The good, the bad and the ugly in books, exhibitions, cinema, TV, dance, music, podcasts and theatre.
At face value, Asti Hustvedt’s Medical Muses is rather a niche tome, a faultlessly researched history of three female hysterics living in eighteenth-century Paris. However, it actually provides a broad and fascinating insight into the interwoven development of the arts and sciences during La Belle Époque – an age of rapid technological, medical and artistic
The BBC’s World at One recently asked five leading figures in the literary world for their thoughts on the ‘future of the book’. Here is what they had to say: 1.) Notorious literary agent, Andrew Wylie – aka ‘the Jackal’ – worried that the industry is at a crisis point. He argued the book industry is in
6,000 names on the petition and five tweets a week: the Society of Authors has launched its attack on Radio 4. BBC Controller Gwyneth Williams’ decision in June to reduce the BBC short story slots from three to one drove a cohort of objectors, including Ali Smith, Joanne Harris, Neil Gaiman and the SoA, to
As a new series of Desert Island Discs gets underway, we investigate the least talked about but most fascinating aspect of the show: the castaway’s book choice… This March, in the most momentous archival unveiling since Glasnost, the entire back catalogue of the world’s longest-running factual radio programme, BBC Radio 4’s Desert Island Discs, went
Edna O’Brien (pictured here on the right with Margaret Drabble in 1972), the grand dame of Irish literature, has just won the The Frank O’Connor prize for her latest collection of short stories Saints and Sinners. Established in 2005, the €35,000 prize is run by the Munster Literature Centre as part of the Cork International Short
One of the literary excitements of this week, The Fear Index by Robert Harris, showed that the journalist and novelist continues to mine both the ancient and modern world for inspiration. His latest thriller revolves around a mad scientist who’s created a beast he can’t control. So far, so Shelley, but this monster is unmistakably
Shakespeare and Milton: unsurpassable in the English canon. Milton’s mature poetry stands for perfection, Shakespeare’s for a wholeness of vision verging on the truly religious. Their examples cannot be rivalled, only followed. Dickens chose to follow Shakespeare. And now D. J. Taylor trails Dickens. Derby Day is a story about—wait for it—the Derby. A spectacular
The introductory room to Women War Artists at the Imperial War Museum confronts the visitor with a large canvas of a women’s canteen in 1918 by the little-known Flora Lion. It’s an honest painting, workmanlike but dull. Hanging to its left is Laura Knight’s famous ‘Ruby Loftus Screwing a Breech-ring’ (1943), and in between is
Without Roy Harper’s baroque, mellifluous, melancholy folk there would have been no ‘Stairway to Heaven’. James Delingpole meets a neglected genius In 1970, shortly before the release of Led Zeppelin III, guitarist Jimmy Page invited his folk-singing chum Roy Harper up to his Oxford Street offices to have a look at the new album. ‘What
Here’s an improbably, even impossibly, young Steve Earle jamming with a bunch of great old boys at Guy Clark’s place way back in the day. It’s a groovy side of country and, you’ll observe, one fuelled by ample quantities of booze, tobacco and dope. Quality all the way. And, blimey, Steve’s just a kid singing
The Promenaders have excelled themselves this year. I thought initially they were slightly more docile and slightly less dotty than usual, but no. Not only at the Last Night, but also at the Israel Philharmonic Prom on 1 September, they found their voice — so strongly that the BBC actually suspended the broadcast of the
This adaptation of John le Carré’s 1974 novel is so beautifully executed and so visually absorbing and so atmospherically hypnotic that I wonder this: would it have been awfully greedy to have hoped to have wholly understood it, too? I thought the plotting might be an issue — what do I know about spying? Me,
Well done, the Royal Court. It’s got the art of audience abuse down to a tee. The queue for the tiny studio theatre snakes up an airless flight of stairs and bottlenecks into a doorway where each play-goer receives a personalised earbashing from an usherette. ‘Hello, did you hear all that? It’s one hour straight
Das Rheingold used to have the reputation of being a difficult opera, in that it not only lasts for two and a half hours without a break, but also involves a considerable amount of discussion, immense quantities of plot, and lacks stretches of lyricism, with a few obvious exceptions. It is one of the operas
