The good, the bad and the ugly in books, exhibitions, cinema, TV, dance, music, podcasts and theatre.
Here is a remarkable novel, one which appears to be about nothing in particular, featuring barely half a dozen characters, several of whom have no names. Hardly anything happens. A boy dies, a man gets shot, another boy is given a new suit, and that, more or less, is that. There is a good deal
This book falls into two parts. The first is a brisk account of Britain’s involvement with India and of the backgrounds of those people who were principally responsible for unscrambling that relationship. It contains most of the facts that matter, if rather too much social trivia that does not, and is generally fair. Where it
In Grand Canal, Great River we enter a world that makes the moon seem familiar. It is also one of the most beautiful books I’ve handled and is a screaming bargain. Philip Watson read Chinese at Oxford and spent most of his working life in the Foreign Office, with postings in Hong Kong and Beijing.
When, ten years ago, you bought for Jack or Chloe a jolly-sounding novel about a schoolboy getting up to all sorts of pranks at an academy for wizards, I don’t suppose you could have predicted the tone of the seventh and last book in the series. It is apocalyptic, redemptive, Wagnerian and quite extraordinarily keen
Peter Suderman and Isaac Chotiner each highlight an interview with Matt Damon (who is promoting the latest Jason Bourne thrilla, The Bourne Ultimatum). I like Damon. He’s an increasingly interesting actor and his excellent performance in The Good Shepherd last year was every bit as under-rated as the movie itself. Nevertheless, he’s also an ass.
It’s official. A nation mourns. Mr Eugenides strikes a mournful, plangent note: Stop all the clocks, cut off the telephone,Prevent the dog from barking with a juicy T-bone,Silence the tambourines and with muffled drumsBring out the burger buns, let the ketchup come. Let cattle trucks circle moaning round the barnScribbling in the dirt the message,
As a coda to yesterday’s posts on Not Reading Books, it was remiss of me not to quote the man who may make a decent claim to being the greatest newspaper columnist of the 20th century. I refer, of course, to Myles na Gopaleen (“Myles of the Ponies”) better known to posterity by one of
Does this sorry tale demonstrate a) the dangers of reading, b) the extraordinary idiocy of local government or c) both? I’d say it was extraordinary except for the fact that nothing local nincompoop politicians do should cause so much as a raised eyebrow these days. WILKES-BARRE, Pa., July 25 A bookstore owner’s obsession with the
If like me you’re a complete sucker for all things Banksy, do check out the graffiti artist’s new website. Hat tip: Andrew
On the subject of not reading books, commenter Jim Barnett has an excellent idea: How about a new category: LR, for “Livres que je regrette d’avoir lus” – books I have regretted reading. I’d put Nabokov in that category – “The Gift” was just the sort of prissy, self-satisfied blather that I had always suspected
Megan links to the now almost famous Not Reading post and recalls a conversation we had: Me: I’ve never read Camus in English. Alex: That’s brilliant! I’m going to use that. Me: “I’ve never read Camus in English?” Alex: No, like this: “I’ve never read Camus in English” . . . That way I don’t
There’s been a lot of hype – justifiably – around P J O’Rourke’s book on Adam Smith’s Wealth of Nations Indeed, we posted on it weeks ago. But Coffee Housers should not miss out on Eamonn Butler’s splendid new guide, Adam Smith – A Primer (IEA, £7.50), which is a thorough and well-written introduction to
Coffee House guru Seth Godin has a great parting thought on the Harry Potter phenomenon, why books are useless for keeping secrets, but why they’ll survive as a still-treasured medium in the digital age.
These are difficult times for the BBC. The fine for the Blue Peter phone-in fraud was, in its way, as big a shock as the famous vandalising of its garden. The silly Crowngate affair in which what they claimed was the Queen staging an angry walk-out turned out to be her staging an angry walk-in.
