The good, the bad and the ugly in books, exhibitions, cinema, TV, dance, music, podcasts and theatre.
‘Gays are cowardly.’ ‘Capricorns are self-confident.’ Both prop- ositions are (pace astrologers) simply untrue or, as the author puts it, spurious. ‘Gays are more likely to get Aids than non-gays.’ There is plenty of evidence for this, although of course not all gays get Aids. So this is what the author calls a non-universal but
My Ladybird book of The Story of Napoleon had two pages to illustrate 1812. Napoleon sits on a white horse and watches Moscow burn, torched by fleeing Russians. Then the Grande Armée retreats, a column winding into a blurry, white oblivion. ‘With the thermometer seventy degrees below freezing’, read the text, ‘few of those who
This provocative, titillating and seductive novel is about upper-class affectations and ‘the mystery of unearned greatness’. It focuses on a network of rich, blue-blooded and slightly dim grandees which apparently stretches ‘far beyond national boundaries’. Snobs describes in forensic detail a world where duchesses are ‘taken in’ to dinner and desperate, social-climbing women feel deeply
The epic survival story of the SAS patrol known as Bravo Two Zero during the first Gulf war until now, has largely overshadowed a darker story of incompetence and worse on the part of some of those who sent eight brave men into the desert on foot, on a Scud-hunt that was doomed from the
This is a sad little story of the author’s annus horribilis as a pupil barrister in the late Nineties. Today the Bar bends ever deeper before the winds of modernisation — an all-graduate profession which subordinates even the best and brightest to the continuing rigours of further training and examination, piling acronym upon acronym —
Who would have thought of Harrow as ‘the heathen temple’ or suburban Penge as Celtic pen ced, ‘head of the wood’? This new dictionary, the better part of 20 years in the making, re-enchants the prosaic and gives historical resonance to the timelessly English. We are reminded of the mixed Celtic, Roman, Scandina- vian, Germanic
Have we had enough Irish childhoods, lackadaisical days remote from English stresses, charming eccentrics, amusing turns of speech, rain, religion, nostalgia? Well, no, not if they are as acute and funny as this tale of a Protestant boyhood in County Meath. Homan Potterton is the youngest of eight children of long-established farming stock. He grew
Available from Heywood Hill, 10 Curzon Street, London W1J 5HH Producers of ‘period dramas’, on film or television, go to tremendous trouble to create the right ‘period look’. In the late Victorian town house, everything is late Victorian; in the Regency rectory, everything is Regency; and so on. All of which is, of course, absurd
Henning Mankell, the Swedish crimewriter who is the creator of Inspector Kurt Wallender, is being taken increasingly seriously: an international bestseller but also the subject of profiles in literary papers. He has already won the prestigious (British) Crimewriters’ Gold Dagger Award with Sidetracked. It seems the measure of the success of his dour, dispirited and
Yvonne Cloetta, the French wife of a Swiss businessman, was Graham Greene’s mistress for the last 30 or so years of his life. Her husband spent most of the year in Africa; she lived at Juan les Pins with her two daughters, Greene in a flat overlooking the harbour in Antibes. When I first met
As in the theatre, so in his letters: John Gielgud was a man of many parts, and acutely aware of his audience for all of them. In this comprehensive volume of 800 letters spanning nearly 90 years, we see the great actor in a range of roles: loving son, wicked gossip, star actor, indecisive director,
Isaiah Berlin was a much-loved friend and a dominant influence on my thinking as an historian. His death in 1997 left a void that cannot be filled. I first met him in 1946 playing tiddlywinks on the floor of his room in New College. The letters in this book of some 700 pages, magnificently edited
Everyone — well, almost everyone — knows that in 1895, while The Importance of Being Earnest was packing in the punters at the St James’s Theatre, Oscar Wilde was foolish enough to take the Marquess of Queensberry to court for libelling him as a ‘posing somdomite’. The noble lord’s spelling mistake occasioned history’s most famous
Artemisia Gentileschi (b. 1593) is a feminist icon of such power that she has penetrated even to these islands, for instance in a book by our own feminist icon, Germaine Greer. Not only was Artemisia almost the only woman artist of her age, but while still in her teens she was raped by a fellow-artist,
