The good, the bad and the ugly in books, exhibitions, cinema, TV, dance, music, podcasts and theatre.
Beaming Sir Pelham Grenville Wodehouse, KBE, D.Litt. (Oxon), Mark Twain medallist and co-founder of the Hollywood Cricket Club (1881-1975), personified a rare oxymoron: he was a serenely contented writer. Shortly before the Queen awarded him a knighthood and the Queen Mother, a devoted fan, wrote a letter congratulating him, Madame Tussaud’s sent an artist from
Of all the cities in all the world, Paris dominates the American imagination more than any other. Although Americans may admire Rome or London, more have enjoyed a love affair with the French capital since Benjamin Franklin represented the 13 rebellious colonies at the court of Louis XVI. Josephine Baker captured that sentiment with her
Few men are prepared to die for the right of others to say what they strongly disagree with; and most people’s faith in multiparty democracy is at best a lukewarm recognition that the alternative is much worse. Secretly most men would like their ideas (which they naturally believe to be correct) to rule absolutely and
Nigeria is not exactly a tourist destination. A colleague chortles over the memory of trying to wangle his way in — without a journalist’s visa — during Sani Abacha’s military regime. ‘Purpose of visit?’ barked the immigration man. ‘Tourism,’ he lied. ‘No one comes to Nigeria for tourism,’ said the official. He was promptly expelled.
Some readers may wonder if we need this book. Surely, the argument might go, one can summon up potted ‘lives’ on the internet, while serious biographies take book form. And how can even 294 lives of novelists offer, as the cover to this book claims, ‘a comprehensive history of the English novel’? Reason not the
‘It was like a drug, a disease,’ said the legendary Ritz employee Victor Legg of the institution he served for half a century. There’s something magical about London’s grand hotels. Even those of us who usually experience them only when we nip in for a five-star pee know that. Matthew Sweet has tapped this glamour
It was in 1814 that the Benedictine monks arrived in Stratton-on-the-Fosse in Somerset from Douai in Flanders where, in 1606, they had established an exiled, but English, monastic house. They were forced to leave the Continent in 1795 after revolutionary France had declared war on England. They wandered a bit until they finally bought a
Gordon Bottomley, Georgian poet with an unpoetic name, wrote a play called King Lear’s Wife with which he hoped to inspire a poetic revival in the theatre. It might be interesting to see it revived — though most 19th- and 20th-century verse-dramas proved forgettable. Nevertheless, he surely happened on an interesting subject, though one which
Margaret Atwood has written 20 novels, of which three (The Handmaid’s Tale, Oryx and Crake and The Year of the Flood) are science fiction. Indeed, the first— and far the best of them — won the inaugural Arthur C. Clarke award, Britain’s chief prize for books in the genre. She has, however, long resisted any
Seduced by the hayseed hair and the Yorkshire accent it’s tempting to see the young David Hockney as the Freddie Flintoff of the painting world: lovable, simple, brilliant, undoubtedly a hero, and delightfully free of angst. In this enjoyable book, which sets out to to ‘conjure up the man he is and in doing so
Connoisseurs of the Christmas gift book market — we are a select group, with little otherwise to occupy our time — will have noticed a couple of significant absences from this year’s line-up. There is no Blue Peter Annual, for the first time since 1964, when even Christopher Trace was still a young man. More
The history of the royal family is punctuated by dramatic, premature deaths which plunge the monarchy into crisis. The most disastrous of these — historically more significant by far than the death of Princess Diana — was the death of Prince Albert in 1861. By the time he died, aged 42, this minor German prince,
Thirty years ago Sir Keith Joseph, portrayed by Sir Ian Gilmour, a fellow minister, as owning ‘a Rolls-Royce mind without a chauffeur’, sent a newly published book to every Cabinet colleague. Most groaned, some murmured oaths, and a lucky few skimmed it. The book was English Culture and the Decline of the Industrial Spirit (1850-1980)
In Baghdad in the 1980s there was a children’s book published called The Hero Saladin. The cover bore an image of Saddam Hussein, identified, in what his biographer drily describes as ‘the second and longer part’ of the book, as ‘Saladin II Saddam Hussein’. Given that Saladin was actually Kurdish — and knowing what we
Dante didn’t have the foresight to create or depict a circle of the Inferno designed expressly for opera critics, with intrepid explorers of new operas with social agendas as an extra. That was left for almost seven centuries until the Royal Opera House came up with the idea of the Linbury Studio Theatre, which answers
