The good, the bad and the ugly in books, exhibitions, cinema, TV, dance, music, podcasts and theatre.
Robert Harris has long been on a one-man crusade to reverse history’s negative verdict on the architect of appeasement. He argues that it was Neville Chamberlain’s duty to go the extra mile for peace and give Britain the moral authority to fight Hitler in the second world war. ‘There seems to be a general feeling
Any student of Chinese will sympathise with the 17th-century Jesuit priest Fr Emeric Langlois de Chavagnac when he wrote: ‘One can only endure the pain of learning it for the love of God.’ With its convoluted characters, subtle tones and numerous homonyms, it can seem as though the language just doesn’t want to be learned.
Madeleine Slade, born in 1892, was a typical upper-class Victorian daughter of empire: a childhood riding around her grand-father’s estate in Surrey was followed by years of rejecting suitors and performing Beethoven on the piano. Occasionally she would sail across the world to visit her father, the commander-in-chief of the East Indies Squadron, who was
Fedor Zan was 18, working on the river closing sluices, when, on a winter afternoon in 1942, he saw his childhood friend Andrei Sawoniuk standing in a clearing outside Domachevo, their town in Belarus. Sawoniuk had lined up 15 terrified women, all wearing the yellow Jewish star. As Zan watched, hidden behind the pine trees,
When Zorrie Underwood, the titular character in Laird Hunt’s deeply touching novel about an Indiana farm woman, is pregnant, a little girl asks how her baby breathes. ‘Like a fish,’ says Zorrie, which is how Hunt treats his readers, luring them with a snapshot of Zorrie’s diminishing days before reeling them in as her life
The extent of Walt Disney’s grasp of the natural world remains unclear. After the Austrian author Felix Salten sold the rights to his 1923 bestseller Bambi for a paltry $1,000, Walt is reputed to have suggested myriad unhelpful plot additions to the simple story. ‘Suppose we have Bambi step on an ant hill,’ he offered
What is ‘immigrant food’? In America, the answer can be just about anything — from burritos to bibimbap to burgers. In a country shaped by immigrants, there is little else but immigrant food. But while some food cultures are firmly embedded in the American mainstream, well-mixed into the fabled ‘melting pot’, others are not. This
Never, never kill the dog. It’s rule one in the crime writer’s manual. Cats are bad enough, as I can testify, having once had the temerity to behead a cat — in a novel, I mean —and then crucify the mutilated corpse upside down on a church door. As a general rule, if you kill
The Swiss writer Peter Stamm’s inscrutable, alienated outsiders make bizarre choices to escape stifling mundanity. Their discontent suggests malaise, something Stamm accentuates in his spare prose. The result is a distilled essence of unease: the reader is uncomfortable, but can’t look away. This masterful combination of fundamental themes, explored without embellishment through confused lives, has
The rules of sex can kill. In 1844 an angry mob shot Joseph Smith, the founder of Mormonism, for his polygamous ways. But in the counterculture today, polyamorists face less of a physical threat and more of a metaphysical one, as chronicled by the journalist Rachel Krantz in her tortured book Open: An Uncensored Memoir
Edmund White’s new novel opens, somewhat improbably, in 2050. This imagined future, however, springs few surprises on the reader and is in fact almost identical to the present. Indeed, the leap forward in time is merely a narrative device, allowing a 70-year-old Sicilian aristocrat to reminisce about his affair 30 years earlier with the elderly
‘The two most fascinating subjects in the universe are sex and the 18th century,’ declared the novelist Brigid Brophy when the ban on Fanny Hill was lifted in 1963. Penelope Corfield’s big, handsome, enjoyable book goes a good way to illustrating Brophy’s assertion. Part source book, part interpretive history of the long 18th century (1688-1837),
In an author’s note at the beginning of her biography of Elizabeth Hardwick, Cathy Curtis warns that she has included ‘only as much information’ about Hardwick’s ‘famous husband, the poet Robert Lowell, as is necessary to tell the story of her life’. Ironically, this caveat highlights Hardwick’s status as another wife of the poet. There’s
Sir Simon Rattle and the London Symphony Orchestra began the year with a world première. Unsuk Chin’s Second Violin Concerto opened with the soloist, Leonidas Kavakos, completely alone in front of a silent orchestra, playing phrases that rocked back and forth until, suddenly, they were striking sparks. As well they might; Kavakos, after all, is
