The good, the bad and the ugly in books, exhibitions, cinema, TV, dance, music, podcasts and theatre.
Here come three novels marketed as debuts but written by authors with some sort of previous, be it in short stories, journalism, theatre, television or a combination of the above. The Alarming Palsy of James Orr by Tom Lee (Granta, £12.99) takes a fable and transplants it into real life — in this case bourgeois
Every operation starts the same way. Chlorhexidine scrubbed under nails, lathered over wet hands, palm-to-palm, fingers interlaced, thumbs, wrists, forearms. A soothing routine accompanied by the sound of water hitting a steel trough sink. Washing is an act of safety but also humility. It acknowledges a doctor’s capacity to cause disease as well as cure
Franklin D. Roosevelt isn’t as popular as he once was. When Barack Obama won the 2008 election, he let it be known that he was reading a book about FDR, and tumbleweed blew through the newsrooms. Which is odd because for many decades FDR was every bit the model liberal as Ronald Reagan was the
I loved a man. But our affair was nasty, brutish and short. Copious weeping was my un-tart retort. All that’s left of him is a stained T-shirt. I must rid my mind of him now. That’s long overdue. But how? These three books seem to present three answers. I’ve been wonkily underlining whole paragraphs and
In 1990, the BBC’s adaptation of David Lodge’s culture-clash novel Nice Work won an award at a glitzy soirée in London. At the same time, his debut stage play The Writing Game opened at the Birmingham Rep. Malcolm Bradbury, his old friend and partner on the twin tracks of literary academia and serio-comic fiction, had
Many and various are the things one finds in Kentish pubs (I’m told); but few could top the sepoy’s skull discovered at The Lord Clyde, Walmer, complete with brief biography: Skull of havildar ‘Alum Bheg’, 46th Regt. Bengal N. Infantry… blown away from a gun. From this grisly starting point, Kim Wagner, lecturer in British
Like A Fiery Elephant, my biography of the experimental novelist B.S. Johnson, contains one particularly careless sentence: the one where I described Johnson as ‘Britain’s one-man literary avant-garde of the 1960s’. It was a silly thing to write, partly because it wasn’t true, but also because it was easily the most quotable line in the
Many believed in Australia for 1,000 years before its discovery. There had to be a commensurate weight — somewhere Down Under — to counter the northern land mass; an ‘unknown Southland’ which was crucial to maintaining the balance of the world. To confuse matters, this theoretical continent was dubbed for a while Austrialia del Espiritu
Claude Debussy died on 25 March 1918 to the sound of explosions. Four days earlier, the Kaiser’s army had deployed its long-range Paris Gun, and as Debussy’s cancer entered its final hours, artillery shells were bursting in the streets around his home in Avenue du Bois-de-Boulogne. This quiet modernist — who’d transformed music into an
My third most fervent New Year wish — just after Litecoin goes to £20,000 and Jacob Rees-Mogg becomes PM — is for the BBC to retire to its study with its service pistol and a bottle of whisky and finally do the decent thing. After all, as lots of people are beginning to notice, when
It’s all about the rhythm. Hamilton is a musical that tells the story of America’s foundation through the medium of rap. It sounds crazy but it works because the show’s arsenal of effects is simply overwhelming. The lyrics drive the narrative, the rap gives energy to the lyrics, and the dancers double the effect by
It’s racing up the UK podcast charts, overtaking (as I write) the established favourites such as No Such Thing as a Fish, Kermode and Mayo’s Film Review and This American Life, and only just behind the reigning number one, My Dad Wrote a Porno (don’t ask; it’s meant to be funny). Briefly, at the height
Brad’s Status is a midlife crisis film starring Ben Stiller as a nearly 50-year-old man whose status anxiety is through the roof, poor thing. My heart bleeds and all that. I’ll tell you what Brad’s status should be: face well and truly slapped. The film is written and directed by Mike White (Beatriz at Dinner;
At the close of the 1970s, I found a selection of postcards in an antique shop which had been sent from the Western Front in 1917 by a soldier named Private Howe to his young daughter Ena. I was struck by the immediacy of the language, and the careful avoidance of anything hinting at danger,
