The good, the bad and the ugly in books, exhibitions, cinema, TV, dance, music, podcasts and theatre.
A crime novel by Chekhov? Professor John Sutherland positively chortles in the introduction at his readers’ likely surprise. Indeed, any novel by Chekhov is probably news for those readers, and Sutherland, who delights in literary mysteries, waves in front of our eyes the date of the only previous translation: 1962. It was the date of
The meteoric rise and swift fall of Anne Boleyn, she of the thousand days, has gripped the imagination even of sober-minded academic historians, Eric Ives describing it as ‘the most romantic, the most scandalous tragedy in English history’. Much of the fascination derives from the fact that the evidence is confusing, and no explanation appears
Just how unhappy was Jane Welsh’s 40-year marriage to Thomas Carlyle? For decades after the publication of J. A. Froude’s scandalously revealing biography in 1883, it was widely regarded as one of the dirtier secrets of Victorian literary history. She never wanted him in the first place, he was sexually impotent, she was bitterly jealous
A curious volume, this, and you would be right in thinking that anyone writing a book review of someone else’s book reviews needs to justify himself. (Indeed, the first essay in this book is a review of Sven Birkerts’s book reviews, at which point we seem an unnecessarily remote distance from literature itself — I
I will cheerfully own to having struggled in the past with Ronald Frame’s novels. Brooding once over a stack of photographs brought back from a fortnight’s holiday in Kerry, I realised that lurking among the margins of practically every snap — here flung down on a bathing-towel, there wedged beneath the picnic basket — was
‘The victor writes the history,’ says Peter Hofschröer in his latest attempt to rewrite it himself. ‘Rarely has this old adage been more apposite than when applied to Wellington and Waterloo.’ In his two previous books, the second of which is called 1815, The Waterloo Campaign: The German Victory, he argued that the Duke of
Miles Hudson is a military historian with several interesting books to his credit, especially his War and the Media (1981), written with Field Marshal Sir John Stanier. He gives his latest book the subtitle ‘A Cautionary Tale’, and so indeed it is. It tells the story of the various forces sent to Russia in 1918–19
Michael Collins, he tells us, was brought up in a terraced street south of the River Thames in Southwark, a district I don’t know very well. I have been there a few times, usually visiting west African friends and acquaintances, a fact that might strike Michael Collins as ironic. For if you look closely at
Marie of Romania (1875–1938), though little known to most readers today, was probably the most dynamic and effective royal consort of the 20th century, and certainly the most glamorous. A granddaughter of both Queen Victoria and the Tsar Alexander II, she was brought up in England by her parents, the Duke and Duchess of Edinburgh.
Within just a week of the tragic assassination in Dallas, the widowed Jackie Kennedy summoned the presidential chronicler Theodore H. White to a midnight conference at the family compound on the stormy Cape Cod shore. For four hours her whispery voice mesmerised him as she set out her vision of the Kennedy White House as
The Age of Napoleonby Alistair HorneWeidenfeld & Nicolson, £14.99, pp. 182, ISBN 029760791X More words have been written about Napoleon than about any other historical figure, even Abraham Lincoln. Whether he betrayed, or carried on, the French Revolution is a question that agitates historians. Certainly the seeds of the French urge to mastery over Europe
Ian Davidson begins his book by telling us that Voltaire is a famous writer but that his work is largely unknown. True, his plays are no longer performed and his poems are no longer read. But when he tells us that his historical works are also ignored, those of us for whom Siècle de Louis
Having just, laboriously, finished a book of my own (with a subtitle remarkably similar to Ian’s), it was with a sinking heart that I opened Making the Running. All too often in the past, the name I. Balding on the same race card, playing field, cricket pitch, or other competitive sporting arena has been, unless
Tom Perrotta’s fourth novel, Little Children, is a book one should read for its last 50 pages, but that means having to read the 300 before to make sense of it. In a book that primarily takes place in a suburban playground, it ends, naturally enough, at the playground, although at a worrisomely late hour,
