The good, the bad and the ugly in books, exhibitions, cinema, TV, dance, music, podcasts and theatre.
At the risk of encroaching on Spectator Competition territory, what is the least surprising thing for any given narrator in a particular author’s work to say? (For one of Irvine Welsh’s, a single word of four letters might be enough.) In the case of Patrick McGrath, I’d suggest, the answer comes on page 55 of
If you want to judge how much society has changed, you might do worse than visit a few secondhand bookshops. Obsolete volumes rest undisturbed on their shelves. The more popular they once were, the more unwanted copies accumulate. An almost inevitable presence nowadays is Sir Arthur Bryant, in his time a bestselling writer on historical
Two war correspondents were hitching a lift towards Paris in August 1944 when a sudden wave of German bombers forced them to dive for cover. What the hell were they doing trying to cadge a ride when ‘war correspondents have their own jeeps and drivers?’ an American officer barked at them as his car screeched
Dr Benzion Netanyahu’s reputation precedes him. ‘A true genius, who also happens to be a major statesman and political hero,’ writes one former colleague in a letter of recommendation. Unhelpfully, another letter follows where a different former colleague describes him as a ‘prolific rabble-rouser’, with ‘a history of inciting terrorist violence’. These letters land in
‘Everyone knows the Alexandria in Egypt,’ writes Edmund Richardson, ‘but there were over a dozen more Alexandrias scattered across Alexander the Great’s empire.’ By the early 19th century, though, very few had been identified. Moreover, the prevailing scholarly view was that there remained ‘not a single architectural monument of the Macedonian conquests in India’ —
Real Estate is the third and concluding volume of Deborah Levy’s ground-breaking ‘Living Autobiography’. Fans of Levy’s alluring, highly allusive fiction will appreciate the insights into her life; moreover, anyone with an ounce of curiosity will be fascinated by her compelling tour of city streets, island rocks and meandering diversions into ideas from a wealth
Charles Péguy’s adage that everything begins in mysticism and ends in politics is sharply illustrated by the development of the Irish Revolution. In his previous scintillating studies, Easter 1916: The Irish Rebellion and The Republic: The Fight for Irish Independence 1918–1923, Charles Townshend traced the progress of Ireland’s long-drawn-out severance from Britain. The completion of
When it comes to biography, some authors draw the punters, and others leave the mob cold. D.H. Lawrence has been written about a lot, from the moment he died. At least ten memoirs were published in the five years after his death by authors ranging from his sister and his wife to patrons such as
‘To see a world in a grain of sand’, to attain the mystical perception that Blake advocated, requires a concentrated, fertile imagination. Barbara Hepworth (1903-1975), one of the leading and most popular British sculptors of the 20th century, fervently imagined that her works expressed cosmic grandeur and her own spiritual aspirations. In the foreword to
New York in a nutshell? No way. New York in a New York minute? Forget about it. The city contains multitudes: it contradicts itself, wantonly. Any attempt to summarise will fail. Not even Craig Taylor’s delightful cacophony of voices, dozens and dozens of them spilling their New York stories, can compass its vastness and variety.
