The good, the bad and the ugly in books, exhibitions, cinema, TV, dance, music, podcasts and theatre.
Lucrezia Borgia was not the fiend history made her out to be. According to Gaia Servadio, she was a radiant symbol of Renaissance woman and, moreover, a judicious administrator of her husband the Duke of Ferrara’s realm. Lucrezia’s ethereal blonde looks had so captivated Lord Byron that, in 1816, he stole a strand of her
The origin of language is one of the riddles of mankind. History begins with languages already formed, the intricate relics of vanished civilisations. As history progresses, so languages deteriorate. Latin and Sanscrit are richer and more expressive than any of their living successors. As Adam Smith wrote in his beautiful essay of 1761, Considerations concerning
When the poems of Philip Larkin came to the fore in the late Fifties, I admired his graceful colloquialism but was dismayed by his almost proselytising gloom; life wasn’t given much of a chance. So I decided that he was a great Comic poet — stretching the idea of Comedy to almost Renaissance widths and
Ian Fleming pretended they were glamorous, John le Carré claimed they were brainy and unscrupulous. Commander Crabb, in real-life 1956, made Britain’s spies into the figures of fun they went on being until the Iraq fiasco showed they could be dangerous, too. He was the middle-aged chap, tripping over his flippers in a baggy wet-suit,
When banking families fell out in Renaissance Florence, disputes tended not to be settled by the financial regulator. In April 1478 in Florence cathedral, members of the Pazzi family murdered Giuliano Medici and came close to killing Lorenzo the Magnificent himself. Several of the Pazzi conspirators were hanged and left to dangle from the windows
Martin Meredith ended his 1984 book on Africa, The First Dance of Freedom, with a quote from a recent report by the Economic Commission for Africa which looked ahead to the continent’s future over the next 25 years. On existing trends, it predicted, poverty in rural areas would reach ‘unimaginable dimensions’, while the towns would
When Sybille Bedford was born, in Germany in 1911, it was into a world already vanishing: a world where ‘people were ruled by their servants’, lived in opulent houses (fully staffed by their rulers), ate heavy Edwardian-Germanic cuisine at very frequent intervals, took nothing so vulgar as holidays, but went south for their health, or
Coleridge was supposed to have been the last person ever to have read everything, and that was in 1834. So Peter Watson, a Cam- bridge archaeology don, is up against it when he tries to squeeze the history of all the clever things that mankind has ever thought into 822 pages. He makes a pretty
It was the second world war Allies, according to John Dunn, who converted ‘democracy’ into a slogan. Their object was innocent enough. They wanted to identify themselves by a word which signified everything that the Axis powers were not. Yet a word that could embrace both Stalin’s Russia and Roosevelt’s United States must have seemed
What is the point of William Cobbett? Richard Ingrams claims that Cobbett was one of the greatest Englishmen who ever lived, yet his life is largely forgotten. He is remembered, if he is known at all, as the author of Rural Rides, a classic account of his travels around the English countryside in the 1820s.
