The good, the bad and the ugly in books, exhibitions, cinema, TV, dance, music, podcasts and theatre.
Elizabeth Strout’s Pulitzer-prize winning Olive Kitteridge (2008) is the novel I recommend to friends who don’t read much. Talk about bang for your buck. Strout packs more character and life into 337 pages than you’d expect to find in a novel twice that length and combines classic storytelling with elegant formal innovation. Each chapter works
It’s telling that perhaps the best wine book of last year, Amber Revolution by Simon Woolf, was self-published, though you’d never guess from the quality of the design, photography or editing. Wine books are a tough slog for publishers unless they’re written by one of the big four: Clarke, Johnson, Robinson and Spurrier (sounds like
What strikes me most about the Christmas gift-book industry — for industry it surely is, as I can confirm, having toiled on that production line myself — is the incurable optimism of everyone concerned. After all, most of these books are terrible. Some are merely appalling. But the simple act of writing and publishing them
Eleanor of Aquitaine is the most famous woman of the Middle Ages: queen of France and England, crusader, mother of kings — ‘lionhearted’ Richard and ‘bad’ John — and ancestress to the royal dynasties of Europe. Yet more nonsense has been written about her than almost any other woman. Much of what we think we
In this week’s Spectator Book Club, my guest is Christopher Tugendhat, whose new book offers a refreshing and thought-provoking survey of twentieth-century history; not through wars and treaties and policies, but through the pages of the books from his extensive private library. In A History of Britain Through Books: 1900-1964, Christopher argues that we can
When the sex trade survivor Rachel Moran published her memoir, Paid For: My Journey through Prostitution, she knew not everybody would be happy that she’d laid bare the realities of sexual exploitation. Pimps, brothel owners and punters would hardly be pleased that she’d lifted the lid on the world’s oldest oppression. What she could never
What makes someone become a pop star? Sometimes, it’s true, pop stardom arrives by accident, and its recipient responds not with joy, but horror. More often, though, pop stardom is sought, sometimes to make up for things that are missing in life, and the newly minted star embraces all the benefits fame brings, until those
As you enter the forecourt of the Royal Academy, you see them. A row of artistic titans, carved in stone, peer down from their alcoves in the higher half of the gallery’s façade. Thanks to the name plaques, they’re easily identified. You can see Pheidias, the genius of the Parthenon; Leonardo and Raphael; Sir Christopher
I went to the Battle of Ideas at the Barbican last weekend, a free speech festival organised by the Brexit party MEP Claire Fox, and listened to an interesting discussion about Life of Brian. The Monty Python film is exactly 40 years old, having been released in the UK on 8 November 1979. The opinion
The hammering downpour before the last round in Batumi was, in retrospect, a precious omen. After all, England’s medal drought in international team competitions has lasted nearly 20 years. This year our rain dances finally took effect, as we brought home the bronze medals from the European Team Championship last week. It’s our second major
Grade: B- Horribly woke boilerplate slogans welded inexpertly to the usual incompetent Crazy Horse grunge. Young and his pick-up band of now 50-years standing usually work well together — as on Zuma, Everybody Knows This is Nowhere and even Ragged Glory. But that’s when there were a few decent songs in the mix, stuffed with
The Royal Court is the theatre’s answer to Islamic State, a conspiracy of nihilists fascinated with death, supported by groups of self-flagellating puritans, and committed to inflicting pain on all who stray into its orbit. The latest fatwa from Sloane Square concerns the imminent demise of the Welsh language — an emergency for which there
Squeeze and Hot Chip are both great British pop groups. But they never defined a scene. Their ambitions extended further than being hailed by a few hundred people in bleeding-edge clubs. Squeeze piggybacked on punk, but they were quite evidently never a punk group, even if they dressed up as one. They were of the
