The good, the bad and the ugly in books, exhibitions, cinema, TV, dance, music, podcasts and theatre.
In ‘Thé-Dansant; Saturday Evening, La Ciudadela’ the English painter James Reeve shows elderly men and women dancing the danzon, a national passion in Mexico not unlike the two-step, where partners perform a series of intricate, angular passes and twirls requiring complete control of wrists, elbows, and little fingers. In Mexico City, where Reeve lives, well-off
Researching her second book, I Didn’t Do It for You, Michela Wrong says she learned something that shocked her. Very often, no one around her had even heard of Eritrea, the nation in question, let alone anything of its agonising 100-year history. This cannot be true. A shrewd Africa correpondent for the Financial Times and
Horny black hills on red grounds and exposed roots clawing the air like scary glove puppets are typical of Graham Sutherland in his prime. Teeth and thorns, the odd crucifixion and Somerset Maugham perched on a rattan stool with a jaundiced tortoise look on his face are typical of him soon after, in the Forties,
Lord Rosebery was the great lost leader of Victorian politics. Today he is a forgotten figure, but in his time he was the most famous man in Britain. Precociously talented and a star orator, he could draw vast crowds and keep them spellbound. He was the heir apparent to Gladstone as leader of the Liberal
Simon Hoggart writes:Douglas Johnson, who has died at the age of 80, was one of the most distinguished — and most entertaining — of the academic writers who have appeared in the columns of The Spectator. In fact, the word ‘academic’ has perhaps the wrong connotations, for in spite of Douglas’s great scholarship, few people
Tim Mackintosh-Smith, author of the wonderful Travels with a Tangerine, his debut volume in the footsteps of the 14th-century Moroccan traveller Ibn Battutah, wastes little time in getting going with this remarkable sequel. Give him a word and he’ll be etymologising before you can whip out your OED. And you’ll need one to keep up.
In 1892 Frank Hall, who was building a road for the Imperial British East Africa Company, decided to punish some local Masai for obstructing his work. He raided their village with a force of 150 men armed with rifles and a machine-gun, destroyed their huts, took their cattle, but felt dissatisfied at only killing five
The bitterness of the immigrant experience, the tumultuous coming of independence to a former British colony, forbidden love and miscegenation within a close-knit Muslim community: dominant themes of Abdul-razak Gurnah’s former novels are gathered together in this one. Since, though not abnormally long, his book ranges over such a wealth of material, there are inevitably
I feel slightly cornered by the blurbs on the jacket of this book. On the front, Jung Chang, author of Wild Swans, says, ‘This is my favourite Chinese novel: a highly amusing comedy of manners that conceals a powerful emotional charge.’ On the back, Lisa Appignanesi suggests we ‘imagine Svevo taking David Lodge to China
What is one to make of this little book? There is much that is good in it, about new handguns, their use in crime and warfare and their role as fashionable accessories (notably in portraiture) of the rich and proud; about the ‘spinning’ rife in Renaissance pamphlet wars; and about that age’s wantonly cruel methods
The New English Kitchenby Rose PrinceFourth Estate, £18.99, pp. 468, ISBN 0007156448 The Dinner Ladyby Jeanette OrreyBantam, £16.99, pp. 259, ISBN 0593054296 If a Martian were to read these three recently published cookery books, his postcard home would conclude that for Earthlings money is the root of all cooking. Alain Ducasse’s Grand Livre de Cuisine
Curious Pursuits is a collection of the ‘occasional writing’ of Margaret Atwood — essays, reviews, talks and introductions to books. Such rehashes often remind one of Juvenal’s adage that ‘twice-cooked cabbage is death’: it was, indeed, only as a fan of Margaret Atwood’s that I wanted to review this book at all, since it would
To be successful, biographers must possess some degree of empathy with their subject. They need not convince themselves that they would always have acted similarly, still less play the part of counsel for the defence, but they will have failed if the reader does not understand why the subject of the biography behaved as he
According to the business press, the age of the ‘imperial CEO’ is now behind us, swept away by a wave of scandals and collapsing stock prices. But for much of the 1980s and 1990s, Michael Eisner was an emperor’s emperor. Recruited from Paramount in 1984, the Walt Disney Company’s new chairman and chief executive officer