As you may have noticed, it’s something of a golden age for TV shows about how invisible middle-aged women are — except perhaps, in all those TV shows about how invisible middle-aged women are. At first sight, Rules of the Game — a crime drama set in a northern sportswear company — seemed a fairly
The latest film from Andrea Arnold (Red Road, Fish Tank, American Honey) is a feature-length documentary about a cow, starring a cow, with almost nothing else in it, apart from this cow. It feels like a test. Can I watch a cow for 93 minutes? What does this cow do that’s so interesting? I see
Hampstead Theatre has revived a play about Peggy Ramsay, the legendary West End agent who shaped the careers of Joe Orton, Robert Bolt, David Hare and others. We first meet her on the phone to a dramatist whose new script is good but, warns Peggy, it must not be produced because it will damage his
If there’s any form of entertainment that I will reliably find time for, no matter how big the to-read pile or how long the to-do list, it is the dying-on-an-adventure true story. I have yet to watch about half the films being called the best of the year, but I am devouring documentaries about hikers
In 1950 the 21-year-old painter Helen Frankenthaler, fresh out of college, went to an exhibition at New York’s Betty Parson’s Gallery that changed her whole perspective on art. ‘It was as if I suddenly went to a foreign country,’ she later recalled. ‘I wanted to live in this land; I had to live there, and
Grade: A I have persisted in buying everything Neil Young releases since I first heard On the Beach as a callow but pretentious 13-year-old. To tell you the truth, the past 27 years have somewhat tested this commitment. There has been a fatal laziness in the songwriting, lyrically and melodically, since 1994’s Sleeps with Angels
There always comes a moment in the films of Apichatpong Weerasethakul where you’re forced to scoop your brain up from the floor. In his last, Cemetery of Splendour, this occurs at the point where the sky is invaded by a colossal blimpish amoeba. You stare. Blink. Adjust eyes. It slowly dawns that you’re peering into
Tessa Hadley is the queen of the portentous evening, the pregnant light and the carefully composed life unwittingly waiting to be unravelled. Free Love, like its predecessor Late in the Day, begins on one such evening. The year is 1967 and Phyllis, a suburban housewife, is applying her make-up. She and her husband, a ‘respected
At a village train station in deepest Kent two men and their pet mongoose are setting off on their honeymoon. The men are Otto and Xavier Shin and the mongoose is Árpád Montague XXX; the train is the Lucky Day — a former tea-smuggler’s transportation, now home to a mysterious woman named Ava Kapoor. They
There’s a scene in Martin Amis’s 1990s revenge comedy The Information in which a book reviewer, who’s crushed by his failures and rendered literally impotent by his best friend’s success, is sitting in a low-lit suburban room beside a girl (not his wife) named Belladonna: ‘She was definitely younger than him. He was a modernist.
When is a life worth telling? The Soviet writer Konstantin Paustovsky’s six-volume autobiography The Story of a Life combines high drama with heroic misadventure in a comico-lyrical amalgam of history and domestic detail that enchants from start to finish. Why Paustovsky is not better known outside his native Moscow is a mystery. In the mid-1960s
‘Male writers now are the opposition party, and that may not be such a bad thing for them.’ So Rob Doyle writes in this addictive self-portrait/collection of reviews. And if male writers are now in navel-gazing opposition, ousted by a landslide of female talent, judging by this book Doyle is one of their most reactionary
The premise of White Debt is that the author’s ancestors ran a business selling a product grown by slaves. Therefore he wants to investigate Britain’s role in slavery — which is a rather odd framing, since his family’s tobacco firm wasn’t started until decades after slavery in British colonies was abolished. But Thomas Harding apparently
Last year was the 200th anniversary of the outbreak of the war of Greek independence in March 1821. It has been celebrated by a flood of books and events, a particularly instructive exhibition at the Benaki Museum in Athens and this gruesome page-turner. Mark Mazower, professor of history at Columbia University and the author of
In the world of books, a modern classic is an altogether more slippery thing than a classic: it must walk a line between freshness and durability; reflect the current age but hope to outlast it. For individual publishers, given many 20th-century writers are still in copyright, a modern classics list will necessarily be partial. However,