According to David Hepworth, the year he turned 21 was also the year when ‘a huge proportion of the most memorable albums ever made were released’. Having been a rock journalist for four decades, he does of course know the theory that everybody thinks music was at its best when they were young. But, as
George Bell (1883–1958) was, in many respects, a typical Anglican prelate of his era. He went to Westminster and Christ Church, and passed his career in the C of E’s fast stream. Never a parish priest, he became, first, chaplain (and later, biographer) of the Archbishop of Canterbury, Randall Davidson; next, Dean of Canterbury; finally,
Trencherman was first published in Afrikaans in 2006 and translated into English for a South African readership shortly afterwards, but has only now found a UK publisher. Eben Venter — one of the notable voices in white South African writing post-Apartheid — has been ‘temporarily’ based in Australia for more than two decades, but returns
If you could travel back in time, would you kill Hitler’s mother, seek out your old house and play ball with your former self, or locate your (eventual) wife during her unhappy adolescence and punch her violent boyfriends? These are the dilemmas facing Jack, the hero of Daniel Clowes’s latest graphic novel. The murderous attitude
Nordic noir is passé. Now we have Israeli noir. Waking Lions is a mordant thriller written by a clinical psychologist who knows how the mind is tortured by deception, infidelity, obfuscation, suspicion and sex. Eitan Green is a neurosurgeon who, exhilaratedly driving his SUV at speed on the desert tracks outside Beersheba, runs down an
The idea for a mechanical cock was never going to work. In 1595 the English ambassador to Constantinople, Edward Barton, advised Queen Elizabeth I that the surest way for her to impress Sultan Mehmed III, the new leader of the formidable Ottoman empire, was to send him a ‘clock in the form of a cock’.
In his new book Apostle Tom Bissell has an advantage over writers who go looking for Jesus: he can start with human remains. His frame for this uneven combination of travel and Church history is a series of trips to the alleged tombs of the apostles. To flesh out 13 ghosts (the 12 disciples and
My last review for The Spectator was of Julian Barnes’s biographical novel about Shostakovitch. A Girl in Exile also depicts the life of an artist favoured by a brutally oppressive regime, this time written by one who was there. Ismail Kadare survived the rule of that isolationist tyrant Enver Hoxha. In some quarters, Kadare has
Margaret Forster, who died on 8 February, excelled at writing about complex relationships between women. Even old friends, she demonstrated, can experience jealousy, disapproval or dislike. Here, ‘Sarah’ has changed her name to live incognito on the west coast of Cumbria, in a town chosen at random. When she gets locked out of her house,
The Sun is a star that many astronomers assume is only worth studying because of its averageness; it’s middle-aged and middle-sized. Its convenient proximity to us means it can act as a testbed for physics research. But we’re too well-schooled in the Copernican principle to view it as ‘special’ in any way. In contrast, Lucie
Valerio Varesi, the Turin-born crime writer, displays a typically Italian interest (I would say) in conspiracy theory. The Italian term dietrologia, which translates, not very happily, as ‘behindology’, presumes that shadowy consortia are everywhere manipulating political scandals. A Woman Much Missed, the fourth of the excellent Commissario Soneri thrillers to be translated into English, unfolds
On 1 November 2006 Alexander Litvinenko, ex-KGB officer and by then a British citizen, met two of his former colleagues, Andrei Lugovoi and Dmitri Kovtun, in Mayfair and drank a cup of tea with them. What happened next must count as the century’s most gruesome crime so far. The tea taken by Litvinenko was laced
At nearly eight foot high and five foot wide, Adélaïde Labille-Guiard’s portrait of herself with two of her students is by any reckoning a tour-de-force. Painted in 1785, it shows the artist seated at her easel, palette, brushes and mahlstick in hand, as though looking up briefly before adding to the large canvas before her.
Eileen is an accomplished, disturbing and creepily funny first novel by Ottessa Moshfegh, the latest darling of the Paris Review, which has published her stories and given her a prize. It recalls, half a century later, a week in the life of Eileen Dunlop, leading up to Christmas 1964. Her mother, whom she loathed, has
With ‘both arms stretched out like a starfish, her long hair floating like seaweed at the sides of her body’, Kitty Finch swam naked into view in Deborah Levy’s Booker-shortlisted Swimming Home. Similarly, in Hot Milk, Sofia Papastergiadis loves to swim —as, indeed, does Levy herself. Only, whereas Kitty swims up and down the gravelike
In 1963, when the bloom was still on the rose, Bob Dylan described Woodstock as a place where ‘we stop the clouds, turn time back and inside out, make the sun turn on and off… the greatest place’. Six years later, he wrote in Chronicles: Volume One, ‘Woodstock had turned into a nightmare, a place
We can all identify decades in which the world moved forward. Wars are not entirely negative experiences: the social and technological advances of the 1910s and 1940s are obvious. Ben Wilson has been more thoughtful, and has chosen the 1850s — or, more specifically, the years from 1851 to 1862. It was a time when,
Sitting at her desk at the BBC in March 2006, researching a documentary about the Olympic Games, Caroline Jones pressed her thumbs deep into her eyelids, allowed herself to visualise a chocolate brownie and started to salivate. After work she stopped at the supermarket and bought some brownies… along with a chocolate loaf cake and
The author of this jam-packed treasure trove has been a film critic at the New York Times since 2000 and is also professor of film criticism at Wesleyan University. As if these platforms weren’t enough, he’s now written a book about the tangled worlds of films, books, music, paintings and criticism, dragging in Aristotle, Pope,
The decrepitude of old age is a piteous sight and subject. In his second book Michael Honig — a doctor-turned-novelist and sharp observer of the body’s frailties, and the mind’s — zanily explores it through the imagined senility of Vladimir Putin, once supremely powerful, now struggling to tie his laces. The horror, sadness and momentary