Here is a short clip of Evelyn Waugh lambasting the “gibberish” written by modernist writers, a satirical staple of his. Waugh saw no reason to vulgarise traditional prose because it’s understood and spoken by the common man. Christopher Hitchens makes a similar point in this Vanity Fair column about the importance of writing with a
Eurozone crisis, what eurozone crisis? According to Spanish newspaper El País, the real global emergency is the state of literary criticism. British book pages, however, won’t need bailing out any time soon — at least if these splenetic offerings are anything to go by. Tibor Fischer on Parallel Stories by Peter Nadas, Guardian It’s a
Silly old Jeremy Clarkson, where would the chattering classes be without him? The Top Gear presenter has landed himself in hot water by saying that yesterday’s public sectors strikers should be lined up against a wall and shot — or words to that effect. He made the comments live on the One Show last night. To
Call me superficial, but I would far sooner buy a beautiful book than an ugly one. It’s something to think about when Christmas shopping — a concern that’s only magnified when it comes to buying a book as a present, rather than for oneself. It’s also something to bear in mind in the broader context
Sir Henry Raeburn’s exquisite nineteenth-century portrait of Sir Walter Scott hangs — magisterial, but unfamiliar — in an ordered sea of Scottish portraits, of Scottish subjects, in the renascent Scottish National Portrait Gallery. As the stock picture question of University Challenge well attests, putting a face to a famous name, especially that of a writer
After Paul Torday related his latest adventure in the digital new world, here is Fleet Street veteran Walter Ellis on the trials of self-publishing on Amazon. Soon kindled and soon burnt: The gentle art of online publishing The idea of a level playing field is that everyone engaged in a competitive activity should have the
Veteran SF writer and devout Luddite Ray Bradbury has finally bowed to the inevitable and allowed Farenheit 451 to be reproduced in a digital format. Bradbury’s hand was forced by contractual reality: his publishers refused to re-sign him without digital rights. Surely print must now be damned if even Bradbury has to consort with his Devil? To mark the occasion, we have commissioned
Last night, at a secret location in the East End, Andy McNab addressed the London branch of the Royal Green Jackets Association, the body representing former members of the Rifles Regiment. McNab, a decorated Rifleman before he entered SAS folklore on the botched Bravo Two Zero mission, was drumming up support at a private bash for
Earlier this month, former New York Times Iraq correspondent Alex Berenson published the paperback version of The Secret Soldier, his fictionalisation of the CIA’s operations in the Middle East. Last week, life imitated art with the news that the Iranian-backed Hezbollah terrorist group has unwound much of the CIA’s spy network in the Lebanon. Below,
Cambridge academics spend a lot of time worrying about how to persuade taxpayers to keep them in ivory towers. Perhaps it’s for that reason that, twice a year, Cambridge Wordfest invites the reading public into the lecture theatre to be reminded how pleasant it is to chat about books. David Baddiel was there this weekend
How much would you spend on a joke stocking-filler? £5 £10 £15? Not much more than that, surely, the ways things are at present. This vacuous question was prompted by yesterday’s astonishing news that Penguin has apparently paid Pippa Middleton a £400,000 advance for a book on party giving, working title: How to be the
Full marks to Radio 4 for deciding to dramatise Stefan Zweig’s masterpiece, Beware of Pity (listen on BBC iPlayer). This is a rare example of a “neglected classic” that actually lives up to the hype. Born in Austria in 1881, Zweig was one of the most famous writers of the twenties and thirties, his novellas
In some ways, publishing in early post-independence India was like publishing in pre-sixties Canada: cautiously seeking native voices without much financial success. Take GV Desani’s All About H Hatterr (1948), the first Indian novel to ‘go beyond the Englishness of the English language’ as Salman Rushdie once said. It languished out of print for many years,
Several usually eloquent pens spat venom last weekend. The spat between Niall Ferguson and Pankaj Mishra and the London Review of Books has escalated. You might recall that Ferguson and Mishra trading insults over the latter’s review of the former’s book Civilisation; their acrimony has been underscored by references to racism. Mishra has since said that Ferguson