Back in the US in the Fifties, just as atomic fear was gripping the American nation and the McCarthyite witch hunts were at their most vicious, a rather extraordinary radio programme was created by the journalist Edward R. Murrow and his production team at CBS radio. This I Believe presented ‘The living philosophies of thoughtful
Glass Eels / Love’s Labour’s Lost / Saint Joan Squelchy trotters up in Hampstead. Nell Leyshon’s new play is set on a Somerset flood plain where a family of bumpkin farmers are coping with a suicide. Before the action commences Mum has done a Virginia Woolf in the nearby river and her premature submersion furnishes
This film is fun. It is fun, fun, fun, fun, fun. It might be the most fun you can have with your clothes on or, if you have been married a good while, then with them off. John Travolta as Mrs Edna Turnblad is fun. Christopher Walken as Mr Wilbur Turnblad is riotous fun. Newcomer
Bach’s St Matthew Passion doesn’t seem an obvious ‘Glyndebourne opera’, except from the point of view of the non-Londoner having to use public transport to get there, who might well regard the whole outing as a penitential pilgrimage. At the third performance the atmosphere did seem unusually hushed. What we were offered was an almost
The summer ballet season in London, with the traditional arrival of illustrious foreign guests, has a well-established historical tradition. It was during the summer months that, in the 19th century, famous and not-so-famous foreign ballet stars appeared on the stages of theatres such as the Her Majesty’s, the Alhambra and the Empire. Later on, renowned
Hockney on Turner Watercolours at Tate BritainAnnely Juda — A Celebration at Annely Juda Fine Art If you enter Tate Britain via the side entrance on Atterbury Street, you will find five large new landscape paintings by David Hockney hanging above the stairs to the main galleries, to celebrate his 70th birthday. Each painting is
The word ‘virtuoso’ is often bandied about. Stephen Pettitt explains what it means to him Serious music critics — and I do not except myself from the breed — have many tendencies that mark them out from the rest of society. One of them is the habit of bandying around the word ‘virtuoso’. We know
Coffee House has a review of the latest, and final, Harry Potter book here. The review doesn’t give too much away, but if you’re a dedicated Potter fan I’d recommend finishing the book first.
Everyone, I suppose, now knows that Gordon Brown was the first student rector of Edinburgh University. Though based on Continental models, the rectorship is a peculiarly Scottish institution. The rector is elected by the students, and elections have often been lively affairs. (The plot of John Buchan’s Castle Gay turns on the kidnapping of a
For the most part political diarists are located on the fringes rather than at the centre of power. The two finest British journals from the 20th century were written by failures — Alan Clark and Chips Channon. Only rarely did they gain the sustained access they craved to the great figures of their day. They
Connoisseurs of the short story will welcome this new collection by William Trevor, his first since 2004. Trevor has been compared with Chekhov, not without justification. He works by indirection, avoiding judgment, his sense of tragedy well concealed by a partiality for unfulfilled lives left free to exist on the page without the author’s intervention.
‘Give me the cheque, you look like a decaying oyster’ — thus Roger Hilton accepting the John Moores First Prize in 1963, at the height of his career. At the dinner afterwards, very drunk, he was so rude to an alderman sitting next to him that the poor man had a heart attack and died
The Fears of Henry IV: The Life of England’s Self-Made Kingby Ian Mortimer Henry IV, in Ian Mortimer’s graceless (and sense-defying) words, is ‘the least biograph-ied English king to have been crowned since the Conquest’. No longer. Here is a full and richly detailed life. Not a deal more would need to be said were
Fateful Choices: Ten Decisions that Changed the World 1940–41by Ian Kershaw Britain’s decision to fight on in 1940; Hitler’s to attack the Soviet Union in 1941; in the same year, Roosevelt’s to wage undeclared war in the Battle of the Atlantic; Japan’s to attack Pearl Harbor and expand southwards; Hitler’s declaration of war against America
There was once a Greek called Herostratus, who, in search of enduring fame, set fire to the Temple of Diana at Ephesus. (A successful strategy, clearly.) It’s odd to think that the second John Murray’s permanent fame rests on such an act of destruction, since in undertaking it he was not, like Herostratus, trying to