Matt Suggests

BOOK

Nixon and Kissinger: Partners in Power by Robert Dallek: The double biography is a genre that, in the hands of a master, can shed fresh light on the most familiar materials. Alan Bullock’s Hitler and Stalin is the example nonpareil and, more recently, Andrew Roberts has produced splendid volumes on (for example) Napoleon and Wellington. Funnily enough, I attended a lunch in Kissinger’s honour at Andrew’s house recently, as I was ploughing my way through Dallek’s majestic book which shows how the lives of these two very different men were interwoven and shaped the destiny of America in the second half of the twentieth century. Reading of Nixon’s hatred of the social establishment from which he felt so excluded it is hard not to be reminded of Gordon Brown. Does that make Ed Balls a latter-day Kissinger? You decide.

Miss Herbert – Adam Thirlwell. I have only just begun this formidable book by one of our most promising young novelists but it shows every sign of being even more thought-provoking than his astonishing debut, Politics.

FILM

Better late than never, I went to see Control, Anton Corbijn’s film about Ian Curtis and Joy Division – and adored it. Sam Riley’s performance as the band’s doomed lead singer is extraordinary and the cinematography – as you expect of Corbijn – captures both the drabness of the band’s social origins and the bleakness of Curtis’s philosophy. But what I liked most about the film was that, at last, it humanised its subject, who, more than almost any dead pop star, has been disfigured in memory as a sort of existentialist mannequin. In fact, as the film makes clear, he was a very young, very confused man with a wife and child, suffering from terrifying epileptic fits, expected to give it his all on stage.