The good, the bad and the ugly in books, exhibitions, cinema, TV, dance, music, podcasts and theatre.
Here’s some news that you may have missed from last week: World Book Night is to be extended to America. The American arm will be led by Carl Lennertz, currently with Harper Collins, and former head of marketing at Foyles, Julia Kingsford, is to become chief executive of the whole charity. The organisers hope that
Slide 1 (Photo credit: Karima Khalil) When I walked into the some 800,000 strong crowd that was in Tahrir Square on the morning of Saturday January 29th, one of the first things I saw was a man standing quietly, holding a sign with a simple message in Arabic: “I used to be afraid, I became
In November 1844, Dostoyevsky finished writing his first story. He confides in Diary of a Writer that he had ‘written nothing before that time’. Having recently finished translating Balzac’s Eugénie Grandet, he suddenly felt inspired to write a tale ‘of the same dimensions’. But he was not only prompted by artistic aspirations. In a letter
Former Booker judge Louise Doughty says hooray! for the bravest Booker longlist ever compiled. * Julian Barnes The Sense of an Ending * Sebastian Barry On Canaan’s Side * Carol Birch Jamrach’s Menagerie * Patrick deWitt The Sisters Brothers * Esi Edugyan Half Blood Blues * Yvvette Edwards A Cupboard Full of Coats * Alan
“What passing-bells for these who die as cattle?” lamented Wilfred Owen in his Anthem for Doomed Youth. When RC Sherriff wrote his play Journey’s End just a decade after the Great War, he never set out to answer this haunting question or justify what he had witnessed at Passchendaele. But he was the first to
One of the art books purchased in recent months that I’ve most enjoyed has been Arthur Boyd: Etchings and Lithographs, published in 1971. Boyd was an Australian painter, potter and printmaker, born in 1920 in Melbourne, who came to England in 1959 and made his home in this country. A deeply interesting image-maker, he came
What makes an appropriate encore? And when should they be performed? Michael Henderson on the art of finishing well After a recital at Wigmore Hall earlier this year András Schiff performed an encore, as pianists often do. Normally a Bach prelude or a Schubert impromptu will round the evening off. It is part of the
In honour of the debt-ceiling fiasco currently crippling Washington George Jones’s Things Have Gone To Pieces seems rather appropriate. Happily, it’s also a great song.
Who was Carlos Kleiber, and why has he been voted the best conductor of all time? Carlos Kleiber — the name evokes both Hispanic and German spheres — cancelled performances, never gave interviews, claimed he only conducted when the fridge was empty, and told Placido Domingo he’d prefer to devote his time to drinking wine
American trio Low are what you get when a band evolves far from the established music scenes of laidback California and buzzing NYC. Fronted by husband and wife Alan Sparhawk and Mimi Parker, their sound evokes the relative isolation and five-month winters of their native Duluth, Minnesota, with glacial tempos and minimal arrangements, laced with
Horrid Henry (3D, like we care) is the first big-screen adaptation of Francesca Simon’s bestselling children’s books, and if you would like to save yourself a trip to the cinema you can recreate the experience at home by tuning into some super-noisy, busy, brightly coloured Saturday-morning kids’ TV programme while simultaneously bashing your head between
Die Walküre (Bridgewater Hall, Manchester) What is the best way to introduce someone to Wagner, granted that, for assorted reasons, his art is thought to be exceptionally forbidding? I have always found that it’s enough to provide a few dates, to place him in respect of his forebears and contemporaries; to say a few things
Loyalty at Hampstead is two sensations in one. First, it’s a sensational drama written by the partner of a key Blair aide, Jonathan Powell, about the build-up to the invasion of Iraq in 2003. Second, it’s a sensational finale to Mr Powell’s career. The author, Sarah Helm, records events unfolding in London and Washington from
Sometimes the simplest ideas are the best. Take Dolly Parton’s Imagination Library. She wanted ‘to do something nice for the folks in my home county [Tennessee]. I wasn’t thinking on a larger scale,’ she says. But her idea to send a free book every month to every child enrolled in her scheme from the moment
Hold on to your seats, everyone, and grab yourselves a stiff drink. I’ve got a story gleaned from this week’s Dispatches: How Murdoch Ran Britain (Channel 4, Monday) so shocking that it will completely change your views on government, the media, everything. OK, here goes: in 2004 Tony Blair wanted Britain to sign up to
Ruth Rendell has probably pulled more surprises on her readers than any other crime writer. But the one she produces with her latest novel is a little unusual even by her standards. Set in the present, The Vault (Hutchinson, £18.99) deals with the discovery of four corpses in the disused coal hole of a Georgian
There was a photograph the other day of a Hemingway lookalike competition in Key West, Florida. Bizarre? Perhaps not. It’s 50 years since he put the barrel of a shotgun in his mouth and blew his head off, but he remains the most famous and widely recognised American writer of the 20th century, indeed of
Nothing more gladdens this reader’s heart than a book that opens up an interesting and underexplored historical byway. Well, perhaps one thing: a book that opens up a historical byway that turns out to be a complete catastrophe. On that count, A Merciless Place more than delivers. Here is one of the great colonial cock-ups.