The Irishman is Martin Scorsese’s three-and-a-half-hour epic — a mobster-a-thon, you could say — starring Robert De Niro, Al Pacino, Joe Pesci and a light sprinkling of Harvey Keitel (he’s only in a couple of scenes). It’s based on the true, late-life confession of Mafia hitman Frank ‘The Irishman’ Sheeran and, while gangster flicks can
There’s nothing like a nice bit of death on a Sunday evening. Radio 4 originally transmit their obituary programme Last Word on Friday afternoons, but I love listening to the repeat. Sunday at 8.30 p.m. is the perfect time — the ending of people’s lives at the ending of the week. The stresses of Monday
‘Here’s your new Sunday night obsession…’ the BBC announcer purred, overintoned and mini-orgasmed, like she was doing an audition for a Cadbury’s Flake commercial, ‘… a dazzling drama with a stellar cast.’ My hackles rose. Did no one ever mention to her the rule about ‘show not tell’? And my hackles were right. His Dark
Charles-Valentin Alkan played the piano faster than Liszt and louder than Chopin. The dying Pole left instructions that only Alkan was to be trusted with completing his unfinished Études. Alkan cited Liszt and George Sand as his referees in a bid to be made head of piano at the Paris Conservatoire, but was rejected in
Liberty is a fragile thing. For thousands of years, civilisations have risen, flourished and fallen, and most of them have been rigid, brutal and despotic. Freedom for the masses is a historical rarity. It arises only as the product of a fine balance between competing interests. That balance is the subject of this book. According
In 1585, Jacques du Perron presented to the court of the French king Henry III, as a kind of after-dinner entertainment, a formal logical argument for the existence of God. Du Perron, formerly a Protestant, was now well on his way to becoming a cardinal. He was a highly intelligent and rhetorically gifted man and
It sounds in bad taste, but Scarlett Thomas has written a riotously enjoyable novel about a boarding school full of girls with eating disorders. It’s not that Thomas doesn’t take eating disorders seriously; she takes them so seriously that one of the girls dies. But there are few more vivaciously original novelists around today, and
Gastronomy is one of the deepest forms of culture. If you’ve grown up in France you know this, to the depth of your Camembert-calcium-enriched bones (I have, and do). In my Year 2 classroom near Paris there was a poster with the most famous cheeses of France on it: heart-shaped Neufchâtel, orange Mimolette; Reblochon, Roquefort,
Philip Hensher The best novels of the year were Colson Whitehead’s The Nickel Boys (Fleet, £16.99) and James Meek’s To Calais, In Ordinary Time (Canongate, £17.99). These days, novels are often praised for the gravity of their subjects, but what elevates Whitehead’s treatment of race and American brutality is the elegance of its style and
Bill Bryson has come a long way from being the funniest, most irreverent travel writer around. He’s still as amiable, avuncular and amusing as ever, but his subject matter has broadened over the decades to cover nearly everything, from science to Shakespeare. His modus operandi, however, has not changed. He absorbs reams of facts, the
There is no longer much point buying strictly practical gardening books, such as were a staple of the publishing industry in years gone by. Those colourful, cheery, cheap volumes have been superseded by trustworthy websites, such as that of the Royal Horticultural Society, which can quickly answer any query you have about cultivation, plant identification
Apparently the first audio message broadcast into space with the ostensible purpose of communicating with aliens was the sound of vaginal contractions in ballerinas. According to Daniel Oberhaus’s Extraterrestrial Languages, the artist Joe Davis beamed the information from an MIT radar installation towards the stars Tau Ceti and Epsilon Eridani in 1985. A USAF colonel
Some 35 years ago I visited the National Gallery of Sicily in Palermo on the hunt for the ‘Virgin Annunciate’ by Antonello da Messina, the painter of the beautiful ‘St Jerome in his Study’ in the National Gallery in London. It was hard enough to persuade anyone that the gallery was meant to be open,
On the Shoulders of Giants consists of 12 essays that the late Umberto Eco gave as lectures at the annual Milanesiana festival of culture between 2001 and 2015. Judging from the book, seeing him deliver them must have been like going to a concert these days by Van Morrison or Bob Dylan. Sometimes he’s on