The proposal that the English have a long tradition of violence is the opening of Adam Nicolson’s book and he supports his belief by invoking the Book of Revelations, Virgil, Homer, Joanna Southcott, the Methodists, Jane Austen and William Blake to bring this together at Trafalgar. That occasion cannot, of course, be without Nelson, and
‘I used to be an atheist,’ says ten-year-old Oskar Schell, ‘which means I didn’t believe in things that couldn’t be observed… It’s not that I believe in things that can’t be observed now, because I don’t. It’s that I believe things are extremely complicated.’ On 11 September 2001, Oskar is sent home from school when
‘Canada,’ wrote the Toronto journalist Michael Valpy, ‘is the only country in the world where you can buy a book on federal-provincial relations at an airport.’ Things are looking up. Travellers eager to broaden their horizons can now curl up with this extended disquisition on globalisation by the consort of Canada’s outgoing Governor-General. His Excellency
When I was a child, I frankly and thoroughly detested Peter Pan in every single one of its manifestations; horrible Christmas stage spectacular, horrible Disney cartoon, horrible, horrible novel. It was a passionate and immediate hatred, shot through with something very like terror. In part, I guess, it was the idea that someone might come
Ever since David Steen joined Picture Post at the age of 15 he’s been photographing celebrities. This handsome collection of male portraits shows his range. At one end of the spectrum is the cheesy picture of Steven Spielberg with his foot in the mouth of an inflatable rubber shark. At the other, there is the
The Gardens at Hampton Court Palaceby Todd Longstaffe-GowanFrances Lincoln, £25, pp. 208, ISBN 0711223688 The Gardens at Hatfieldby Sue Snell, with an introduction by the Dowager Lady SalisburyFrances Lincoln, £25, pp. 192, ISBN 0711225168 In 1979 the first major exhibition on the history of British gardening was staged at the Victoria & Albert Museum. It
Professor John Carey is at his most acerbic, combative and impassioned in this brilliant polemic, developed from lectures he gave at University College London last year. Just don’t expect the question proposed by the title to be satisfactorily answered: Carey doesn’t exactly contradict himself — he’s far too fly for that — but halfway through,
Penguin By Designby Phil BainesPenguin/Allen Lane, £16.99, pp. 255, ISBN 0713998393 Publishers do not make popular heroes. Who has heard of Humph- rey Moseley, who published the Caroline poets? Or Jacob Tonson, apart from Pope’s patronising verses? Thomas Hughes made Tom Brown’s School Days famous, but could not do the same for Daniel Macmillan. But
The day before this review was written Christopher Hitchens was insulted (‘ex-Trotskyist popinjay’ and other unrepea- tables) during a Washington press m
Basil Hume, when a young Benedictine monk from Ample- forth in Yorkshire, was sent to study in Switzerland at the Catholic university of Fribourg. While he was there, two young men, staying at the same college, went mountaineering and got lost. The priest in charge of the seminary told the students that two young Englishmen
Those who can, do; but all too often they cannot resist pontificating as well. John Lukacs is a historian of Hungarian origins and conservative inclinations with a number of important if idiosyncratic books to his credit, including biographical studies of Churchill and Hitler. His aim in Democracy and Populism, however, is more far-reaching. He seeks
Novelty alone — with writing as with condoms — should not ever be the overriding criterion when making an important selection. Unfortunately, in their introduction to New Writing 13, Toby Litt and Ali Smith make clear that they have only chosen authors practically squeaking with novelty: writers ‘for whom everything they write is a renewal
Moving to a farm cottage 700ft up in the Pennines, surrounded by sheep and serenaded by curlews, and conscious of the dawn-to-dusk regime of the family next door, one begins to understand life on a small mixed farm. It is unrelenting work. No wonder Richard Benson preferred the glitzy attractions of Grub Street. But if
The Rules of Perspective is set in a provincial German art museum as it is bombed by the Americans at the end of the second world war. The pivotal scene is revealed at the outset: Corporal Neal Parry comes across four corpses seated in the ruined museum’s vaults. There are two men and two women,
There is a dizzying profusion of texts and writers in Nicole Krauss’s second novel, The History of Love. There is an inset novel bearing the same name, written by one of her principal characters, Leo Gursky, excerpts from which are strewn throughout. Gursky, an 80-year-old Jewish refugee in New York, doesn’t know whether his book
Not long after Alexander Chancellor had been appointed editor of The Spectator in 1975, and had then lightheartedly or pluckily taken me on to his small crew at Doughty Street, we had lunch at Bertorelli’s with David McEwen and a great friend of his: a man once met not easily forgotten. He was imposing or
I can’t decide whom I distrust more in True Story: the author, a humane and thoughtful man, or his subject, Joe Longo, who butchered his wife and youngest son, then drowned his other children by tying them up in a sack and dropping them into a lake like unwanted kittens. True Story is written by
Faced with a choice on election night of staying in to watch the results coming in on the box or heading out to The Anvil, Basingstoke, to catch a live show by The Manfreds — featuring my old school contemporary Michael d’Abo on vocals, as well as his apparently ageless predecessor, Paul Jones — it
Lee Cotton is born to a black mother in a little Delta town in the 1950s, but has white skin. He grows up amid violent confrontation between white supremacists and the civil rights movement. Aged 16, he is beaten to death by the Ku Klux Klan. At this stage in the book, 50 pages in,