The good, the bad and the ugly in books, exhibitions, cinema, TV, dance, music, podcasts and theatre.
Man is a constitutionally ungrateful creature, taking all progress immediately for granted and making the most of whatever complaints still come to hand. However privileged he is, either in relation to people who have lived in previous ages, or to contemporaries living elsewhere in the world or even in his own country, a man can
In 1967 Claude-Anne Lopez brought out a perfectly delightful book, Mon Cher Papa: Franklin and the Ladies of Paris. It described Benjamin Frank- lin’s eight years as the infant United States’ first ambassador to France from the slightly oblique angle of his relations with his French women friends. The book was amusing, subtle, beautifully written
Only a fool would try to explain fashions and tendencies in novel-writing. Everything can change so quickly, and it only takes one really good novel to rescue a genre which we’d all thought consigned to the dustheap. A year ago, I would have laughed drily at the notion that the campus novel still had some
Most readers probably remember the name Guy Liddell, if at all, as the Fifth Man. Or possibly the Fourth, since we remember the first three, Burgess, Maclean and Philby, but cannot remember the next one, since the name kept on changing between Straight, Hollis and others. Liddell’s death in 1958 was largely un- noticed. He
with a foreword by David Hockney and an introduction by Lucinda Lambton It is a well-known fact that artists love dachshunds. Bonnard had Poucette, Picasso Frika, Andy Warhol Archie, and Hockney his Stanley and Boodge. Less often noted is the attraction these adorable creatures have always had for royalty. But simply turn to the magisterial
One evening in the Antarctic winter of 1912, some months after all hope of Scott had been given up, the surviving members of his expedition at base camp sat down to vote on their sledging plans for the coming spring. Along the coast to the north of them a party of five men under the
Paul Foot, the ‘campaigning’ journalist who died last year and whose funeral attracted a crowd of 2,000 mourners, was a Cornish nonconformist who retrained as a Marxist revolutionary. Had he lived a century ago he would have made a stalwart Liberal member for West Cornwall, savaging the tinmasters. But Foot was condemned by the ideology
‘You have been in Afghanistan, I perceive.’ It could be a fanciful tryst between George W. Bush and Osama bin Laden, but it is something far more auspicious: the first meeting between Sherlock Holmes and his chronicler, John Watson, MD, in 1881. Their friendship spawned many things: worldwide societies, sightseeing tours, commemorative deerstalkers (though Holmes
Of all the books on houses and gardens, inside and out, this one takes the cake. Nancy Lancaster was the possessor of those two attributes, difficult to describe but instantly recognisable, of style and charm. Together with her unstoppable energy and plenty of money, she made an indelible impression on one of England’s most envied
Santa can still be a useful adjunct to the winter solstice. If there is a child whom you especially dislike, just ask it quietly what it hopes will be coming down the chimney and the little beast will cringe away, and stay away, in embarrassment. Otherwise Santa’s time is up. He cannot even safely go
It takes pluck to write about the historical Jesus, not just because doing so always stirs the wrath of hot-headed Christians but because there is not a single ‘fact’ relating to Jesus’s life that cannot be fiercely disputed according to any objective interpretation of the available evidence. Take, for instance, the supposed year of his
The Devil’s Own Song and Other Verses (1968) by Quintin Hogg The Devil’s Own Song and Other Verses (1968)by Quintin Hogg Yes, that Quintin Hogg, Lord Hailsham of Woolsack fame. ‘Quite suddenly, during the summer of 1940, my personal and emotional situation was such that I felt an irresistible urge to write short lyrics,’ he
A selection from Keeping My Words: An Anthology from Cradle to Grave by Magnus Magnusson (Hodder & Stoughton, £6.99, pp. 280, ISBN 0340862645) What though his head be empty, provided his commonplace book be full?Jonathan Swift (1667-1745), A Tale of a Tub Lord knows what incommunicable small terrors infants go through, unknown to all. We
Here is part of an Evening Standard review of Goldfinger, written when it was first published in 1959 under the untentative title ‘The Richest Man in the World’: ‘The things that make Bond attractive: the sex, the sadism, the vulgarity of money for its own sake, the cult of power, the lack of standards.’ Over
