Culture

Culture

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

Ian Thomson

Cocking a snook at Manhattan

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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. Close friends have described Capote as a ferocious malcontent, free-wheeling to self-destruction with the help of bourbon and barbiturates. The addictions finally got the better of the novelist in 1984, however, when he died of alcohol-related complications; he was a few weeks short of his 60th birthday. Oddly, for such a self-publicist, Capote kept quiet about the novel he wrote at the age of 19, Summer Crossing.

Digby Durrant

Come, rap for the planet

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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 35-year-old ecologist faced with the probability that a huge dam and a nuclear reactor are going to be built, causing immense damage to the land around them and disruption for those who live there. He and his colleagues are out to stop both ventures. Their activities stall when Paul is operated on for thyroid cancer.

Anthony Sattin

A place of wonders and horrors

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For his fifth travel book, Philip Marsden has returned to his roots; not to his native Cornwall, but to the country that gave birth to his travel writing. Marsden first visited Ethiopia in the early 1980s when he was 21, when Emperor Haile Selassie was long in his grave and when the country was ruled by the Derg, a military junta led by the future dictator Mengistu. Civil war and repressive government had cast a pall of misery over the country and Marsden’s journey suffered for it — he was refused permission to travel to Tigray, the historical heartland in the north of the country and a province that had long been at odds with the administration in Addis Ababa.

Noble Frankland

When the tide of blood turned

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If one was shot through the head in the battle of Stalingrad or the battle of Alamein, the sensation, presumably, would be much the same, but there the similarity would end. The second world war on the Russian front was fought on a catastrophically different scale from that in the West. In the course of it, the Red Army lost more than eight million soldiers killed; the Americans and the British lost fewer than 250,000 each. On top of that, at least 19 million Soviet civilians lost their lives through deportation, hunger, disease and direct violence. In the decisive battle of Kursk of July 1943, 70,000 guns, 12,000 aircraft, 13,000 tanks and mobile guns, 900,000 German and 1.3 million Soviet troops were locked in combat.

Gary Dexter

Surprising literary ventures | 3 December 2005

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The Passing Show (1937)by Captain W. E. Johns The story behind this one-off by the author of the ‘Biggles’ books is probably best told by the editor of My Garden magazine in 1937, Theo A. Stephens: ‘The offices of My Garden were next door to those of Popular Flying, of which paper Captain Johns was, and still is, the editor ... I asked Captain Johns whether he had ever written about any of his gardening experiences. He replied that he had not, but was so tired of writing articles and books on flying that it would be a relief and recreation to write on gardening.

Juliet Townsend

Recent children’s books

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The bookshop shelves are stacked with the usual bewildering array of children’s books this Christmas, and the first striking fact is what good value they have become, largely because, like almost everything else, most of them are now produced in the Far East, from Thailand to Cochin. The average price of a lavishly illustrated book for young children, £10.99, has remained the same for several years, and even elaborate pop-ups, like Francesca Crespi’s The Nativity, published by Frances Lincoln and printed in China, only costs £12.99. It was good to see a version of one of Arthur Ransome’s Old Peter’s Russian Tales being reprinted in a lively version for young children.

Elfreda Pownall

Cookery books for Christmas and for life

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A good cookery book is for life, not just for Christmas. Fifty years ago many people had just one cookery book, and in Italy it would have been The Silver Spoon (Phaidon, £24.95). Now translated into English (with an appendix of recipes by modern celebrity chefs) it is the vast cookery book that almost every Italian bride has been given since its publication in 1950. And no doubt the bride felt modern and somewhat iconoclastic, turning her back on the regional and local specialities of her black-clad nonna for the wider possibilities of cooking from all over Italy, even including a certain international hotel element.

26 November 2005

Francis King

All passion still not spent

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From her earliest years, one attribute dominated Bernice Rubens’s life: passion. It fuelled her impressive books, her personal relationships and her reactions to the world around her. It expressed her innate generosity of spirit, but could also deprive her of the ability to consider any viewpoint contrary to her own. Of such passion there is little in this posthumously published memoir. Instead, the general tone is one of valedictory tenderness. Rubens writes far more about a close-knit and much-loved clan than about her successes, first as a maker of documentary films and then as the author of 25 novels, one of which, The Elected Member, won the 1970 Booker Prize, and many of which were subsequently filmed.

