The good, the bad and the ugly in books, exhibitions, cinema, TV, dance, music, podcasts and theatre.
‘You’re not losing; we don’t care for that type of play here. Just cash in your chips and collect your check.’ Thus the Caesar’s Palace pit boss to your reviewer in the Sixties when in fact, contrary to what the author says, the casinos did already know about, and object to, players counting the cards
A group of bored American fighter pilots liven up their posting in cold war Germany with round-the-campfire joshing, petty squabbles, and some traditional extramarital frolicking. But hey — it’s all locker-room stuff: the banter is kept within acceptable boundaries. For safety’s sake a code of behaviour, however peculiar, is observed. Everyone seems to know the
Waking Raphael has all the ingredients one could hope for from a thriller set in Italy: corruption, art, religion, food and very nasty, mafia-style murders. Among the characters are a prim English art-restorer ripe for unbuttoning, a bimbo television presenter, a dodgy aristo, and a butcher who sings as he slaughters. The result is imaginative
In Waxwings Jonathan Raban triumphantly transfers the skills of an award-winning travel writer to his second novel. (The first was written 18 years ago.) Like the author, the principal character has moved from Britain to Seattle, ‘where herring gulls were a traffic hazard and all streets led down to the water’. Tom Janeway is Distinguished
To be apparently always affable, a person everyone is pleased to see, ‘dear old Johnners’, as it seems was the broadcaster Brian Johnson, takes a nerve of steel, and that is apparent in this slightly awed biography by his son. Perhaps it is true, as Barry Johnson suggests, that the early death of Brian’s father
This is a hugely impressive but somewhat exhausting book, the justification for which — from a brutally commercial viewpoint — I fail to grasp. It is a collection of Sir Frank Kermode’s literary criticism, selected by the author and drawn chronologically from all periods and aspects of his oeuvre. Short prefaces, outlining genesis and context,
I really thought I had made it when I went to give a talk at my old Oxford college. But when I got there I discovered that there had been an attempt to have me banned. I was accosted by a dusky beauty in the quad who, practically incoherent with indignation, told me that this
A shilling life will give you all the facts, or at least a £20 one will. And in the case of Humphrey Carpenter it comes with a guarantee of research, honesty and fair play. Nothing flash, no tricks of style and perhaps not too much humour, but at the end a feeling that what you
Harriette Wilson’s Memoirsintroduced by Lesley BlanchPhoenix, £9.99, pp. 471, ISBN 1842126326 What do a modern New York psychoanalyst and a Regency London courtesan have in common? Both offer escape, relaxation and individual attention; both are expensive. ‘In place of the alcove there is the analyst’s office. But basically the functions of both analyst and courtesan
Closing Time by Joseph Heller Scribner, £7.99, pp. 464 ISBN 0743239806 Fortune granted Joseph Heller’s generation, raised during the Depression, not only service in a war whose good intentions were universally applauded but, once in uniform, a standard of living previously unknown to a boy like Heller himself, brought up on Coney Island in a
It isn’t good manners for somebody to criticise a great-uncle after his death, but I know from first-hand experience that my great-uncle, Lord Longford, either didn’t mind criticism or at least grew so used to it that he looked like he didn’t mind. After he appeared in an Oxford Union debate in the early 1990s
I have to declare an interest. In the late 1980s, I travelled with the author of this book. After university we went to run the bulls in Pamplona together, while our neighing contemporaries were being strapped into their first pinstriped suits. Then we went to Africa, where his family had lived since the 1930s. That
At the Italian seaside last week I flicked through the hotel’s copy of a translation of Gombrich’s Story of Art. The publisher had reproduced Reynolds’s portrait of his friend Giuseppi Baretti to a larger size than any other British picture. ‘Ottimo,’ said the text, and by some odd process of displacement I was all the
Dear James, Thanks for sending me a copy of your … what shall we call it? Memoir? Novel? Anyway, I really enjoyed it. You’ve completely captured what it was like to be an Oxford undergraduate in the mid-80s — all that Sloane Ranger crap, the Pimms, the seccies. Every time I turned the page I
‘When I die,’ Robert Lowell told me, three days before he did die, in 1977, at the age of 60, ‘Elizabeth’s shares will rise and mine will fall. But mine will come back.’ Elizabeth, in this context, was Elizabeth Bishop, who with Randall Jarrell was Lowell’s correspondent and best friend in the art. His temperament
Courts can be a tool for understanding the present as well as the past. The behaviour patterns of courts and courtiers are often a better guide to the workings of modern regimes than constitutions or ideologies. In The Last Days of Hitler, Hugh Trevor-Roper analysed the government of the Third Reich as a ‘cannibal court’.
