God, I wish I was Janet Malcolm. Fifty or more years as a staff writer on the New Yorker, reviews in the New York Review of Books, the occasional incendiary non-fiction bestseller (In the Freud Archives, The Journalist and the Murderer, The Silent Woman: Sylvia Plath and Ted Hughes), even the famous lawsuit. (She was
Surely God, if He existed, would find a major source of entertainment down the ages in the activities of theologians, reaching their climax perhaps in the 19th century, when they involved Him with German idealism, and then the descent from that to the present day, when the sheer naivete of anyone who thinks that God
‘You are what you eat.’ The old phrase always reminds me of Denzil, John Sparkes’s character in the comedy sketch show Absolutely, who quotes it to his girlfriend and then adds: ‘And you have obviously eaten something very stupid.’ Pete Brown, on the other hand, has taken it as the theme of his book about
Like many a 20th-century publishing house, the fine old firm of Faber & Faber came about almost by accident. The inaugurating Faber — Geoffrey — was an All Souls don in search of a livelihood, who began his career in the post-Great War book trade by investing in the Scientific Press, publishers of the Nursing
IN ASSOCIATION WITH THE PRINCIPAL PARTNERS OF SHAKESPEARE’S GLOBE’S 2019 SUMMER SEASON As I noted last week, the dramatic climax of Henry IV, Part Two — that stew of rot and renewal — is reached when Prince Hal casts off the roguish companion of his younger years, ‘the tutor and the feeder of
Timothy Hyde’s Ugliness and Judgment: On Architecture in the Public Eye is not about why we find things ugly. It’s not even about what ugliness is, or why our understanding of what it is see-saws so violently. We don’t learn why people once loathed John Nash’s All Souls at Langham Place, one MP calling it
John Buchan was a novelist, historian, poet, biographer and journalist (assistant editor of The Spectator indeed); a barrister and publisher; one of Lord Milner’s ‘young men’, charged with the reconstruction of South Africa after the second Boer war; director of propaganda 1917–18, a Member of Parliament; lord high commissioner (i.e. the king’s representative) to the
Norway doesn’t have a world-class philosopher (Kierkegaard was Danish). Karl Ove Knausgaard declared at the end of his previous book that he is no longer a writer, and it looks as though he’s moving in to fill that space. A very modern space: a selfie space. Nietzsche observed that all philosophy is autobiography, and Knausgaard
Jill Dawson has a taste for murder. One of her earlier novels, the Orange shortlisted Fred and Edie, fictionalised the 1922 Bywaters and Thompson murder case. More recently, The Crime Writer cunningly blended an English episode from the life of Patricia Highsmith with elements of one of Highsmith’s own crime novels. Now Dawson has turned
What do the following filmmakers have in common: Victor Fleming, John Ford, Henry Hathaway, Howard Hawks, Alfred Hitchcock, Ernst Lubitsch, Lewis Milestone, Otto Preminger, Josef von Sternberg, George Stevens, Charles Vidor, King Vidor, Orson Welles and William Wyler? I know, it’s a toughie — and it isn’t much less tough if you consult IMDb. But
What is creativity? Marcus du Sautoy, a mathematician and Oxford professor for the public understanding of science, offers this pert definition in his introduction: ‘Creativity is the drive to come up with something that is new and surprising and that has value.’ This, he argues, is possible in mathematics (he himself invented a new kind
Vasily Grossman’s novel Life and Fate (completed in 1960) has been hailed as a 20th-century War and Peace. It has been translated into most European languages and also into Chinese, Japanese, Korean, Turkish and Vietnamese. There have been stage productions, TV series and an eight-hour BBC radio dramatisation. And Grossman himself — like Leo Tolstoy,
There are more than 100 cathedrals in England, Scotland and Wales of many different denominations (although I for one had been previously unaware of the Belarus Autocephalous Orthodox Church). But, wisely, Christopher Somerville focuses on those great galleons with which we are most familiar: the cathedrals that first rose up above the plains of England
IN ASSOCIATION WITH THE PRINCIPAL PARTNERS OF SHAKESPEARE’S GLOBE’S 2019 SUMMER SEASON And so, as we continue through the Summer Season of history plays at Shakespeare’s Globe — supported by principal partner Merian Global Investors — to Henry IV: Part Two, which opens this week. This is, for my money, the most complex and moving
Say what you like about the efficiency of the Kindle, one day we’re going to wake up and miss the lizards. Among the many lost methods of making an illuminated book in the pioneering days of Renaissance printing, the way we once obtained powdered gold may be the most lamented: ‘In a pot place nine
At a dinner recently I was told the story of a Canadian billionaire (now defined in banking circles as someone withmore than $500 million in liquid assets) who is building an escape destination from the oncoming climate apocalypse: an ersatz Versailles, with two runways, deep in the thawing Canadian tundra. Four hundred years earlier, the
What kind of loyalty do we owe a robot we’ve paid for — one who exhibits a convincingly human kind of consciousness? Less loyalty than we owe to our own children? But what about to someone else’s child? And do we commit murder if we destroy him? These are the questions facing Charlie when he
Titania McGrath is the alter ego of the schoolteacher Andrew Doyle. A perpetually enraged ‘activist, healer and radical intersectional poet’, her job was to lampoon the imbecilities of the achingly ‘woke’ middle class left, and expose the manifest contradictions in what they were spouting. Her forum for this was, of course, that vast lagoon of
In matters of culture and ethnicity, I take my lead from my old friend and guide Sir Jonathan Miller. Like him, I count myself as Jew-ish, and, as every Jew-ish person knows, you are what you eat; these traits are expressed most poignantly in our food. Not in the ancient (and incoherent) Hebrew dietary laws,
Women who can — however tenuously — be described as ‘rebel girls’ are big in publishing now. Goodnight Stories for Rebel Girls sold 3.5 million copies in hardback, reflecting a huge cultural push to discover and venerate women in history who kicked over the traces. To publishers, real-life rebel princesses have cool hard-cash value. In