The good, the bad and the ugly in books, exhibitions, cinema, TV, dance, music, podcasts and theatre.
In the early 1990s, when Boris Johnson was making his name as the Daily Telegraph’s Brussels correspondent, Sonia Purnell was his deputy, and last year she published a biography of him — the second, and surely not the last — entitled Just Boris: A Tale of Blond Ambition. Now follows Pedal Power: How Boris Failed
Since I discovered this interview on Armando Iannucci’s Twitter feed I wondered if it was actually a spoof. But no, it seems Bill Shorten really is an Australian politician and not an Ocker Chris Morris. Anyway, for the time being it is my new favourite political interview…
Nigeria is called ‘God’s own country’, and well it might be because no one else is on its side. Eliza Griswold, who has spent several years exploring religious divisions in the country’s interior, tells me that billions of oil dollars are embezzled each year, leaving the vast majority of the population to fend for themselves
‘Oh yes, Dracula,’ said a colleague. ‘Two splendid bits at either end, and 200 boring pages in the middle.’ It was exaggeration, but only slight. Dracula sags in the middle, but that is a reflection of the knockout opening and conclusion. Film adaptations have the luxury of cutting out the fat to concentrate on Jonathan
Classics were predicted to be one of the first things to fall at the feet of eBooks. Traditional booksellers — like me — have been in a perpetual cold sweat, wondering how to make up the lost revenue for around a third of our sales. Classics publishers must have been positively feverish with worry. The
Penguin has launched a new design for the Penguin English Library. The press blurb says, ‘Each cover is a crafted gem, they’ll look and feel lovely in your hands.’ And they do. Steal into a bookshop in the next couple of days and hold one. The covers are individual and relevant to the book —
Editor-in-chief of The Lady, judge of the inaugural Hatchet Job of the Year Award, author of Shire Hell and a keen skier, Rachel Johnson is this week’s Shelf Lifer. She has eminently sensible suggestions for the English curriculum, reveals the guilty literary secrets of the Johnson dynasty and tells us about the downside of having
It is fitting that Bram Stoker is more celebrated in death than life. This week marks the centenary of his death. Numerous events have been held in his honour. It’s a typical jamboree. Horror writer Stewart King has explained how Stoker’s legacy is being sustained by a new wave of vampire fiction, which, for those
An elderly woman receives a phone call from a once eminent publishing house. The nice man on the phone tells her that his company is going to reprint her deceased father’s books. Wonderful news, she says — delighted that her old man is not quite dead and buried yet. Hope for us, she thinks. The
When an unpublished diary or book of letters from a celebrated writer comes to the attention of the reading public nowadays, there is often a sense that a game is being played between two parties. Writers — being the megalomaniacs they invariably are — dream of grandiosity and world domination, therefore these documents are predominately
St. George’s Day, 23rd April, is Shakespeare’s birthday. You may get a present, if you are in the right place at the right time. World Book Night, the event where enthusiasts give a book to passers-by, will take place this evening. The organisers hope that 2.5 million copies of 25 books will be given away by 78,000 volunteers in
Man has conquered his inhibitions to talk about everything other than his own demise. Death is, famously, the last taboo — and, judging by many of the reviews of Philip Gould’s When I Die: Lessons from the Death Zone, we are no closer to breaking it. The novelist Justin Cartwright describes himself as ‘racked with doubt’ about
I first became aware of Bob Marley when I heard ‘Put It On’ by the Wailers, and their version of Tom Jones’s ‘What’s New Pussycat’, in 1967. These tracks in turn led me to discover the ska songs recorded at Studio One, such as the blueprint of Bob’s all- time world classic ‘One Love’ and
If you take the Tube to Colindale on the Northern Line and then hop on a 303 bus or walk for ten minutes, you arrive at the Royal Air Force Museum, open daily from 10 a.m. until 6 p.m., admission free. The place is full of planes, as might be expected, and has a wonderfully
Once you grasp the essential triviality of the Olympics, the Cultural Olympiad falls perfectly into place, says Lloyd Evans. Even Shakespeare can’t escape Once you grasp the essential triviality of the Olympics, the Cultural Olympiad falls perfectly into place, says Lloyd Evans. Even Shakespeare can’t escape Funny business the Olympics. No one seems to want
