The good, the bad and the ugly in books, exhibitions, cinema, TV, dance, music, podcasts and theatre.
Nobody could argue that Andrew Davies isn’t up for a challenge. He’d also surely be a shoo-in for Monty Python’s Summarise Proust competition. After turning both War and Peace and Les Misérables into satisfying, unhurried six-part drama series, he’s now taken on Vikram Seth’s 1,300-page novel A Suitable Boy. The first episode started with a
In Russian, the proverb ‘Ignorance is bliss’ translates as ‘The less you know, the better you sleep’. For those who experienced the worst of the Soviet Union’s terrors, this is not just a throwaway adage but a strategy for self-preservation. As Alex Halberstadt’s father — the son of one of Stalin’s former bodyguards — attests:
Covid-19 has been bad news for writers with books coming out — unless the book is about breathing. We’re all now gripped by our airways, by the significance of a runny nose, a sore throat or chest tightness. We know to dread that once obscure symptom, anosmia. We debate the risks of breathing through two-ply
Home, as James Baldwin wrote, is perhaps ‘not a place but simply an irrevocable condition’. Sarah M. Broom’s National Book Award-winning memoir The Yellow House is a sweeping social history and condition report of the New Orleans neighbourhood in which she grew up. The youngest of 12 children in a blended household, Broom was born
Keith Douglas is perhaps the best-known overlooked poet. He died following the D-Day landings in 1944, and his Collected Poems were published in 1951, followed by a Selected Poems in 1964. ‘Now, 20 years after his death,’ wrote Ted Hughes in his slightly puffy introduction to that volume, ‘it is becoming clear that he offers
All it takes to turn a cast-off into a prized possession can be a bit of imagination. To a passerby, a bookcase left on the pavement might be perfect for that impossible-to-furnish alcove. An empty bottle, once the waves have worn it smooth, could become a precious jewel for a beachcomber. In an instant a
The montane forests of far-eastern Russia have given rise to one of the finest nature books of recent years, The Great Soul of Siberia. In it the Korean cameraman Sooyong Park describes his quest to document the life of the region’s Amur tigers, evoking both his totem beast and its remarkable landscape in loving detail.
Tim Parks is a seasoned, incisive observer of football, the railways, work, domestication and plenty more in his adoptive country of half a lifetime. What is, what ought to be and the machinations in the delta between provide much of his material. In this tale of two countries in one, bright, hard-working Valeria leaves Basilicata
The cosiest way to read The End of Everything, Katie Mack’s fast-paced book about universal death, is as a murder mystery. Everything in spacetime, including the reader’s understanding of much of the story, is in the shadows. Black holes, quarks and gluons, Cepheid variables, the Concordance Model? Mere words, strewn across the floor. Believability, restraint
Some faint hearts may sink at the idea of a torrid Swedish family drama peopled with nameless figures identified only as ‘a grandfather who is a father’, ‘a sister who is a mother’, and so on. Stick around: this gets better. That grandfather, an immigrant trader who ‘could sell sand to a beach’ or ‘wind
When you leave Bekonscot, the world looks different. The semis and grass verges of suburban Beaconsfield seem slightly wrong: too large, too assertive. It takes a minute or two to adjust your perspective — to size yourself up, or bring the surrounding houses down. In that moment, you experience the sensation described by Will Self
Travelling around Latin America three years ago, Stephen Chambers was attracted by pharmacy signs with pictograms advertising treatments to illiterate customers, and on his return he painted a series of serio-comic pictures of fatal diseases from the plague to bird flu. Could he get a gallery to show them? Could he hell. They all complained
Two films about young women this week, one at the cinema, if you dare, and one to stream, if you don’t. Saint Frances requires the daring and I’d dare, if I were you, as it’s splendid and funny and tender and involving and taboo-busting, and if you do contract a deadly virus, it’ll be worth
There’s a scene in the French espionage series The Bureau — about the DGSE, France’s equivalent of the CIA or MI6 —where one of the characters loses a limb while on active service. ‘Excellent,’ jokes the station boss on his return. ‘This will greatly improve our diversity quota for disabled employees.’ This is why I
