The good, the bad and the ugly in books, exhibitions, cinema, TV, dance, music, podcasts and theatre.
‘It’s like acting,’ says the illustrator Quentin Blake about his latest project. ‘You imagine yourself there, in that situation. You imagine you are that person.’ The first-ever children’s laureate has been taking his acute eye for gesture, for character, into hospitals, as part of the Nightingale Project. His funny, colourful, bursting-with-life paintings are now decorating
Keith Lowe’s horrifying book is a survey of the physical and moral breakdown of Europe in the closing months of the second world war and its immediate aftermath. It is a complex story and he tells it, on the whole, very well. Though the first world war took the lives of more uniformed young men,
‘The World of Interiors’ might have been a better title for this novel. Its two chief protagonists, Catherine Gehrig and Henry Brandling, live a century and a half apart, but both are beset by circumstances that make them physically isolated and emotionally stunted. They rail in furious misery, and are sunk in interior communing. Commodities
In the summer of 1961 I was in my second year at Magdalen College, Oxford with rooms in the 18th-century New Buildings. One of my neighbours there was a quiet man called Jonathan Green-Armytage. Sitting out on the steps of the building’s colonnade, in the sun, we became friends. He was already a distinguished photographer.
I read this novel while convalescing from pneumonia. It proved admirably fit for purpose. A light diet, mildly entertaining and with enough twists and turns of plot to serve as a tonic. John O’Farrell is a man of many parts — comedy scriptwriter (Spitting Image, Alas Smith and Jones), political satirist (An Utterly Exasperating History
The mirrored sunglasses worn by Putin on the cover of Angus Roxburgh’s The Strongman give the Russian president the look of a crude mafia boss, while the half-face photo on the cover of Masha Gessen’s book makes him appear both more ordinary and more sinister. This hints at the difference of the authors’ approach. Gessen
Charlotte Rogan’s The Lifeboat (Virago, £12.99) comes garlanded with praise from the likes of J. M. Coetzee and Hilary Mantel. Rogan, who has only taken up writing after a career in architecture and engineering, tells the story of Grace Winter, a young woman on trial for murder as the novel opens. She and her husband
In an age when the merely mildly curious believe they can get all they really need to know from Wikipedia for free, A. N. Wilson’s fellow literary professionals must take heart from his expectation that there is still possibl to charge for a work of such succinctness that it is essentially an extended Wikipedia entry
Colm Tóibín began his writing career as a journalist. Although he wrote his first novel, The South, in 1986, it took him a further four years to find a publisher. Since that seminal moment, Tóibín has delivered five other novels; two books of short stories; two plays, as well as several works of non-fiction. He
On 13th March 1938, judgment was passed in the political show trial of Nikolai Bukharin, former head of the Soviet Politburo. He was sentenced to death. Bukharin was taken in silence from the dock to the exit to the cells. He paused at the door and cast his eyes up to the gallery that contained
What, if any, are the similarities between the great novels of past wars, such as Somerset Maugham’s The Hero (the Boer War), Ford Madox Ford’s Parade’s End (WWI), and Evelyn Waugh’s The Sword of Honor Trilogy (WWII)? And is there a connection between these wartime experiences and our current conflicts in Iraq and Afghanistan? As
Every time I do a ‘CTRL F’ search, allowing my computer to achieve in milliseconds what it took the schoolboy me hours to do (find a particular word among pages and pages of text), I think of a small business centre in Sheffield, and imagine its occupants to be shaking in fear at the onward
A new world flavour to Shelf Life this week, as the novelist Sean Thomas Russell joins us from Vancouver. He has been getting to grips with Shakespeare — an attempt, perhaps, to escape the pervasive influence of Bill O’Reilly. His latest novel, A Ship of War, is published in Britain next week. 1) What are
There’s a cracking story in the Bookseller this morning. The Publisher’s Association is calling on the government to cut VAT on eBooks to the zero rate enjoyed by print books. eBooks currently attract 20 per cent VAT, whereas print books are exempt on the grounds that they promote education. The Publishers’ Association complains that eBooks
Don’t be ashamed if you can’t understand the Budget. Economics is a notoriously tricky business. Even chancellors of the exchequer find themselves flailing about in the dark, dependent on the guidance of others. Winston Churchill explained his disastrous policy of returning sterling to the Gold Standard in 1925, by writing: ‘I had no special comprehension
Attention all those who commute through King’s Cross. A new bookshop has opened on the concourse near platforms 9-11, next to the shrine for Platform 9¾ of Harry Potter fame. This is the first Watermark store to open in Europe. Watermark is an Australian firm that specialises in filling small spaces in major travel hubs.
