The good, the bad and the ugly in books, exhibitions, cinema, TV, dance, music, podcasts and theatre.
Frank Dikötter has written a very lively and concise analysis of the techniques and personalities of eight 20th-century dictators: Mussolini, Hitler, Stalin, Mao Zedong, Kim Il-sung, Duvalier (Haiti), Ceausescu (Romania) and Mengistu (Ethiopia). As a comparative study of those individuals, it is enlightening and a good read. The title and parts of the foreword indicate
A boardful of company directors are summoned to explain themselves to a Whitehall select committee. The Bank of England has already had to bail out the company, the British economy has taken a hit in the fallout and parliament has now been recalled to discuss the company’s massive debts. In the committee room, the corporate
Probably this happens to every generation: the moment when you can’t believe what’s going on; when events seem too preposterous to be true. I never thought I’d witness government and parliament in this country tearing themselves to tatters and becoming so irrelevant that Westminster might as well be located on the dark side of Jupiter.
He would want to be remembered as the debonair war hero who delivered Indian independence and became the royal family’s elder statesman. But something went wrong for Lord Louis Mountbatten. Andrew Roberts anticipated many modern historians when he called him ‘a mendacious, intellectually limited hustler’. Field Marshal Gerald Templer told him to his face he
Doxology covers five decades and a spacious 400 pages, with all the subplots and digressions you would expect of a baggy monster realist novel. It moves from the subculture of straight edge punk to the backrooms of political powerbroking, and surveys ground from East Harlem to rural Ethiopia. There are at least half a dozen
It is to Peter Quennell in his memoir The Wanton Chase that D.J. Taylor owes his concept of wartime London’s ‘Lost Girls’: ‘adventurous young women who flitted around London, alighting briefly here and there, and making the best of any random perch on which they happened to descend’. They were courageous, living ‘without any thought
Those who think Essex is boring, or a human waste bin into which only the most meretricious people find themselves tipped, would require only one or two chapters of Gillian Darley’s widely researched book to tell them how wrong they are. Essex has experienced various types and degrees of civilisation since before the Romans arrived
The novelist and essayist James Meek’s confident new medieval romance is conducted in brief passages separated out by three icons, a rose, a sickle and a quill, emblematic of the three estates of the realm. The nobility play at courtly love; the commons can only evade their bondage by war service; and the clergy are
Towards the end of this tale of imperial intellectual expansion, Susan Sontag’s publicist goes to visit his shrink and, dealing with some appalling professional trauma or other, mentions her name. The psychiatrist bursts out laughing. The publicist asks what is so funny and is told: ‘You can’t imagine how many people have sat on that
This week’s books podcast was recorded live at a Spectator event in Central London. My guest is the distinguished historian Frank Dikötter, whose new book – expanding from his award-winning trilogy on Chairman Mao – considers the nature of tyranny. How To Be A Dictator: The Cult of Personality in the Twentieth Century looks at what
At the Villa Pignatelli in Naples there is an exhibition by Elisa Sighicelli: photographs of bits and pieces of antiquity from, among other places, the city’s Archaeological Museum. Put like that it doesn’t sound so interesting but the results are stunning. Walking through the Archaeological Museum after seeing the exhibition it was difficult to discover
Romy Somerset is the sweetest, nicest young girl in London. She’s also my goddaughter and I remember, during her christening at Badminton years ago, the present duke’s mother staring at me rather intently while the minister was going on about love, trust and faithfulness. At lunch afterwards I asked Caroline Beaufort: ‘Why the looks?’ ‘I
The figure is back. Faces stare, bodies sprawl, fingers swipe, mums clutch, hands loll. The Venice Biennale was full of it. After decades of being pushed to the margins, figurative painting is once again dominating the art world. Peter Doig, Alex Katz, Chris Ofili and Jenny Saville head the sales at auction houses, but there
Scarborough is a small British film but it will give you a very big headache. Its subject is teachers who have relationships with pupils and it’s well directed and well performed — Jodhi May is always worth the price of a ticket whatever — but I’m still trying to work out what it has to