I always want to know more about Louis Theroux, which is odd, since I’ve seen so much of him already. I’ve seen him hanging out with Nazis, auditioning for Broadway and undergoing liposuction. I’ve seen him chased by scientologists and given the runaround by Jimmy Savile. I’ve even seen him evading the insistent romantic advances
There was only so long anyone could put up with the live musical performances of the early days of lockdown: musicians in their living rooms, performing stripped-back versions of their songs in broadcasts that froze or stuttered. The time would come, inevitably, when everyone wanted more. Viewers would want something more closely approximating a full
The BBC announces Merchant of Venice as if it were a Hollywood blockbuster. ‘In the melting pot of Venice, trade is God.’ The RSC, which staged the show in 2015, calls it ‘a thrilling, contemporary interpretation’. Each element in Polly Findlay’s production looks fine. Jacob Fortune-Lloyd and Patsy Ferran (Bassanio and Portia) are as cute
A book about breaking confidences, not to mention friendships, rather begs the same in return. Reading Anne Applebaum’s brief memoir of the world going mad around her sparked a memory of my own. It is a couple of days after the Brexit vote, and several hundred of us have gathered in London for the memorial
This is a strange but valuable book. The author is a private equity magnate, whose fascination for Richard Burdon Haldane dates back to his childhood. In his acknowledgments he admits he lacked the expertise to write a proper book about his hero, and so enlisted the help of a young scholar, Richard McLauchlan, credited on
Are all children of famous parents told they must have a book in them? Since Allegra Huston’s wonderful memoir Love Child in 2009, standards have been slipping. More Than Love is by a minor actress whose only claim to fame is that she is the daughter of Natalie Wood and won’t ever let you forget
Short story writers often find it irksome to be asked when the novel is coming out, as though their work was just rookie preparation for something more substantial. (That said, many do go on to write that novel.) The Dear Departed is, amazingly, the first selection of Brian Moore’s short stories to be published. Written
Melancholy pervades this novel: a sense of glasses considerably more than half empty, with the levels sinking fast. This is largely due to its central character, John Dyer, a former journalist in his late fifties, who has returned from years in South America to live in Oxford and write a book about Portugal’s accidental discovery
Wendy Williams is an enthusiast, and enthusiasm is infectious. Lepidoptery is for her a new fascination, and it shows. On the plus side, her excitement shimmers as freshly as a newly-hatched Adonis Blue. She marvels, and makes us marvel, at the miracles she discovers. She wonders at the strangeness of a butterfly’s proboscis, which is
Such a sublime, terrible beauty, the shark. Glidingly filled with our awe, as if those glassy eyes marked us out as a bite-sized snack from the start. Evolutionarily pre-lapsarian — they’ve been around for 450 million years — sharks are wreathed in a symbolic cruelty, theirs and ours. In one of the most vivid scenes
Before reading this book, the only thing I knew about Action Park was that it had lent its name to Shellac’s 1994 debut album At Action Park. Shellac, one of whose members is the notoriously contrarian music producer Steve Albini, play pummelling, hazardous, post-hardcore rock at ear-splitting volume and occasion much joy in anyone who
Clemency stars Alfre Woodard as a prison warden on death row whose job is beginning to take its toll, and if you think it sounds like a tough watch, you’d be right. But it is also a masterwork, won the Grand Jury prize at Sundance, and doesn’t at any juncture call on the uplifting, healing
Pandemic creates the oddest phenomena: here, for instance, is a British drive-in cinema. They exist for people who won’t go to a conventional cinema for fear of infection, which sounds like a film in itself. But that is the charm: attending a drive-in cinema feels like living inside a film, because every British drive-in cinema
Gwyneth Paltrow has a new neighbour. On the same block in Notting Hill as Gwynie’s Goop store, with its This Smells Like My Vagina scented candles and must-have child-calming essential oil sprays, a shopfront has been taken over to display a poignant series of self-portraits by a rather different woman. Khadija Saye died three summers
If you want to understand Beethoven, listen to his piano sonatas. Without them, you’ll never grasp how the same man could write the hummable, easy-listening Septet of 1799 and the scraped dissonances of the 1825 Grosse Fuge, which even today scares Classic FM listeners. It’s the 32 sonatas, not the nine symphonies or 16 string