Raymond Carr

Two sorts of ending up

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By a fortunate coincidence these books treat the same subject: old age at the mercy of time, the ‘blind rider’ of Goytisolo’s title. Ageing is a matter of temporary victories and final defeats. At 75, you can succeed in getting on your horse by using a mounting block and shortening your nearside stirrup leather; at 81, you can’t hold your horse out hunting. You give up. What is the point of it all?

Elfreda Pownall

Three star cooks

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Going to Italy for his latest book, Jamie’s Italy, Jamie Oliver is, in a sense, coming home. Though he learnt to cook in his parents’ pub in Essex, all his early professional experience was in restaurants serving good, authentic Italian food. He worked for Gennaro Contaldi, Antonio Carluccio and, of course, at the River Café, where he was discovered and made a television star. Jamie’s recent television series have had a serious purpose, improving the abysmal standards of school dinners and helping disadvantaged young people find a trade and self-respect through cooking.

Jane Ridley

Scarcely a matter of honour

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Early one morning in August 1826 two men stood facing each other 12 paces apart in a sodden field a few miles outside Kirkcaldy in Fife. One man was a linen merchant named David Landale, the other was George Morgan, his banker. At the words ‘Gentlemen are you ready? — Fire!’ two pistol shots went off instantaneously. As the smoke cleared it was plain that Morgan had fallen to the ground. He was shot through the chest and died at once. Landale escaped unharmed. This was the last duel ever fought in Scotland (the last duel to be fought in England was in 1845) and the wonder is that it happened at all. As James Landale shows in this enjoyable book, the quarrel between David Landale and George Morgan was not a matter of honour in the aristocratic sense of the word at all.

Dot Wordsworth

A dose of the verbals

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A light moment in the preliminary stages of learning Turkish is to discover that the word in that tongue for ‘talking nonsense’ is fart. Later on one finds that the Turkish for ‘violin bow’ is arse, though these facts alone are not always enough to carry the student chortling on to complete mastery of the language. The Danish for bookshop is boghandel and the Swedish for ice-cream is glass. Adam Jacot de Boinod’s The Meaning of Tingo (Penguin, £10) is not entirely filled with such false friends, but he does like them. I began to be suspicious when he claimed that slug means ‘servant’ in Gaulish. Gaulish? No one speaks Gaulish.

Harriet Waugh

Recent crime books

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The Stranger House by Reginald Hill (HarperCollins, £12.99) is not a Dalziel and Pascoe detective novel but a highly enjoyable gothic confection. Two strangers are brought reluctantly together in the village of Illthwaite in Cumbria. Sam Flood, a small, red-headed Australian woman of 24, is about to take up a post at Cambridge as a mathematician but stops off at this gloomy village to explore her ancestry. Specifically she wants to find out more about her grandmother, also called Sam Flood, who was sent as an orphaned child to make a new life in Australia in 1960 but who did not long survive the experience. The only thing she knows about her is that she had once lived in Illthwaite.

Mary Keen

Recent gardening books | 26 November 2005

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Twenty years ago, gardening books never made it to the coffee table. The reader had to supply the glamorous illustrations. It was a bit like the difference between listening to the wireless and watching telly. I remember Mark Boxer, who was a publisher then, saying, ‘Once garden books start using pictures, they will sell in big numbers.’ They do, but they date and yesterday’s aspirational title is soon remaindered. This year, there are some picture books which should last longer than most, if only because they provide records of important gardens. The Country Life archive has been a good source of images, although only those that have been featured in the magazine are included, so these volumes can never present a true picture of design at the chosen moment.