Almost every day throughout the Great War of 1914 to 1918 Douglas Haig kept a diary which its editors describe as ‘an understated account of the day-to-day slog of high command’. It consists of often brief notes of operations and their outcome. Magnificently edited as it is, without maps with arrows showing the directions of
It was always on the cards, to use a rather obvious metaphor, that Hilary Mantel would write a novel about spiritualism. Her earlier books were awash with hints of the numinous. Giving up the Ghost (2003), her recent memoir, duly connected these fragments of otherworldliness up to the circumstances of her own life. Now comes
At Queen Elizabeth’s funeral in April 1603, the predominant emotion among the spectators was relief. For the past 45 years her subjects had lived in continual terror of being engulfed in civil war when the childless queen died, leaving behind her a disputed succession. There were as many as 12 possible claimants to the throne
A writer, John Dearborn, known as Bron, persuades a publisher to commission him to do a book about love at first sight. Bron is obsessed with Paul Marotte, a physician living in Amsterdam who one day in 1889 sees Kate Summer on a bridge and instantly falls in love, decides to paint professionally and they
Having obsessively admired Billie Holiday’s singing for 50 years or so, having seen her perform whenever possible, having listened to her recordings again and again, and having read hundreds of thousands of words about her, I received Julia Blackburn’s With Billie in a mood of blasé scepticism. It is a pleasure to report that this
The saga of Naim Attallah and his writing career continues. For readers who have just joined, Attallah’s short morality tale about his simple and happy childhood with his good and loving grandmother and great-aunt, The Old Ladies of Nazareth, appeared last year. It came swiftly on the heels of Jennie Erdal’s entertainting memoir, Ghosting. In
Diplomatic memoirs were once a staple of serious publishers; nowadays they are privately printed, if published at all. But the appetite for memoirs of the ‘trailing spouse’, the plucky ‘diplomatic baggage’, seems insatiable. A phalanx of distinguished critics rolled out on the dustjacket has greeted Brigid Keenan’s contribution, the latest to this popular genre, as
Trials make irresistible reading. The slow discovery of truth, the revelation of other people’s usually disgraceful lives, the battle of cross-examination and the warm and comfortable feeling induced by reading about other people in deep trouble make them always popular. More important, the fairness of our trial system is a mark of our civilisation. By
The Glass Castle is a memoir of an extraordinary childhood. Jeannette Walls and her three siblings survived an upbringing truly stranger than fiction — if it were invented, it would not be credible. Rex Walls, Jeanette’s father, is a brilliant and charismatic man; a mathematician, a physicist, and an inventor. He is also a brutal,
There are two views about the morality of political lying. The first is the classical British view that politicians should always tell the truth, as people should in private life. This view is usually qualified, as William Waldegrave qualified it before the Treasury and Civil Services Committee of the House of Commons: ‘In exceptional circumstances
School reports can be remarkably prescient. William Empson’s headmaster noted, ‘He has a good deal of originality and enterprise: I hope he is learning also to discipline his vagaries.’ It’s a judgment which could serve as an epigraph for this massive first volume of John Haffenden’s long-awaited, long-meditated biography, in which the great literary critic
Having read The Prester Quest almost at a single sitting, I think I can say without fear of contradiction or a libel suit that Nicholas Jubber is full of it. But his is a most passionate, exuberant and charming kind of ‘it’, and his account of travels in Italy, the Levant, Sudan and Ethiopia in
Something very important in the history of England happened on 24 January 1536, when King Henry VIII, celebrating the vigil of the feast of St Paul’s conversion, staged a splendid tournament in the tiltyard of his palace at Greenwich. The monarch, ‘mounted on a great horse to run at the lists’, was unseated by an
Recent research tells us that the average British shopper is destined to spend two years of his or her life inside a supermarket. Ever since ‘Mr Alan’ Sainsbury, third-generation head of the grocery dynasty, converted his Croydon branch to self-service in 1950 — and despite the fact that one of the first customers threw her
They are a puzzle, those Victorian ancestors, gazing through their beards stock-still to keep the image sharp. How did they move when the photographer had left, how uncomfortable were their bulky coats? The Airds found out. Charles (1831-1910) wrote a memoir in his retirement, and his grandson and great-granddaughter have piously transcribed and published it.