The good, the bad and the ugly in books, exhibitions, cinema, TV, dance, music, podcasts and theatre.
Augustus the Strong (1670-1733), Elector of Saxony and King of Poland, is often labelled one of the worst monarchs in European history. His reign is billed by Tim Blanning’s publishers as ‘a study in failed statecraft, showing how a ruler can shape history as much by incompetence as brilliance’. Yet this thorough and often hilarious
Max Johnson’s life while he waited for a heart transplant had become so miserable and traumatic that he didn’t care whether he carried on or not. Indeed, the colourless, almost lifeless nine-year-old recorded a video saying he wanted to die. His parents felt as though they were on ‘death row’ as they waited for a
There is something undeniably sweet about this book. On one level, in line with the cover’s pretty pink text, it is a simple, unpretentious story about a girl who loved to dance. But on another level, the unfolding tragedy is Shakespearian – an effect amplified by the unfussy prose of Anne Allan, a long-time professional
Garth Greenwell has made a name for himself as a chronicler of touch. In his previous novels, What Belongs to You (2016) and Cleanness (2020), the intimacy of a lover’s hand or the frisson of something much darker – the spit, the slap of a BDSM session – could expand to fill whole paragraphs: stories
When Shakespeare wrote Richard II, he billed his play as a tragedy: the downfall of a king riddled with fear, contempt and an obscure sense of majesty. Shakespeare’s portrait was a reasonably accurate one. Some historians have suggested Richard was a narcissist; others that he had borderline personality disorder. Helen Castor offers a candid and
In Home Is Where We Start, Susanna Crossman quotes one of Nadine Gordimer’s characters on the subject of utopias: When rationalism destroyed heaven and decided to set it up here on Earth, that most terrible of all goals entered human ambition. It was clear there’d be no end to what people would be made to
Nearly a quarter of a century ago, Malcolm Gladwell wrote The Tipping Point in which he explained how little things could suddenly add up to cause huge change, in phenomena as diverse as the popularity of Hush Puppies and the reduction of crime in New York City. The book achieved its own tipping point and
In April 1967 Tony Scotland, a cub reporter for Australia’s ABC television news, drove with a cameraman from Hobart to a sheep station in Fingal to interview Lord Talbot de Malahide, an Anglo-Irish aristocrat who had edited a book about Tasmanian flora. This was a delicate assignment. Lord Talbot was a retired British ambassador to
I have been reviewing for decades and this is by far the most difficult book I have taken on: difficult to read because it relates to what Israel has done in Gaza over the last year, and difficult to write about because the subject is so divisive. But whether you think Palestinians deserve what is
An earworm from the time of Covid: the sound of Connell and Marianne having breathless sex, bedsprings squeaking. I’m talking not about 2020’s hit TV adaptation of Sally Rooney’s bestselling second novel, Normal People but about the relentless piss-take featured on BBC Radio 4’s Dead Ringers. After every few skits the show would cut to
One wintry day during lockdown, the parliamentary political adviser Chloe Dalton discovered a new-born leveret on the track by her converted barn. It was only as long as her palm’s width, with a white star shape on its forehead. Ambivalent about interfering, she nonetheless gave it houseroom, despite being warned that brown hares can never
Leo Tolstoy served as a young artillery officer in the defence of the great Russian naval base of Sevastopol against British and French invaders in the middle of the 19th century. The first of his three short stories, collected as Sevastopol Sketches, came out as the siege was still in progress. In it he spelled
‘You never seem to get a good murder nowadays.’ With this ‘fretful complaint’ George Orwell imagined newspaper readers bemoaning the decline of the classic English murder. Gone were the ‘old domestic poisoning dramas’ – a solicitor or dentist killing his wife in a quiet suburban home – which made the perfect News of the World
Sexual fantasies, that dream you had last night, and ideas for novels have one thing in common: generally the best place for them is inside your head, never to be divulged. Until now, the major exception to the rule was Nancy Friday’s 1973 compilation of women’s fantasies, My Secret Garden, which sold more than two