Nineteen eighty-five was the year in which I became closely engaged in the revolution that was to overthrow the Soviet empire. Poland was the last of five loveless republics of the Warsaw Pact which I visited between February and April, and it was the one which made by far the deepest impression on me. For
My second most vivid memory of Brian Brindley — the first was the magnificent sepia risotto he served the first time I had dinner in his Georgian-style Reading dining-room whose walls had been painted a green so dark it was almost black — was the outrageously smelly fart he let rip as he wobbled into
Welcome a volume that in all ways lives up to its title, even at a pinch a comparison with John Aubrey. The 18 characters who receive at the hands of this gentleman of the press a good-natured hearing make a great celebrity list for a party. As guests we the readers are no longer bored
Rob Roy (1671-1734) is one of the most famous of Scotsmen. Whiskies, hotels, pubs, and junior football teams have been named after him. He has been portrayed on stage and screen. The 1994 Hollywood film, written by Alan Sharp, is a fine western set in 18th-century Scotland. He was already famous in 1817 ‘when’, as
Softback edition – £29.95 ISBN 1904537111 Self-portraiture is akin to what used to be called self-abuse: often done for want of anyone else at hand. Artists’ models cost money and, with the invention of colour photography, the demand for oil portraits declined. But, just as every autobiographer is the world authority on his or her
To celebrate the centenary of Anthony Powell’s birth next year an exhibition is being planned at the Wallace Collection in Lon- don, which houses Poussin’s ‘A Dance to the Music of Time’, the work of art that inspired the novelist’s panoramic 12- volume sequence. The official biography, to be written by Hilary Spurling, a former
We live in a demotic age. How is it therefore that by the beginning of the 21st century the Duke of Devonshire had become a national institution? If you doubt that fact you need only refer to Patrick Leigh Fermor’s lyrical account of the funeral in this magazine or the hundreds of column inches devoted
I was bemused by this novel — a first from Katherine Bucknell, better known as an editor of Isherwood’s diaries and of Auden studies. In its concentration on houses (in London and Virginia) and their furnishings, I kept thinking of Henry James and such novels as Portrait of a Lady and The Spoils of Poynton
Said Aburish, a Palestinian with excellent English who worked for years in Iraq, wrote a very good biography of Saddam four years ago. He brought out the full horror of the regime, and showed how Saddam’s hero was Stalin, even to the point that Stalin’s works were Saddam’s bedtime reading (such, at any rate, was
One of the chief characteristics of New Labour, Blairism or the Project — they amount to the same phenomenon — is that many of the cheer-leaders began their careers not just on the far left of the Labour Party but so far to the left as to be outside the party completely. Peter Mandelson and
Just as vulgarity can sometimes transcend itself and become something else (I am thinking of Gillray and Las Vegas), so silliness can sometimes transcend itself and attain sociological significance. Germaine Greer has written a transcendently silly pamphlet about a proposed future for her homeland, Australia. She wants it to become what she calls an Aboriginal
Frank Kermode’s The Age of Shakespeare is an astonishing achievement. In fewer than 200 small-format pages he discusses each of Shakespeare’s works. No comments are less than telling; most are highly original. Examples of the latter include a discussion of familial and rhetorical ‘doubles’ in Hamlet; an account of the unvaried verse of Julius Caesar,
It was comforting in the late 1960s to learn that the composed, sturdily elegant figure of Basil D’Oliveira was in the England cricket team. He was a man, we felt, who would see us through. This absorbing book, significant beyond the confines of cricket, is an account of the suffering and frustrations that beset his
James Surowiecki is a Martian. True, he doesn’t have pointy ears and he writes a financial column for the New Yorker. But only someone fallen to Earth would celebrate the obvious as much as he does. When he ventures out into a city, he marvels at the fact that fast-walking pedestrians don’t bump into each
Lawyers meet lawyers, historians and economists meet their colleagues. They have a defined profession. Creative writers have no defined profession: their concern is human nature in all its complexity. Yet they do bump into each other and are often obsessively interested in each other’s works and lives. Rachel Cohen is concerned with the way their