My new book, Thinly Disguised Autobiography, is not just good. It’s absolutely bloody amazing. The drug scenes make Irvine Welsh look like Mary Poppins; the sex scenes are more realistic than the real thing; it’s the finest dissection of the English class system since Evelyn Waugh; the dialogue rocks; it’s funny and moving, pacy, and
Weidenfeld and Nicolson is about to publish a big biography of Mussolini by my friend Nicholas Farrell, which contains the following passage: ‘Just as none of the victorious powers went to war with Germany to save the Jews neither did Mussolini go to war with them to exterminate the Jews. Indeed, once the Holocaust was
For some reason, almost every time I plunge into too hot a bath I find myself thinking of my days as a public schoolboy – presumably a ‘tosh’ must have been one’s principal pleasure at an impressionable age – and more often than not a half-remembered line from Frederic Raphael’s haunting School Play, shown on
Perhaps this strange volume is a bang on the nose for political correctness, but one cannot be sure. It could have been written in the 18th century by a deranged sage determined to scotch the more famous Encyclopaedia of the Enlightenment and its absurd faith in progress and human perfectibility. Published on April Fool’s Day,
Happiness writes white, it’s said: so too, one would think, does Antarctica. How is it possible to describe an environment which tolerates almost no life, which is derived from a single substance, and which is for the most part a single colour? Early explorers were simultaneously horrified and enthralled by the continent’s awesome singularity. Scott
Sprawling, teeming with people and flooded with an almost malevolent brilliance, this book is the literary equivalent of some vast conurbation. As with a conurbation, it is difficult to identify the heart – and heart here means not merely centre but humanity. Trapped, as in one of Mark Gertler’s most famous pictures, on a constantly
There are two literary facts in English which it is almost impossible to examine, to see clearly. They are Shakespeare and the King James Bible. In both cases, the impossibility derives from the same point; that critical standards of what great English writing means stem so completely from Shakespeare’s peculiar virtues and from the values
Fergus Fleming is the author of three volumes of narrative history, the best of which, Barrow’s Boys, gives a rollicking account of 19th-century Arctic exploration. Now he has lighted on the ‘conquest’ of the Sahara, and it is a gripping saga, little known beyond the popular image of a kepi-wearing French officer riding into the
translated by Krishna Winston The advantage of Crabwalk is that it is only a third as long as G
Norman Mailer was 80 years old on 31 January 2003, so let us salute the last of all the knights. He was very famous very quickly, with The Naked and the Dead, and for nearly six decades he has poured forth rich and provocative novels, biographies, non-fiction bouts of reportage – it’s hard to know
The story begins at the ch
There was recently, in the serious and excellent Saturday Guardian review, a short piece on Oor Wullie, a small boy whose cartoon adventures divert the readers of the Sunday Post in Scotland. It was written by Ian Jack, distinguished editor of Granta, the influential literary magazine. The article mentioned a number of things that touched
The pleasure boat captains who ply the coast of the Gulf of Salerno beneath Gore Vidal’s Ravello flat are inconsolable at the thought that the grand old man of American letters is returning to his homeland. The round trip that departs from Capri, and chugs past Positano and Amalfi, finishes with a flourish, as the