Considering how close, if mysterious, the links are between being gay and loving opera, it could seem surprising that there are almost no operas explicitly on gay subjects. Many of Britten’s operas heave with homoerotic subtexts, but his only opera to come out is his last, Death in Venice, and that’s paedophiliac. Tippett, always wackier
Ladies and gentleman, boys and girls, anyone who happens to be passing, I have decided to quiz myself about this week’s film, for no other reason than the idea occurred to me, and I fancied it, so here goes: Salmon Fishing in the Yemen, any good? No. That it? OK, if this film teaches us
Great title, Long Day’s Journey into Night. The sombre, majestic words are suffused with auguries of doom. ‘A play of old sorrow written in tears and blood,’ was O’Neill’s description of the script, which is inspired by his personal background. We’re in a beautiful seaside mansion where a prosperous New York family, the Tyrones, are
I spent the last week in America, and my hosts had 900-plus channels listed on cable, though some required payment, others were in Spanish, and many featured what can only be called niche programming, such as lacrosse from the high school. My hostess liked Chopped!, which is their version of MasterChef — less hectic though
It’s the weirdest thing. This obsession with the sinking of the Titanic. Go to the BBC iPlayer website and you’ll find eight programmes you can listen to now, if by chance you missed them first time round. Take Titanic: Minute by Minute on Radio 2, broadcast ‘live’ on the very same night (100 years later)
Tim Minchin swept the board at the Oliviers last Sunday. The Australian’s hit musical, Matilda, won a record seven gongs at the West End’s most prestigious awards ceremony. The rise of Minchin has been stratospheric. Just eight years ago he started out on the Melbourne cabaret circuit performing quizzical spoofs like ‘Inflatable You’, a ballad
Conrad Black sympathises with the NatWest Three — victims of British cowardice and a corrupt US legal system It was the misfortune of David Bermingham and his co-defendants to be very peripherally connected to the Enron debacle. Enron was the ultimate hot financial client for a merchant banker and designer of sophisticated financial vehicles, the
One could meet any day in Society Harold Acton, Tom Driberg or Rowse: May there always, to add their variety, Be some rather Odd Fish at The House. Thus W. H. Auden (something of an odd fish himself) reminiscing at a Christ Church gaudy half a century ago. There have certainly been quite a lot
In his preface to this anthology of brief memoirs, Robert Silvers suggests that its ‘invisible, tragic core’ is to be found in an account by Isaiah Berlin of one of his several meetings with Boris Pasternak. Pasternak told Berlin how Stalin had once telephoned him to ask him two questions: had Pasternak been present when
Scenes From Early Life is a rather dull title for a deeply interesting book. It is a novel; this is stated on the jacket, as if anticipating the possibility that readers may question that definition. Set in Dacca (now Dhaka), it is about the emergence of Bangladesh as a state independent of Pakistan after the
An ebook arrives! The future of publishing on my hard-drive. All the big profits are in cyber-publishing these days, as I discovered last month when I downloaded an ebook for three quid and found it contained just 85 pages. This one, by Alwyn W. Turner, has only 72 pages, but it’s a penny cheaper at
There are six drawings in the back of this book. They’re not very good drawings. In fact they look as if they come from an unusually hamfisted comic strip. However, it’s their crudity that makes them so powerful. One shows a young boy being suspended over a coal fire, a rope round his wrists, a
This is a weird and wonderful book. Bernie Krause, who started out as a popular musician and then in the mid-Sixties began to experiment with synthesisers and electronic mixing, has spent the past 40 years recording natural noises — individual species, but more importantly, perhaps, whole habitats and therefore the relationship of the different sounds
This is a delightful book, nostalgic, slyly witty, perceptive and at times flirting — deliberately — with old fogeyism. Tom Fort, a BBC radio journalist, starts from the assumption that ‘many of us have a road that reaches back into our past’. For him, this is the 92 miles of the A303 — as he