The Spectator

Books of the Year II | 26 November 2005

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Robert Salisbury It is difficult to look beyond three biographies this year: Jung Chang and Jon Halliday’s Mao (Cape, £25), William Hague’s Pitt the Younger (HarperCollins, £8.99) and Max Egremont’s Siegfried Sassoon (Picador, £25). Mao is a standing indictment not only of Mao himself but also of the self-hating Left of the Sixties and Seventies who bought his Little Red Book and worshipped at his feet. William Hague on Pitt is elegant, readable and, with admirable clarity and concision, brings a politician’s understanding of the world of Whitehall and Westminster to the service of his scholarship. His return to the Conservative front bench is long overdue. It is risky to puff the work of one’s close relations.

19 November 2005

Ian Thomson

The discreet charm of sewers

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Public visits to the sewers of Vienna are rare: the clammy atmosphere can cause breathing problems. Nevertheless in 1994 I visited them with a local Graham Greene enthusiast, Brigitte Timmer- mann. Greene’s darkest entertainment, The Third Man, ends with a shoot-out in the Vienna sewers and the death of the penicillin racketeer Harry Lime. With his alley-rat amorality, Lime is a familiar Greene character; I wanted to catch a glimpse of his life down a manhole. The sewer entrance by the Stadtpark U-bahn was apparently much as it had been in Greene’s day. (I half expected to see the Austrian police in pursuit of Lime.) As we descended into the darkness I could make out a graffito on the wall: ‘Lime is my favourite fruit.’ I did not see Timmermann again for 12 years.

Anthony Sattin

East and West — when the twain meet

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As far as love affairs go, the relationship between British travel writers and Islam has been both intense and long-lasting. From Orientalists such as Richard Burton and Edward Lane installed à la turque in 19th-century Cairo and Damascus to Wilfred Thesiger in the Empty Quarter, Bruce Chatwin in Sudan, Colin Thubron in Syria, Jan Morris in Oman and Egypt, Muslim ways and means have inspired some of our best travellers to produce some of their finest writing. But the nature of the exchange between these writers and their Muslim subject-matter was transformed by the destruction of the World Trade Center and the ensuing war in Iraq. One of the most significant changes has been in the rhetoric of politicians and the press.

D.J. Taylor

A wheelbarrow full of surprises

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The people in Rose Tremain’s brisk short stories tend to be hooked on highly symbolic artefacts. Thus the East German border guard of ‘The Beauty of the Dawn Shift’, cycling off to illusory salvation in Russia, takes with him a solitary lemon, ‘a precious possession’ turned up in an otherwise fruit-free grocery store. A middle-aged woman working in a Norfolk haberdashery shop covets the unclenched wooden fist of the glove display. The chef in ‘Nativity Story’ nurtures a gleaming oyster shell which he aims to bestow on his absent son. Our minds, as asylum resident Victor in ‘The Ebony Hand’ informs his anxious sister-in-law, are ‘held together by peculiar things’. The Darkness of Wallis Simpson is full of peculiar things.

Felipe Fernandezarmesto

Facts and fables of the New World

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The Amazon can drive you mad. In Werner Herzog’s cult movie Aguirre: Wrath of God, Klaus Kinski affected a crazed stare that bordered on self-caricature. But the real-life explorer he portrayed was a first-class, unquestionable, copper-bottomed maniac, who systematically murdered his companions, as they drifted downriver in torrid, febrile paranoia in 1560. He recast himself as both pope and king, and, when he at last emerged from the rivermouth, launched an ill-starred attempt to conquer the Spanish empire. His was an extreme case, but the strange, overpowering environment is unnerving to outsiders even to this day. The first Spanish explorers who navigated the river in 1540-2 showed some of the symptoms.

Peregrine Worsthorne

Blindfolds and mindmists

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Without the existence of ‘apparently [my italics] sophisticated circles’, which the great historian and poet Robert Conquest also calls ‘an intellectually semi-educated class’ (soon abbreviated into just ‘cerebral jellies’) his latest book would never have been written. For its express purpose, he avers, is to tease ‘these misinformed strata’ — yet another description — into abandoning the ‘brain blindfolds’ and ‘mindmists’ which have robbed them of all sense of present realities and future possibilities.