‘Zines and self-publishing are a bone of contention in my house. “I don’t have much time for self-publishing,” says my flatmate who works for Bloomsbury, “if it was any good it would have been published properly.” I, however, am in love with the idea that if anybody wanted to make a book or zine themselves,
Isn’t Paxo’s series on the British Empire brilliant TV? Gone is the weary contempt that he wears on Newsnight. Instead, he is visibly enthused by talking to ordinary people in far flung lands. Paxman isn’t telling a new story, but he’s a gifted spinner of old yarns. Pottering around a spice market in Calcutta, going to the races in Hong
Easter – Rise heart: thy Lord is risen. Sing his praise Without delayes, Who takes thee by the hand, that thou likewise With him mayst rise: That, as his death calcined thee to dust, His life may make thee gold, and much more just. Awake, my lute, and struggle for thy part With all thy
Noam Chomsky versus Daniel Everett, it is a literary spat with a difference: they specialise in language. Chomsky is the high priest of modern linguistics, progenitor of ‘universal grammar’. Everett has spent 30 years among remote Amazonian tribes and concludes that language is learned. He says that it is unique to a specific culture, which
Someone asked me recently whether I actually liked Mondrian’s paintings. The implication being that his form of geometrical abstraction was too pure — or too antiseptic — to contain the necessary germ of human warmth required to engage the emotions; and that though one could admire his work intellectually, it was difficult to be passionate
Robert Gore-Langton talks to Professor Vanessa Toulmin about bringing the 27,000 Volt Girl and five-foot earwigs back into the public eye Vanessa Toulmin is that rare thing — an academic professor who grew up on a fair. From the age of ten she fried onions for the hotdogs, spun candyfloss, and took money for rides
In April, for the first time in ages, I am going to a wedding. At least it will make a change from all the funerals. The middle-aged pop fan feels this all the more deeply, because few of our favourite musicians seem to make old bones. Or, more accurately, they make old bones, but at
Every December, for the past decade, I have laid a red rose on Schubert’s grave in Vienna’s southern cemetery. What began as a gesture has become a custom, a way of giving thanks to the most lovable of all composers. Schubert may not be as great as Bach or Beethoven, who established the musical language
Calling all thespians. Roll up, you theatre folk. The Hampstead’s new show is a dramatic love-in you can’t afford to miss. Farewell to the Theatre introduces us to Harley Granville-Barker, one of the greatest playwrights of the early 20th century, as he enjoys a sabbatical in Massachusetts in 1916. Everything is languid, atmospheric and high-minded.
It was about time a dance-maker exacted revenge on dance academics. In Alexander Ekman’s 2010 Cacti, a voiceover explains the alleged semantics of the choreography by resorting to theoretical clichés and the known modes of that mental self-pleasuring that many academics indulge in. As the vacuously pompous words bear little or no relation to the
We Bought a Zoo — in which a family buys a zoo — does what it says on the tin and if you like this sort of film you will like this and if you don’t you won’t, and you have to ask yourself why you buy The Spectator every week? It’s for analysis like
Life-changing moments are not always as dramatic as Saint Paul’s Damascene experience. Often they emerge from conversations that begin with mundane exchanges about last night’s Masterchef, the film you saw last week, the last time there was a drought. Then gradually the talk moves on to other, deeper matters. Something is said, some connection is
If Titanic hadn’t actually sunk on its maiden voyage not even Jeffrey Archer would have dared invent such a hammily extravagant plot. The passenger list — Benjamin Guggenheim, John Jacob Astor IV (Macy’s owner), Isidor Straus, the silent film actress Dorothy Gibson, inventor of the New Journalism W.T. Stead, and sundry English toffs — was