Grade: B+ Get the razor blades out, Ms Misery is back. Only the truly affluent can immerse themselves in such morose and earnest introspection. Listen to the music of Africa’s most benighted countries and, on the whole, you will hear very cheerful fellows. Not so with the USA. Lana, a middle-class New Yorker of some
Only four women pianists have recorded complete cycles of the Beethoven piano sonatas: Maria Grinberg, Annie Fischer, H. J. Lim and Mari Kodama. I’ve written before about the chain-smoking ‘Ashtray Annie’ Fischer: she was a true poet of the piano and her Beethoven sonatas are remarkably penetrating — as, alas, is the sound of her
The Secret River opens in a fertile corner of New South Wales in the early 1800s. William, a cockney pauper transported to Australia for theft, receives a pardon from the governor and decides to plant a crop on 100 acres of Aboriginal land. His doting wife, Sal, begs him to take her and their young
How did the police ever solve any crimes before CCTV? That was the question which sprang to mind watching the first episodes of two highly promising new crime dramas this week. It’s also the central question now facing the detective in one of them. Part police officer, part career women, Rachel Carey in The Capture
It’s such a relief to turn on the radio and hear the voice of Neil MacGregor. That reasoned authority, his deep knowledge of history and how things have come to be as they are, his measured common sense and ability to see round an argument or story. He’s like the voice of how things used
In the early 2000s, Yekaterinburg was in the grip of a major heroin problem. For Yevgeny Roizman, ‘Russia’s vigilante king’, the solution was simple: first, send in goons to beat up the smack dealers; second, round up the city’s addicts, chain them to radiators, and force them to go cold turkey. The policy, unsurprisingly, failed.
I loved this book so much I was appalled. Why, when bookshops are stacked full of memoirs by authors who can’t write, isn’t Alexandra Fuller heaped up in perilous piles so near the till it’s impossible to evade her? This is like one of the most alluring Svetlana Alexievich testimonies, as if it had wandered
The great bomber pilot Guy Gibson had a black labrador with a racist name. This shouldn’t matter, except Gibson loved the dog, and its name was used as a codeword during the bombing raid which made Gibson famous, upon the Mohne and Eder dams in Germany in May 1943. The 1955 movie The Dam Busters
Why does a man join the army? The answer was probably more obvious in the 18th century than now, but in 1793 Thomas Graham was 45. The son of a Perthshire laird and of a daughter of the Earl of Hopetoun, and having inherited a good fortune, in 1774, he had married the beautiful Mary
As a fully paid-up, old-school cricket tragic, I astound myself that I have read almost no Neville Cardus. How can that be? He was, in his lifetime, the doyen of cricket writers, mainly because he effectively invented the form. Before he started writing for the Manchester Guardian in 1919, cricket journalists reported the score and
Madeline Stevens’s debut thriller, Devotion (Faber, £12.99), might more appropriately have been titled ‘Desire’. It’s a riff on that old standby: the crazy nanny story. Except, in this case, both the nanny and the mother of the children are equal contestants in the madness stakes. Ella is poor and adrift in the city. It seems
In June 1940, MI6’s new man, Bill Stephenson, ‘a figure of restless energy… wedged into the shell of a more watchful man’, sailed from Liverpool to New York on the MV Britannic. Once separated from its protective convoy, ‘this elegant, ageing liner was on its own’, Henry Hemming writes, noting that the same was true
In early paintings such as ‘Man with a Thistle’ (1946), ‘Still-life with Green Lemon’ (1946) and ‘Self-portrait with Hyacinth Pot’ (1947–8) Lucian Freud portrayed himself alongside striking plant forms, giving equal weight to the vegetable and the human. Similarly, his first wife, Kitty, was depicted in portraits from the same period more or less obscured
Amedeo Modigliani thought Nina Hamnett, muse, painter, memoirist, had ‘the best tits in Europe’. She fell 40 feet from a window and was impaled on the basement railings. Not suicide. She was peeing out of the window, the shared lodging-house lavatory being too distant. On her deathbed, her breathing was like a harmonica. The collector
Eighty years on from the start of the Second World War, my guest in this week’s podcast is Ian Sansom — who’s talking about ‘September 1, 1939’, the Auden poem that marked the beginning of that war. Ian’s new book is a ‘biography’ of the poem, and he talks about how it showcases all that