If Slim’s 14th was the ‘Forgotten Army’ of the second world war, then the trade union Right and its sponsored MPs are surely the ‘Forgotten Army’ of Labour’s civil war of the 1970s and 1980s. They were ‘old Labour’, but not in the sense which the term has taken on in recent years to mean
‘Thank God that even in a family no one knows anyone else’s private thoughts! The meannesses of her own mind revolted her,’ confesses Rhoda, one of two sisters in Lettice Cooper’s 1936 novel, The New House. Cooper, who was born in 1897 and died in 1994, published 20 novels, many of them based loosely on
In AD 9 the Roman general Varus at the head of three legions was surprised by German forces in the Teutoburg forest, and utterly defeated. It was one of the greatest disasters ever suffered by a Roman army, even if not on a scale comparable to Cannae. This defeat marked the end of any serious
It’s no surprise that one of Alain de Botton’s favoured sources, in a text well-sprigged with neat citations, should be Matthew Arnold: sweetness and enlightenment are their common contributions to a culture in which anarchy is the liveliest art form. What can Arnold have been complaining about in Victorian England, as compared with what we
This is the first book about the Scottish artist William Gear (1915-97), an abstract painter of international standing with an emphatic style and bold sense of colour. The son of a miner, Gear was born in Fife and studied painting at the liberal and francophile Edinburgh College of Art. From the start he was marked
In the spring of 1972 I met what I still think was the bravest man in China. An ordinary factory hand, he told me that the officially invited American China academics, of whom I was one, who the previous day had been brought to his ‘typical workers’ house’ in Canton, had been told a pack
As with the opposite sex, there are few books you fall for and want for life, even fewer with which you can find little fault. Here is a right stunner, if it happens to be your type — a secret family history, hitherto interred by the accidents of time, across the events of which the
The old Oxford Histories of England were trusty bestsellers bound in pale blue wrappers. Hugely authoritative but often dull, they provided confident narratives of kings and governments, together with a chapter or so on culture and economics. The Clarendon Press has begun to update the series, and several volumes of a New Oxford History have
The Battle of Hastings, 1066by M. K. Lawson Tempus, £25, pp. 252, ISBN 0752426893 The Bayeux Tapestry, nearly 75 yards long, the mother of all newsreels and the father of all strip cartoons, was embroidered at Canterbury (most probably) some years after the Conquest. With ‘626 human figures, 202 horses, 55 dogs, 505 other animals,
This book is so important and good it deserves a more crowd-pulling title. Besides, is ‘Revival’ the right word? True, after a silence of 300 years some authors began to write from the Catholic point of view, but this has gathered no popular momentum. Also the word ‘Catholic’ in a title is likely to put
The First Crusade is one of the great historical adventures. Whatever one may think of the consequences or the moral issues, the migration of perhaps 100,000 people across Europe and Asia Minor, and the conquest of a large part of the Middle East by the 20,000 or 30,000 survivors, all over the space of three
The late J. G. Farrell, author of Troubles and The Siege of Krishnapur, used to say that he never read novels by contemporaries: the bad ones bored him while the good ones upset him because they had been written by someone else. I do not know what he would have made of William Nicholson’s The
This generously illustrated book serves two purposes. First of all, it celebrates the centenary of the reopening of the Crystal Palace which housed the 1851 Great Exhibition of the Works of Industry of All Nations in Hyde Park, at Sydenham in June 1854. In this role it traces the history of the build- ing reopened
Peter Conradi is a retired academic best known for his critical work on Iris Murdoch and, more recently, as her authorised biographer. The biography, though painstaking and full of interesting material, exemplified the difficulty of constricting a linear portrait of a thinker who not only wrote obsessively about mages and the electric currents — for
A hundred and twenty years ago, the global hyper-power invaded a strategic Middle Eastern country. It talked of self-government but imposed its own rule. Other powers were excluded. Despite repeated promises to leave, its troops did not finally do so until 74 years later. Egypt under British occupation at the end of the 19th century