In his excellent, brief chronicle of foie gras, Norman Kolpas lists Kate Winslet, Ralph Fiennes, Thandie Newton, Ricky Gervais and the late Sir Roger Moore as among those who don’t want you to eat it, as well as Fortnum & Mason and the state legislature of California, which declared its production and sale illegal in
Deep in Peru’s Amazon rainforest sits a desolate zone, stretching for miles and pockmarked with chemical-tainted water that glistens orange and blue. This was the centre of the country’s illegal gold-mining operations, where tens of thousands of desperate people dug into the soil in search of a precious mineral that could make the difference between
Lisa McInerney likes the rule of three. Three novels set in Cork structured around sex, drugs and rock’n’roll and, within that, ‘smoke, coke and yokes [ecstasy], St Paddy’s modern trinity’. The Rules of Revelation follows her debut, The Glorious Heresies (winner of the 2016 Women’s Prize; in its focus on the relationship between teenagers Ryan
For his 15th novel, the espionage writer Alan Judd turns his hand to the mystery of Christopher Marlowe’s death. The result is never less than engrossing, with Judd putting the scanty known facts about the great playwright to ingenious use. The story is narrated from the King’s Bench prison by Thomas Phelipps 30 years after
Certain novels complicate the very notion of literary enjoyment. This, by the author of the international bestseller The Yacoubian Building, is such a one. Despite its gripping narrative, compelling structure and vivid characters, every time I picked it up it was with a sinking heart. In telling the story of the Egyptian revolution of 2011
Shakespeare’s first biographer was the gossipy antiquarian John Aubrey, who famously described the playwright as ‘not a company keeper’. It has long been tempting to see him this way: Shakespeare the aloof genius, almost divine. There’s something chilly in this vision, and scholarly work on Shakespeare of the past few decades has increasingly tended to
‘Something is afoot,’ wrote the academic philosopher Kathleen Stock in 2018: Beyond the academy, there’s a huge and impassioned discussion going on around the apparent conflict between women-who-are-not-transwomen’s rights and interests and transwomen’s rights and interests. And yet nearly all academic philosophers — including, surprisingly, feminist philosophers — are ignoring it. Material Girls picks up
The most extraordinary thing, still, about Operation Barbarossa is the complete surprise the Wehrmacht achieved. In the early hours of 22 June 1941 the largest invasion force in history, ultimately some three million men, struck at the Soviet Union on a front of nearly 2,000 miles. When Stalin was woken with the news, he wouldn’t
‘They’ll slowly undress us first and then kill us, so our clothes won’t get bloody and our banknotes won’t get damaged.’ These words, spoken by Otto Silbermann in Ulrich Alexander Boschwitz’s The Passenger, are startling. Not because they so perfectly articulate the obscene ethos of Auschwitz but because they were written several years before the
The title of Marc Morris’s new history makes me want to get up and dance a little jig. The modern Inquisition has been jabbing its finger at the term ‘Anglo-Saxon’, accusing it of thought crime and threatening it with the cucking stool. (At least one august history society in the US has renamed itself in
On 1 January 1806, a little over one year after his coronation, the Emperor Napoleon ordered the abolition of France’s new republican calendar and a return to the old Gregorian model. Over the past seven years republicans had grown used to ‘empire creep’, but even for those who had been forced to watch the principles
Nuclear weapons carry a payload of cold logic: if both sides have them, neither will ever use them. But in 1962, when the Soviet Union and US squared up to one another over Cuba, that logic broke down. As this superb new book shows, the Cuban Missile Crisis was the product of miscalculation, ignorance and
Robert Prowe has writer’s block. An Englishman reaching middle age, he lives in Berlin with his Swedish wife and their two young daughters: two prams in the hall, two enemies of promise. Having enjoyed some success with a collection of short stories, Robert has been commissioned to write a novel; but the submission date was
The potter and author Edmund de Waal revisits familiar terrain at an angle in his third book, Letters to Camondo. Ten years after the publication of his debut memoir, The Hare with Amber Eyes, he is once again in Paris, lurking about the rue de Monceau, ruminating on dust, trying to make the dead speak.
For many of us, Elon Musk is a hard man to like. He’s the richest man in the world (or second richest, as he and Amazon founder Jeff Bezos whirr back and forth in top spot), but acts online like a bratty teenager astonished by his own intelligence. He proposes underground tunnel networks as a
‘Holbein redeemed a whole era for us from oblivion,’ remarks the author of a trilogy of novels set at Henry VIII’s court. ‘He has forced us to believe that his vision of it was the only feasible one.’ This is a bit of a tease. It’s not written by Hilary Mantel, as you might be
Maki Kashimada won the 2012 Akutagawa Prize for Touring the Land of the Dead, the strange, unsettling novella that makes up half of this volume. It is translated here for the first time from the Japanese into English by Haydn Trowell, alongside Kashimada’s ‘Ninety-nine Kisses’, a short story based on Jun’ichiro Tanizaki’s classic novel about
Though the indefatigable Gyles Brandreth met and interviewed Prince Philip over a 40-year period, His Royal Highness managed to give very little away. ‘He would just look at me balefully and say nothing,’ Brandreth writes. Wondering what Prince Philip’s philosophy of life might be, ‘I didn’t get very far’. When asked about his childhood,‘he brushed
Charm is a weasel word; it can evoke the superficial and insincere, and engender suspicion and mistrust. But charm in its most authentic sense was surely the defining quality of the painter John Craxton, and it flavours this lively and richly coloured account of his life. Ian Collins only met the elderly Craxton — by