represented the triumph of hope over experience. From the outset, King James I and his chief minister, Robert Cecil, the Earl of Salisbury, were sceptical. A royal
Rumours and published reviews to one side, the new novel by Norman Mailer, called The Castle in the Forest, is not the ‘biography’ of Adolf Hitler or even the story of his youth so much as it is the life of his father Alois Schicklgruber, or Hiedler, finally Hitler. He turns out to be an
Memoirs about bad or dotty fathers — from J. R. Ackerley’s (and the brilliant companion piece by his secret half-sister, Diana Petre) to Lorna Sage’s to Blake Morrison’s — exert a special fascination. A small subdivision of the form are those accounts featuring not only a father who is mad, bad or dangerous to know,
There is something odd about a roman à clef which has the key attached. Justin Cartwright’s latest novel tells the story of ‘legendary Oxford professor’ Elya Mendel of All Souls and his relationship with German Rhodes Scholar Axel von Gottberg, who is hanged in Plotzensee on 26 August 1944 after the failure of the July
They dibble the turf with fork and trowel eagerly, eagerly going to it, each whiskery bulb unclutched and buried as we their assistants kneel beside them. Ours is the knowledge, the choice of season, the nurturing landfill, the bedding down, but theirs the trust in a world new-minted, like prospectors for the future’s gold.
In December 1743 George Bickham produced a caricature, The Late P-m-r M-n-r showing the face of the recently departed premier contorted into a great monstrous yawn — a yawn seemingly stretched to the limits of human endurance. The caption begins with an adaptation of lines from The Dunciad, which come just after the Empress of
The word ‘romance’ has come down in the world, and the romantic novel is one in which the love-interest predominates. A romance used to be more spirited, a tale of adventure in which the events are striking and come perilously close to being improbable. That scene in my favourite Dumas novel, Le Vicomte de Bragelonne,
Charles Richter, born in 1900, was, in the words of his biographer, ‘a nerd among nerds: regarded as peculiar and intensely private even by scientists’ standards. And we’re talking about people who put red-and-white bumper stickers on their cars that read, “If this sticker is blue, you’re driving too fast”.’ The only seismologist most of
Henrik Ibsen’s fictional world of marital breakdown and sexual hypocrisy in the fjords and farmsteads of Norway spread an unfamiliar polar chill at the end of the 19th century. His plays introduced Norwegian literature to a British audience and electrified such writers as Edmund Gosse and G. B. Shaw. His influence can also be felt
The Paris Review came into being in 1953, when a group of young Americans living in Paris, among them George Plimpton and William Styron, decided to start a literary magazine. Their intention was to get away from the academic factionalism that then prevailed in literary journals, and simply publish good writing, whether fiction, poetry or
Natasha Cooper’s heroine, Trish Maguire, is a barrister who subverts the stereotypes, an outsider whose troubled background sometimes gives her more in common with clients than colleagues. At the start of A Greater Evil (Simon & Schuster, £17.99), the latest novel in the series, Trish’s private life is on a relatively even keel. At work,
If you are English and love the poetry of Robert Lowell, Anne Sexton, Zbigniew Herbert or Czeslaw Milosz, you probably have Al Alvarez to thank, directly or indirectly. The unostentatiously brilliant, cosmopolitan reviews Alvarez contributed to the Observer over a decade from the mid- 1950s, together with his taste-changing 1962 anthology The New Poetry and
When Slobodan Milosevic died, more than four years into his trial for war crimes, newspapers around the world said that he had cheated justice. It would have been more accurate to say that he had cheated injustice. Had he lived, the judges would have been faced with an unpleasant dilemma: either to find him not
It would take a heart of stone to contemplate St Pancras station and its appended Midland Grand Hotel without laughing, such is the brio, the swagger, the sheer in-your-faceness of its high Victorian Gothic. Yet it has not always been so appreciated. In the 1950s the distinguished architectural historian Sir John Summerson confided to Sir
France discovered the Arab world with Napoleon’s ill-fated expedition to Egypt in 1798. If David Pryce-Jones is to be believed, this event marked the beginning of two centuries of pernicious Arabophilia and anti-Semitism, leading successive French governments to support unpleasant Middle Eastern despots and turn a blind eye to Islamic terrorism. Like most large generalisations,
Q: How to write imaginatively about the developing world? The old Naipaul-style methods of tragicomic ironising seem to be on the way out. Magic realism, where the butterfly clouds float reliably over the parched savannah, is not what it was. On the other hand, allegory-cum-fable — a tradition that extends at least as far back
In 1907 the Nobel Prize for Literature was for the first time awarded to an English-language writer: Kipling. It wasn’t even then a choice that went down well with those whose opinions counted. ‘The denizens of literary London,’ David Gilmour remarked in The Last Recessional, ‘were aghast that the prize should have gone to Kipling
There is no getting away from it, Edith Wharton was grand. It never occurred to her to spare expense. On her honeymoon cruise, she and her feckless husband Teddy chartered a 333-ton steam yacht with a crew of 16. When they settled down at 884 Park Avenue, they bought the house next door to accommodate
On the opening page of The Waning of the Middle Ages, Johan Huizinga remarked that ‘we, at the present day, can hardly understand the keenness with which a fur coat, a good fire on the hearth, a soft bed, a glass of wine were formerly enjoyed’. Well, C. M. Woolgar can. Not that he is