IN ASSOCIATION WITH THE PRINCIPAL PARTNERS OF SHAKESPEARE’S GLOBE’S 2019 SUMMER SEASON Last time in this space we were talking about Harry Hotspur’s role as a shadow-self for Prince Hal in Henry IV, Part One. But nor, of course, can we ignore the other pole around which the play swings: the sack-swilling anti-Santa
If you’re unsure whether Shaun Ryder’s lyrics for Happy Mondays and Black Grape really deserve the full Faber-poetry treatment, then you’re not alone. So, it seems, is Shaun Ryder. ‘I… wouldn’t call myself a poet,’ he writes in the preface, adding characteristically that ‘I’ve never put myself forward as an anguished wordsmith… like fucking Morrissey.’
In 1919, only months after the end of the Great War, a French airman called Jacques Trolley de Prevaux, accompanied by a cameraman, piloted an airship down the line of the old Western Front that stretched from the Belgian coast to the Swiss border. The result is a haunting piece of film in many ways,
Alex Dehgan is clearly someone with a penchant for hazardous jobs. Even in the first few pages we find him in postwar Baghdad, he had spent the early part of the century searching for Iraqi scientists who had previously worked on weapons’ manufacture for Saddam Hussein. Presumably the life-threatening risks entailed in that role were
The love of money, says St Paul, is the root of all evil. The Snakes makes much the same point. The novel is Sadie Jones’s fourth, and the first to be set in the present. It’s the story of Bea and Dan, a nice young couple who are struggling to make the repayments on their
English as the world’s lingua franca isn’t going anywhere. Why, then, should we Anglophones bother to learn another language? What’s in it for us? And what, more seriously, are the implications if we decide not to bother? Digging deeply into these questions, Marek Kohn’s book asks what it actually means to have some mastery of
‘I still think he was a bastard.’ This is the opinion that Julia, daughter of the novelist Arthur, has about Peter Abelard. In Melvyn Bragg’s narrative, Arthur is finishing his novel about Abelard and Heloise, living in Paris, separated from his wife, and visited by Julia. She gives a modern woman’s view of the behaviour
Some people might argue that Deborah Lipstadt has given us the book we desperately need from the author best equipped to write it. After all, in just the past few weeks the dumpster fire over the Labour party’s hand-ling of anti-Semitism burst into acrid flame again over general secretary Jenny Formby’s release of Labour’s record
The journalist Auberon Waugh, in whose time-capsule of a flat I briefly lived in 2000, once summed up what he took to be the primary motivations for writing books. ‘With women, there is this tremendous desire to expose themselves. With men, it is more often an obscure form of revenge.’ In the case of the
Mister Miracle is, on the face of it, one of the cheesiest of all costumed super-heroes. Created by Jack Kirby in 1971, he’s a gaudily dressed glint from the last gleaming of the Silver Age. Like the fictional ‘Escapist’ created by Michael Chabon in his Kirby-drenched Kavalier and Clay, Scott Free is part superhero and
There’s no getting away from that title. I will never see the world again. It catches your eye on the bookshelf. I will never see the world again. It’s there, at the top of every page. I Will Never See the World Again. It’s a killer opening, before the book has even begun, and it’s
Charlotte Bingham has had an extraordinary writing career. She wrote her first book, Coronet Among the Weeds (newly republished by Bloomsbury), when she was just 19. It was a memoir of her life as a 1950s debutante — the ‘weeds’ were the chinless wonders she met at debs’ dances — and it became an instant
Max Porter’s first book, Grief is the Thing with Feathers (2015), got a lot of credit for finding original ways to talk about two of the oldest subjects under the sun: human love and human death. It’s hero is a young father writing a book about Ted Hughes, whose distress at the death of his
A good question for your upcoming Lent quiz: where are angels mentioned in the Nicene Creed? I asked this at a vicarage supper party after finishing Peter Stanford’s highly informative book about angels, which had left me angel-obsessed and an angel bore. No one came up with the answer. ‘Of all things visible and invisible,
Anyone who has issues with Tolkien (at 16, even in a suitably ‘altered state’, I could not finish The Hobbit, never mind The Lord of the Rings), anyone who falls asleep while watching a tedious Joseph Campbell-formula flick such as Star Wars, anyone saddened by the 2014 BBC poll of adult readers that included six
IN ASSOCIATION WITH THE PRINCIPAL PARTNERS OF SHAKESPEARE’S GLOBE’S 2019 SUMMER SEASON We’ve been looking at various aspects of Richard II, which has just opened at Shakespeare’s Globe. Now to turn our attention a little further into the future. Richard II was only the opener for the remarkable run of history plays that are the
When the poet George Szirtes returned as an adult to Budapest, the city of his birth which he had left as a child with his family in 1956, he experienced what became an abiding fantasy. He imagined his mother going back to the family flat but, instead of sitting down in a chair, she carried
The publication of In the Closet of the Vatican by the French gay polemicist Frédéric Martel has been meticulously timed to coincide with Pope Francis’s ‘global summit’ of bishops to discuss the sexual abuse of minors. The book appeared in eight languages on Thursday morning, just as the gathering began. It is being hyped as
I am undoubtedly, alas, an example of what the Fowler brothers, H.W. and F.G., of The King’s English fame, would have called ‘a half-educated Englishman of literary proclivities’. Fellow half-educateds of similar proclivities will doubtless recall that scene in the third chapter of Our Mutual Friend, when Gaffer Hexam shows Mortimer Lightwood and Eugene Wrayburn
If the road to hell is paved with good intentions, the one to heaven may be surfaced with bad ones. We like to imagine otherwise. We are rational, sensible, moral creatures. If we only think scientifically and apply ourselves, we can achieve anything. Hence the recent secular historiography of the Enlightenment and modern world, which,
