One of the curiosities of western art is that, until the 20th century, few visual artists were of Jewish ancestry. With odd exceptions such as the Pissarros and Simeon Solomon, the culture tended to produce verbal rather than visual imaginations. With the 20th century that changed. The important group of abstract expressionists that came out
Thomas R. Flynn has written an avowedly ‘intellectual biography’ of Jean-Paul Sartre, which might seem fitting. Sartre was nothing if not an intellectual — so much so that one struggles to think of him as anything but an intellectual. Albert Camus, Sartre’s great rival for the title of the 20th century’s most famous thinker, was
You can’t accuse John Gray of dodging the big questions, or indeed the big answers. His new book The Soul of the Marionette: A Short Enquiry into Human Freedom isn’t really that short and certainly isn’t confined to a reflection on human freedom. As a reviewer you’re often faced with books that are so bereft
The title of A.D. Miller’s follow-up to his Man Booker shortlisted debut Snowdrops refers not to lovers but to two British men who befriend each other in their early twenties in 1993 when in the US. Among the sights they see on a tour of Yosemite is a pair of old trees with a conjoined
Ahead of last year’s release of The Interview, the Seth Rogen film about two journalists instructed to assassinate Kim Jong-un, North Korea interpreted the film as ‘an act of war’. Sony Pictures were hacked by a group linked to North Korea and hundreds of humiliating titbits about spats between celebrities and Sony execs made public,
When Helen Garner, an award-winning Australian author, first saw the TV news images of the car being dragged out of the water, she uttered a prayer: ‘Oh Lord, let this be an accident.’ A strange, pessimistic, almost paranoid prayer. A car had swerved off a dark highway outside her hometown of Geelong, Australia, and plunged
In a cheeringly Dickensian fashion, the names of our supposed experts on grammar imply they want to bind writers (Lynne Truss); send them awry (Kingsley Amis); besmirch their prose (H.W. Fowler); deafen them with moos (Simon Heffer); or snort at their legitimate constructions (John Humphrys). At first glance, Oliver Kamm appears happy to keep them
For decades, all the outside world knew was that Patrice Lumumba, the Congolese independence leader, had been done away with. Like so much connected with the Congo, details were lost in the murk of Africa’s magnificent but broken giant. He had been fed to Katangan pigs, drowned in the river — or was perhaps even
Sir John Lister-Kaye has adopted a very familiar format in his new book of wildlife encounters. Essentially he charts a single 12-month cycle in the life of the Scottish Highlands near his home at the Aigas Field Centre, just to the west of Inverness. The author has lived in the region since the 1960s, when
My favourite fact about gyms before reading this book was that the average British gym member covers 468 miles per year and the average British dog walker 676. Eric Chaline’s history of the institution has offered up some competition on the fact front — but my cynicism remains undimmed. Chaline, a personal trainer and weightlifting
In a ‘Dear Bill’ letter in Private Eye, an imaginary Denis Thatcher wrote off the BBC as a nest of ‘pinkoes and traitors’. That drollery points to the corporation’s paradoxical place in British life: an essential part of the establishment (‘Auntie’) yet sometimes its most daring critic, willing to put impartiality above patriotism. Jean Seaton
