On Frank Zappa’s first date with Gail Sloatman, he blew his nose on her skirt. As acts of territory-marking go, it’s hard to imagine something more equivocal. But Gail, a 20-year-old secretary at Los Angeles’s Whisky a Go Go club, must have read it as love. She built her life around the musician, composer and
Rocks are still and lifeless things, and geologists are men with beards whose emotional bandwidth is taken up with an unnatural attachment to cherts and clasts and the chill beauty of the subducted lithosphere. Such is the stereotype. The academic geologist and New Yorker contributor Marcia Bjornerud has managed to go a fair distance towards
I am married to a wood snob. When we bought our house in 1999, my husband insisted that all the shelves (he is an antiquarian book dealer, so there are miles of them) should be made of ‘real’ wood, with not an inch of Medium Density Fibreboard. The price made me squeal. But a quarter
Emily Wilson, the distinguished translator of Homer, has remarked that Pat Barker’s The Silence of the Girls about the Trojan War is a distinctly feminist book. Renowned for her first world war Regeneration trilogy, Barker has now written a powerful novel about the first part of Aeschylus’s Oresteia. She takes the infrastructure of legend and
You must remember this… Harry Morgan is leaning on the bar wondering how the femme fatale and her wounded freedom fighter husband are doing. Then Slim walks in, wearing two wisps of black satin linked by a hoop around her navel. Harry tells her it’s time he checked on his patient. ‘Give her my love,’
I’ve just returned from five days in the Lake District, attending the biennial ‘Friends of Coleridge’ conference in Grasmere. All the other attendees were seasoned Coleridge scholars, but I was a newbie. The reason for my going was the fact that I’m engaged in a project that has at times felt something of a lonesome
Last year, the Proms had a ‘Northern Soul’ special concert; and Benjamin Myers won the Goldsmith’s Prize for Cuddy, his polyphonic novel about St Cuthbert’s afterlife. I do not think he will win the prize again this year for Rare Singles, his novel about Northern Soul. I am glad about the Prom though, since I
According to Clive James: ‘A life without fame can be a good life, but fame without a life is no life at all.’ In My Family: The Memoir, the famous comedian David Baddiel proves he’s also had a life. Or, at least, a family. For anyone who hasn’t been paying attention – and Baddiel, as
These days we use radar to help us park our cars, but during the early years of the second world war it was white hot technology and a closely guarded military secret. First used to detect aircraft in 1935, within a few years it had helped win the Battle of Britain and sink the Bismarck.
Charlotte Mendelson has been described in the Times as a ‘master at family drama’, and her previous novel, The Exhibitionist (2022), contained in Ray Hanrahan one of the most odious fictional husbands ever. Mendelson clearly has an appetite as well as talent for writing awful spouses. In her latest novel, Wife, Penny Cartwright is if
Three philosophers walk into a crypto-currency. Resistance Money: A Philosophical Case for Bitcoin, I’d argue, is a slightly inaccurate title. Messrs Bailey, Rettler and Warmke have composed a book that is a meticulous and unphilosophically lucid examination of the origins and properties of bitcoin. No Hegel, no Husserl, no fuss. ‘We don’t prophesy,’ they state.
Some 100,000 books have been written about the American Civil War since it ended in 1865. That’s hardly surprising, given the four-year conflict’s impact on society, and not just because of the immense death toll, which new estimates put as high as 750,000 – more than the losses from all other wars combined. The effusion
Goodbye to Russia is an elegy for a lost country – the warm, chaotic Russia of unlimited possibility that welcomed the 18-year-old Sarah Rainsford in 1992. She stayed on, studied, worked in an Irish bar in St Petersburg, joined the BBC in 2000 and, after spells in other parts of the world, returned to Moscow
Synchronised swimming isn’t really a sport, is it? It’s ‘artistic swimming’ now, of course, though many athletes don’t like that term precisely because it makes the Olympic event sound less like a real sport. But by the end of Swimming Pretty, Vicki Valosik’s meticulous history of synchronised swimming, it’s difficult to think of it as
‘The politics of Paul Foot are an extraordinary mixture of first-class reporting, primitive Marxism, family wit and fantasy.’ This judgment is taken from a review of Foot’s first book, The Politics of Harold Wilson (1968). The reviewer was well placed to assess it, and, according to this biography, he ‘tore the book apart’. As well
‘The House’ in the title of Richard Davenport-Hines’s engaging new book is Christ Church, by any reckoning the grandest of Oxford’s colleges. The place has always been, he notes, akin ‘to an autonomous duchy within a larger federated kingdom’, and thus ‘a separate realm of memory’. Notoriously, its teachers and researchers are referred to not
On reaching the end of Hettie Judah’s Acts of Creation, I felt somewhat overwhelmed. At 272 pages, the book isn’t particularly large, but the time span it covers, from prehistoric goddess figures to Laure Prouvost’s 2021 cyborg-octopus installation ‘MOOTHERR’, is enormous. The trajectories, practices and obsessions of the artists discussed range far and wide. Written
In 2021, a financial newspaper estimated the American televangelist Kenneth Copeland’s wealth to be in the region of $750 million. This fortune has helped the preacher build a property empire and purchase a fleet of private jets – acquisitions, he says, ordained by God. Gillis, the principal character in Chris Kohler’s Phantom Limb, has not
A drop of water falls on the head of Ashur-banal, the erudite but merciless king of Assyria, as he walks through his capital, Nineveh. Having dissolved into the atmosphere, it reappears in 1840 as a snowflake that falls into the mouth of King Arthur of the Sewers and Slums, the fancifully named son of a
We are blessed to be living in a golden age of anchovies. They’re everywhere – lacing salads, festooning pizzas, draped across inordinately expensive small plates. In certain circles, there are few more potent social signifiers than the red, yellow and blue of an Ortiz tin. Victory for the umami junkies. How times change. Today the