The good, the bad and the ugly in books, exhibitions, cinema, TV, dance, music, podcasts and theatre.
Abbie Devereaux, the heroine of Land of the Living, finds herself hooded and bound and a prisoner of a man who is just a whispering voice. She has a violent headache and cannot remember anything about how she has come to be lying on concrete in this damp, smelly place, or even anything leading up
Although Janet Malcolm has written in depth about an extraordinary range of subjects, from psychoanalysis and photography through to literary criticism, the art world, journalism, biography and the law, in thematic terms she has actually been one of the most consistent non-fiction writers of our time. Certainly, she is one of the most brilliant. I
Can it be said that anyone is sane, that anyone is healthy – or does all life consist of degrees of illness and madness? Is love a kind of madness? Is grief an illness? Is art whatever we say it is, or are there limits? Can murder be art? These and many other questions hover
Superficially, Hitler and Churchill resembled each other, in the way that two very powerful leaders will. In particular, as Andrew Roberts points out, both their careers rested on a particular sort of confidence trick, an ability to misrepresent the facts of the case and thereby inspire their followers into action. In Hitler’s case it was
For the last few years Ruth Rendell has used her Chief Inspector Wexford detective novels to explore social issues that have been much in the papers. This has unfortunately made for unoriginal story lines with obvious villains in an all too familiar terrain. It is a pleasure therefore to be able to report that The
Where other contemporary American novelists, mandarin or popular, like to write about war in South-east Asia, corruption in the boardroom, organised crime and the alienated condition of the human soul, Nicholson Baker prefers to tackle the truly important issues of our time: how to lift a pair of underpants with your toes, how to make
Polly Toynbee describes herself as ‘profoundly anti-religious’, but she had the energy and curiosity to accept an ingenious challenge from a group of Christians. Church Action on Poverty wanted her to spend Lent trying to live on the minimum wage of £4.10 an hour. She duly moved out of her comfortable house and into a
Has anybody ever struggled for Europe? They might have struggled for British Ulster or Free France or the village green in Moreton-in-Marsh. But Europe? There are supposed to be some people around who, when they’re asked where they’re from, trumpet, ‘I’m European!’; if they really exist, they’re doing a good job of keeping themselves to
Hugh Trevor-Roper long refused to write his memoirs. Eventually, the firm of Weidenfeld persuaded him, if he was not going to write them, to speak them. The recipient of his reminiscences was to be a tape recorder and I. He agreed to talk to me because – I speculate – I knew him, but not
In this book Russell Martin seeks to explain to the common reader how Picasso’s largest canvas, measuring 11′ 6” high and 25′ 8” long, came to be called ‘Guernica’, after a small Basque market town of some 7,000 inhabitants and how it became the painter’s best known work as an icon of the radical Left
John Gimlette and I both won this magazine’s Shiva Naipaul Memorial Prize (awarded for unconventional travel writing) and we both got book deals as a result. Winning the prize changed my life and perhaps it changed Gimlette’s, too. We should toast The Spectator regularly for our good luck. I wrote about the inhabitants of Buenos
There comes a time when all professors of literature think of writing a book like this. Elaine Showalter has been professing it for 40 years, and after such a long and varied career what could be more apposite or timely than to share the wisdom of such experience with her younger colleagues? The answer, I
Joyce Carol Oates is a prolific, even prolix writer, with more than 50 novels and short-story collections to her name. Yet she writes wonderfully of life’s uncertainties and of American reality in the raw. In her latest novel, I’ll Take You There, Oates returns to her old themes of violence, madness and sexual passion. The
When John Moynihan was three and living with his painter parents in a flat off Primrose Hill he used to be terrified by nocturnal howls and squeals from the Regent’s Park zoo. Wetting himself, desperate to be ‘rescued from the labyrinths of an unspeakable jungle’, he was soothed by whoever happened to be around, sometimes