Stephen Glover

The Times it is a-changin’

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Because the Times is, or was, a newspaper like no other, it has enjoyed the distinction of successive volumes of official history. The last, written by John Grigg, covered the years 1966 to 1981, when the Times was bought by Rupert Murdoch. Volume seven, entitled ‘The Murdoch Years’, takes us up almost to the present day. Graham Stewart, a historian of the 1930s, should be congratulated on agreeing to undertake the task. For although earlier chroniclers have had to deal with controversial or painful passages in the newspaper’s history, such as its prewar embrace of appeasement or its postwar emollience towards the Soviet Union, none has been asked to wade into so perilous a minefield as was faced by Stewart.

John McEwen

Cheeps, tweets and warbles

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In his old age John Ruskin lamented, ‘I have made a great mistake. I have wasted my life with mineralogy, which has led to nothing. Had I devoted myself to birds, their life and plumage, I might have produced something worth doing.’ Here are two bird books which have been eminently worth doing. Both are by North Americans but their sweep is global. David Rothenberg is a musician, composer, author and professor; the Canadian, Graeme Gibson, is a renown- ed novelist and chairman of the Pelee Island Bird Observatory. Gibson only succumbed to the charm of birds at 37, which is why he begins his book with the Ruskin quotation. Rothenberg’s interest in birds has also intensified with age — it is only since 2000 that he has taken to playing music live with them.

Sam Leith

The very best of bad verse

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In the mid-1930s, the poet Ogden Nash visited a rodeo, where the star attraction was a handsome cowboy parading with his wife and son. ‘This is Monty Montana,’ the announcer declared, ‘who is a great example to American young men and young women. He has never smoked a cigarette, he has never touched liquor.’ Nash’s voice rang out from the bleachers: ‘And that little boy is adopted.’ The chief thing about Ogden Nash was that he was funny. Though he wrote a handful of straightforward and affecting simple lyric poems, what he will be remembered for is his light verse.

The Spectator

Books of the Year | 19 November 2005

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A selection of the best and worst books of the year, chosen by some of our regular contributors Jonathan SumptionNiall Ferguson’s Empire: How Britain Made the Modern World (Allen Lane, £25) is a marvel of objective iconoclasm, much better than the associated TV series, which presents one of the world’s great liberal empires without the usual overtones of Pecksniffian disapproval.

12 November 2005

John Michell

Toeing the party line

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John Brockman, the New York literary agent and science writer, had an artist friend, James Byars, who had a grand idea. It was ‘to gather the 100 most brilliant minds in the world together in a room, lock them in and have them ask each other the questions they were asking themselves’. The result, he supposed, would be a ‘synthesis of all thought’. He drew up his list of minds and telephoned them all. Seventy per cent of them proved their brilliance by hanging up on him. Brockman, undeterred, carried on where Byars had left off. He started a website, Edge, where he invited fellow-thinkers to answer the question, ‘What do you believe is true, even though you cannot prove it?

Paul Binding

Small is beautiful | 12 November 2005

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The British, publishers and booksellers regularly tell us, have an antipathy to the short story; they respond unfavourably to even a well-known writer coming up with a collection, and for an emergent one to devote creative energy principally to the medium would be regarded as literary suicide. And this despite determined efforts by certain key literary editors, competition-setters and indeed the South Bank itself to keep the art-form alive. Elsewhere the short story is differently regarded. In the English-speaking world, Ireland, the American South, and, thanks to Raymond Carver and Tobias Wolff, the Pacific North-West of the US have long exhibited short stories as supreme expressions of their culture’s genius.

Simon Heffer

The boy done bad

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One of Sir Mark Thatcher’s friends once told him he was ‘born guilty’. Many, including the two authors of this book, would contend that he has done his best to live up to his billing. Apparently, in moments of persecution, he has taken to quoting this observation about himself in the most rueful of tones. If he can bring himself to read this book he will feel far more persecuted by the end of it. The authors are unquestionably experienced investigative journalists, with various scalps to their name. They are suited to their subject remarkably well, in that their style and approach are almost as unattractive as they claim their subject to be.