The principles behind ‘synthetic phonics’, the latest educational reading nostrum, have been around for thousands of years. Heaps of papyrus exercises, exercise-books (and a primary school textbook) have been found, dating from the Greek world of the 5th century bc. The first thing to be learnt was the Greek alphabet, by means of a metrical,
When the hero of Cyril Connolly’s novel The Rock Pool was asked which modern writers he admired, he replied, ‘Eliot, Joyce and Norman Douglas.’ Eliot and Joyce have held up well enough, but Douglas? ‘I thought he was quite forgotten,’ one well-read friend remarked to me. So perhaps he is. But he loomed quite large
The great houses of England have been singularly blessed in their owners (with one or two exceptions) during the latter decades of the 20th century. None more so than Chatsworth and Holkham where the baton is currently being passed on to the younger generation. Both these volumes therefore have a slight valedictory quality, though they
Each time I write something about human rights in China, as I did recently in The Spectator, I receive e-mails from men, always men, doing business in China whose message is this: China is becoming a world-class economic power with its own moral standards, so why don’t I shut up and praise it for its
This is a slim two-in-one offer of a pair of previously undisclosed ‘novellas’ (actually film treatments) by Graham Greene. In 1949, when they were written, The Third Man had just been a prodigious hit for the author, Carol Reed and Orson Welles. No Man’s Land — the sole complete piece on parade here — was
The only halfway festive offering in this year’s crop of art books is Laurence Kanter and Pia Palladino’s Fra Angelico. Even in these secularised times, Angelico is still a favourite in the Christmas card stakes. First and foremost, however, this is a major scholarly reassessment of the artist’s career, but it also doubles as the
Coming as I do from a long line of hairless wonders, baldness has fascinated me since childhood. One of my earliest memories is of my father harvesting and boiling nettles to produce a concoction which he then spread on his pate in the hope of checking the premature departure of his hair. What was more
Would-be artists clinging to the belief that they are in possession of strangely unrecognised genius draw comfort from the thought of Van Gogh. For struggling writers, the biography of Herman Melville is almost equally potent. In some ways, indeed, it is even more poignant, for it is one of early success; early glamour, after the
A few years back I had an argument with Ned Sherrin (now, but not then, a friend), which I have to say he won. Reviewing the first edition of his Oxford Dictionary of Humorous Quotations — now reissued in a third edition — I complained that there were too many old chestnuts in it. Varying
Answers to Cancer (1962)by William Gaddis The William Gaddis canon is limited to five novels (The Recognitions, J. R., Carpenter’s Gothic, A Frolic of his Own and Agapé Agape), now recognised to be among the most distinguished in American literature. His career got off to a bad start, though. His first novel The Recognitions (1955)
One of these anthologies (Late Youth) is small and sprightly, with a pretty, jaunty cover depicting one cheery old person cavorting on a pony and a second catching a fish. The other (The Long History) is large and substantial and uses a detail from an 18th- century self-portrait by Jean Etienne Liotard on its glossy,
Long after I had any need of it, I discovered one of the best pieces of advice on surviving one’s schooldays. Of course, it came from Cyril Connolly, though not from Enemies of Promise. I found it while at university in Connolly’s brilliant pastiche Where Engels Fears to Tread: In every group there are boys
Born in New Orleans in 1924, Truman Capote wrote his first fiction at the age of eight. Or so he claimed. Rarely has a writer so elaborated his own legend; not only could Capote make the wildest nonsense about himself credible, he encouraged others to add to it. Drink was no doubt partly to blame.
You don’t read Nadine Gordimer without knowing it will be about Africa and its manifold problems of which you will know too little and even if you did know more could do little about. Her new book is no exception, though I think it will trouble our conscience less than usual. Paul Bannerman is a