When the Royal Navy celebrated Queen Victoria’s Diamond Jubilee in 1897, 173 ships and 50,000 sailors filled the Solent. The Spectator (3 July 1897) described the ‘endless succession of battleships, cruisers, destroyers, gunboats and torpedo boats’ as offering ‘the most magnificent naval spectacle ever beheld’. More importantly, the fleet at Spithead ‘would have been able
I finished reading the third volume of Karl Ove Knausgaard’s latest series – no longer a trilogy, perhaps a sextet – in three days. The Third Realm is as unsettling, disturbing and riveting as the previous instalments, and I was even disappointed that it came in at a mere 500 pages – considerably shorter than
Naples is ‘certainly the most disgusting place in Europe’, judged John Ruskin. The boisterous yelling in the corridor-like streets and beetling humanity filled the Victorian sage with loathing. (‘See Naples and die’ became for Ruskin ‘See Naples and run away’.) In the city’s obscure exuberance of life he could see only a great sleaze. Naples
In 1651, the poet Andrew Marvell was working for the parliamentarian military hero Sir Thomas Fairfax, tutoring his daughter Mary on Fairfax’s Nun Appleton estate near York. When he wasn’t delivering language lessons to his young charge, Marvell was busy composing one of the most astonishingly experimental poems of the 17th century. Opera in the
Yuval Noah Harari has sold more than 45 million books in 65 languages. He is a professor with a PhD from the University of Oxford, has spoken at TED and the World Economic Forum in Davos, and his latest book, Nexus, is considered ‘erudite, provocative and entertaining’ by Rory Stewart and ‘thought-provoking and so very
As many of us who grew up in America in the 1960s and 1970s learned, Mad magazine didn’t, as our parents warned us, warp our brains – because our brains were pretty warped to begin with. It was a time when what passed for culture was almost entirely scripted by Madison Avenue, promising that overpriced
One Sunday in October 1967, about 16 per cent of the British population settled down at 8.15 p.m. to watch the Morecambe & Wise Show on ITV. This was mainstream family entertainment aimed at all age groups, but there was also a place each week for teen-friendly acts from the pop charts. That evening it
Nothing is ever quite as it seems in the world of Olga Tokarczuk. Her latest novel starts with an epigraph taken from Fernando Pessoa: ‘The visible world goes on as usual in the broad daylight. Otherness watches us from the shadows.’ Wild deer were murder suspects in her surreal and beautiful 2018 novel Drive Your
The French philosopher Simone Weil, who died of self-starvation and tuberculosis in a Kent sanitorium in 1943 at the age of 34, remains a conundrum. ‘Mais elle est folle!’ had been the spluttering response of Charles de Gaulle the previous year, during her short wartime period analysing reports for the Free French in London. Her
The Italian actuary Bruno de Finetti, writing in 1931, was explicit: ‘Probability does not exist.’ Probability, it’s true, is simply the measure of an observer’s uncertainty; and in The Art of Uncertainty, the British statistician David Spiegelhalter explains how this extraordinary and much-derided science has evolved to the point where it is even able to
There was a time when Elizabeth Strout’s fans had to wait a few years for the next book; but Tell Me Everything follows fast on her two previous novels – part of what she has termed a ‘marathon’ of writing in her sixties. It has been an extraordinary creative flowering: a diverting pleasure for admirers
Michel Houellebecq’s ninth and longest novel, anéantir, was published in France at the beginning of January 2022 with an initial print run of 300,000 copies. Translations into Italian, German and Spanish appeared a few weeks later. Only now, though, is it available in English, a belatedness all the more regrettable because, like several of Houellebecq’s
The German cultural scientist Ulrich Raulff has written that horses have as many meanings as bones. In the archaeologist William Taylor’s new history of horses and humans, we meet all those bones. Found in thawing permafrost, in caves, and buried ceremonially in graves in Siberia and Chile, the bones are cracked open by Taylor to
Ben Macintyre has a knack of distilling impeccably sourced information about clandestine operations into clear, exciting narrative prose. His latest book, about the April 1980 Iranian embassy siege in London, starts as it means to go on – with a snapshot of seven Range Rovers, two Ford Transit vans and two furniture lorries pulling out
The tramp of lovers marching through our heroine’s bedroom in the first half of Sonia Purnell’s Kingmaker almost deafens the reader. But then not for nothing did Pamela Digby Churchill Hayward Harriman become known as the alpha courtesan of the 20th century. What is perhaps not so well covered is her decade-long influence on American