Having argued last week that it takes time (maybe a couple of generations) before fiction can be appropriately applied to traumatic historical events along comes a Radio 4 season celebrating the work of the Russian writer and ‘heroic war journalist’ Vasily Grossman, who wasted no time in translating his bitter experiences into a series of
There are some things television can do which no other medium can manage. Take one of those little-noticed programmes, Hidden Paintings on BBC4. It’s presented by Laurence Llewelyn-Bowen, the chap with the King Charles spaniel hair, who used to do Changing Rooms, in which people found parts of their house redecorated while they were away,
Dr Johnson would be thrilled. His name up there in lights in the West End. He craved theatrical fame, and was cruelly disappointed that his only play, an exotic tragedy set in Constantinople, had just nine performances in 1749. But here at the Arts Theatre on Great Newport Street (London WC2, until 24 September) he
There’s a passage in Willy Russell’s wonderful novel, The Wrong Boy, which could almost be funny — except, wisely, Russell doesn’t play it for laughs. The book chronicles a childhood blighted by adult misunderstanding, and describes an instance of it in which zealous ‘educationalists’ observe that the Boy’s artwork is harshly, relentlessly black: echo and
Edward Burne-Jones was the archetypal literary-minded Victorian. Born in 1833, the son of a Birmingham picture-framer and gilder, he developed a taste for the Romantic poets while at school. Then, whilst an undergraduate at Oxford, he found a lifelong friend in William Morris. The university was supposed to be their route towards holy orders, but
In an appendix to this powerfully poetic and beautifully produced little book, A.S. Byatt explains that when Canongate invited her to write a myth, she knew immediately which one to choose: the myth of the Icelandic sagas and Wagner’s operas — ‘Ragnarök: the myth to end all myths, the myth in which the gods themselves
It is several years since Anna Funder published Stasiland, her acclaimed book about East Germany. Her new book is a novel concerning a group of German political activists surrounding the writer Ernst Toller, who is now almost forgotten but once was well known and was president of the short-lived Bavarian Republic in 1919 for about
An escaped convict who took part in a slave-ship mutiny and a Liverpudlian banker hungry for land in a north-eastern pit village are the main characters of this novel set in 1767, which is a sequel to Sacred Hunger, Barry Unsworth’s excellent, Booker-sharing yarn about the slave trade (it and The English Patient won in
Kwasi Kwarteng is a young Tory MP and it is right and proper that he should begin his analysis of the British Empire with a quotation from Disraeli. The fact that he is of Ghanaian origin shows merely that we live in an unpredictable world: In the European nations there is confidence in this country
One of the great books to have come out of the British-West Indian encounter is Journey to an Illusion by the Jamaican journalist (and former London bus conductor) Donald Hinds. Published in 1966, the book is made up of a series of interviews with Jamaicans and other West Indians resident in Britain. Throughout, Hinds is
Accounts of the secret world usually fall into one of two camps, the authoritative or the popular. The authoritative — such as Christopher Andrew’s history of MI5 and Keith Jeffery’s of MI6 — are officially sanctioned, based on the file record and reliable. They are incomplete because, inevitably, there are episodes the authors are not
It’s debatable whether politicians of the Left or the Right are better at handling the public finances. But we do seem to learn more about economics under a Labour government. Alistair Darling’s memoir chronicles his turbulent years at the Treasury as he watched the world slithering into a financial volcano. Though the material is extremely
This is not a book likely to figure in the lists of the reading circles of Home Counties England. There is for a start the little problem of a title, which on the spine is How to Disappear but then itself does, for the centre of its frontispiece is A Memoir for Misfits. A dedication
One day in the late 17th century, goes the legend, a French monk named Pierre called out to his colleagues: ‘Brothers, I am drinking stars!’ The French for ‘monk’ is Dom. Pierre’s surname was Perignon. He had invented champagne, and the world had changed forever. Which explains the appear-ance, over 300 years later, of Champagne:
Mark Mason has written the Bookends column in this week’s issue of the magazine. Here it is for readers of this blog: One day in the late 17th century, goes the legend, a French monk named Pierre called out to his colleagues: ‘Brothers, I am drinking stars!’ The French for ‘monk’ is Dom. Pierre’s surname