The career of the photographer and filmmaker Robert Frank stands in direct antithesis to the characteristics of his native Switzerland. Switzerland sucked the air out of him, he claimed, through its orderliness, decorum, neatness and predictability. As R. J. Smith’s vivid biography explains, Frank displays none of these traits. Just as coming to America was
The late Michael Foot used to say that the first thing he needed to know about a new acquaintance was, on which side he or she would like their forebears to have fought in the English Civil War. He himself, of course, was firmly for Parliament. But having read Leanda de Lisle’s book, it is
‘It’s a grand thing to get leave to live’, perhaps the most famous line Nan Shepherd wrote, is carved in the slate paving of the Writers’ Museum’s Close in Edinburgh. But many who read it, either there or on the new Scottish £5 note, will be surprised to learn that it is not actually taken
While the short story is currently under-going one of its periods of robust, if not rude, health, its two dominant modes — the classical or Chekhovian, and the postmodern or experimental — have become harder to define, with authors happily borrowing tricks from both approaches. None of the collections here can definitively be confined to
In 1932, the Daily Plainsman of Huron, South Dakota, ran a feature about a local woman convalescing in hospital. Grace Dow had been visited by her sister, Carrie Swanzey, who read a children’s book to her. What made this mundane story newsworthy was that the book was called Little House in the Big Woods, and
We’re closing 2017 by republishing our twelve most-read articles of the year. Here’s No. 3: John Hemming on why Percy Fawcett wasn’t the great explorer of Hollywood myth: The new film The Lost City of Z is being advertised as based on the true story of one of Britain’s greatest explorers. It is about Lt-Col
A friend bought a new small terraced house of late Victorian origin in a northern city. She liked it; it had no bad vibes (and houses sometimes do) but she had to do work: knocking down a couple of walls, damp-proofing, rewiring and so on. She was tight on budget so decided to do as
Lorenzo Lotto’s portraits — nervous, intense and enigmatic — are among the most memorable to be painted in 16th-century Italy, but his fellow Venetians didn’t see it that way. In a letter to Lotto of 1548, the poet and satirist Pietro Aretino wrote that he was ‘outclassed in the profession of painting’ by Titian. Now,
I am in Paris for the Rolling Stones’ No Filter concert, in Ronnie Wood’s dressing room minutes before he is due on stage. Walking through the door, I find myself in what looks like a giant crèche, and every size of child and grandchild bouncing around on a thick rug woven in the pattern of
BBC1’s The Miniaturist (26/7 December) is a lavish two-part adaptation of Jessie Burton’s bestseller. It’s also further proof that almost any geographical and historical setting can be conscripted to tell us what’s apparently the only story we’re interested in these days: an alliance of plucky and unfailingly virtuous black people, gay people and women taking
Grade: A- Berlioz’s Les Troyens, one of the greatest operatic masterpieces, manages to be neglected even if it is quite often performed. The vast reputations of the most popular operatic composers seem to grow ever larger with the years, but Berlioz somehow always needs defending. Listening to this latest CD set, ‘live’ from Strasbourg,
The season of Advent, for most children, means anticipation, gleeful waiting, the counting down of days. But after a certain age the build-up to Christmas changes its nature, becomes more like anxious preparation. It can, though, be thought of as a time of reflection. Radio 3’s Christmas Around Europe has for years nourished that feeling
This has not been an appalling year for pop music — it was better than 1984, for example, and 1961. Simply put, it was a year in search of a direction, one foot planted in 1980s cheese or bombast, the other still dipping its toe into the now mind-sapping boredom of EDM, with the occasional
It was in his organ loft at Arnstadt that I began my acquaintance with Johann Sebastian Bach — with JSB, with the young man, with the writer, the fighter, the lover. After the great walk of his in 1705 that we would follow, and after his return trek in February 1706, he would be caught