Bill Emmott, the editor of the Economist and author of The Sun Also Sets which accurately predicted the decline of Japan, believes there are two fundamental questions to ask at the beginning of the 21st century. Can capitalism continue to be the dominant force? And, in his words, ‘Will America continue to lead the world
This is a curious story. In 1886, a year after the final British conquest of Upper Burma, a piano-tuner, Edgar Drake, is requested by the War Office to travel to the Shan States – still largely untouched by British power – to tune a rare 1840s Erard piano. The piano was originally shipped to one
Just as Gustav Mahler wove a bugle fanfare into his symphonies, so Joseph Roth wove martial music into his novels. In Roth’s case, it was invariably Johann Strauss’s ‘Radetzky March’, a signature tune which tum-te-tums through his earlier fiction and then becomes the title of this, his 1932 masterpiece. For Roth, like Mahler, military tunes
This is a strange, tantalising book of unintentional poetry; it is rather like a book plucked from the shelves of one of Jorge Luis Borges’ impossible libraries. The first book of the celebrated philanthropist, collector and Daimler heir, Gert-Rudolf ‘Muck’ Flick, it is a highly scholarly and lucid biography of a dozen or so great
I have an unusually vivid recollection of the first time I met John Hall. I went to his flat in Chelsea to be interviewed – as I thought – to establish whether I might make a suitable lecturer for his Pre-University Course in Venice. However, when I arrived, he got straight down to the nitty-
I selected Overnight to Innsbruck by Denyse Woods by chance from the reviewing shelf and discovered a real treat of a read. It is pleasantly old-fashioned in having a strong, page-turning plot, and credible characters who panic and fret in recognisably authentic ways, yet bristling with smart, contemporary dialogue and psychological insight. If only chance
Sven Lindqvist used to be a fairly flabby intellectual Swede with a natural disclination to engage in any kind of sporting activity whatsoever (well, he did a bit of sluggish swimming) – especially team sports. Then, at some point before 1988 (when this book was first published in Sweden), by which time he had reached
How many people have heard of Michael Reeves? Most biographies are written about famous people or people who hobnob with famous people or lesser-known people who have led particularly interesting lives. Michael Reeves is none of these. He was an English ex-public school boy, obsessed by cinema, who made three low-budget horror films and died
It is rare for a first novel to be launched with the degree of enthusiasm that Fourth Estate have bestowed upon this saga of the American civil war. The jacket comes trumpeting its triumph on release in the USA. ‘Deserves the Pulitzer Prize’, it quotes from the Toronto Globe and Mail. A cynic might say,
What is really wrong with the Blair government? The unease it excites is at least as strong on the articulate political Left as on the Right. Indeed the grounds for anxiety may overlap across the political spectrum. Until now it has been difficult to verbalise this sense of malaise. The citation of particular policies that
In 1926 Simon Marks, head of a little-known chain of penny bazaars called Marks & Spencer, placed an order for men’s socks with Corahs, a Leicester knitwear manufacturer. The order was kept secret – the Corah brothers did not want to offend the wholesalers, who forbade their suppliers from selling direct to retailers – but
In the 1840s and 50s, Douglas Jerrold, Dickens and Thackeray were the three best known literary men in England, and it was said at the time that it was ‘hardly possible to discuss the merits of any of them without referring to the other two. What happened to Jerrold? He was born into a family
Here is an astonishing book. It is a biography of Rudolph Nureyev written as a piece of fiction, but it is not a roman
There were four of us on the shortlist: three women in their twenties and me. We sat in a row while a Home Office cheerleader told us what a great life awaited one of us in the press office. The jolly-along lasted for perhaps ten minutes, and not once did the beaver pause in his
In 1909, in a late letter to his brother, Henry James bemoaned the fact that the ‘novel of ideas’ – the novel ‘built on the momentum and inspiration found in a solid, sustainable and infinitely expandable idea’ – was finally dead, and that it had died from ‘lack of want or appetite in the reading