This is a book for anyone whose blood ever ran chill on reading the most sinister recipe in fiction, Samuel Whiskers’ instructions on how to cook Tom Kitten: ‘Anna Maria, make me a kitten dumpling roly-poly pudding for my dinner, make it properly with breadcrumbs.’ With or without breadcrumbs, or indeed butter and flour as
Did you know that on the Central Line’s maiden journey to Shepherd’s Bush, one of the passengers was Mark Twain? Or that The Picture of Dorian Gray and The Sign of Four were both commissioned by the same publisher at the same London dinner? Or that Harrods dropped the apostrophe from its name in 1921,
As L.P. Hartley noted, the past is a foreign country: they do things differently there. And no more so than during the two world wars, a fact that has provided a rich seam for several debut novelists to mine this summer. In Mark Douglas-Home’s puzzler The Sea Detective (Sandstone Press, £17.99), the tidal pull of
According to Richard M. Cook, who is Alfred Kazin’s biographer as well as the editor of his journals, the nearly 600 pages of entries assembled in this book represent only one sixth of the total mass Kazin deposited in the archives of the New York Public Library. According to Richard M. Cook, who is Alfred
At midday on Thursday, 8 June 1933 — Erik Larson is very keen on his times — the newly elected President Franklin D. Roosevelt had a call put through to the history department at the University of Chicago. At midday on Thursday, 8 June 1933 — Erik Larson is very keen on his times —
In her foreword to Elizabeth Jenkins’s 1954 classic, The Tortoise and the Hare, Hilary Mantel reminds us of the unaccountability of love Apart from a war, what could be more interesting than a marriage? A love affair, though it is one of the central concerns of fiction, is a self-limiting tactical skirmish, but a marriage
Andrew Taylor wrote the Bookends column for this week’s issue of The Spectator. Here it is for readers of this blog: Ruth Rendell has probably pulled more surprises on her readers than any other crime writer. But the one she produces with her latest novel is a little unusual even by her standards. Set in
1) Last week, P.D. James was awarded the Theakstons Old Peculiar Outstanding Contribution to Crime Fiction Award. James has been publishing for fifty years. Her first novel, Cover Her Face, appeared in 1962. Her most recent work, the non-fiction book Talking About Detective Fiction, was published in 2009. Speaking recently to the BBC, James hinted
Which books are making the critics lose their cool? We’ve rounded up the best bad reviews: Mary Beard (Guardian) on Rome by Robert Hughes “The first half of the book, especially the three chapters dealing with the early history of Rome, from Romulus to the end of pagan antiquity, is little short of a disgrace
The title of George Craig’s recent book, Writing Beckett’s Letters, is both playful and paradoxical. And it prompts the question: how can Craig claim to be the author of someone else’s correspondence? The answer is both simple and complicated: Craig is a translator. He has spent the last fifteen years as part of a band
It’s a rare life to be a Classics don, and now you can try your hand at it. The process is remarkably simple: go to Oxford University’s Ancient Lives website, where the university’s enormous archive of ancient manuscripts has been stored, and take a very quick tutorial. After that, you will be presented with an