The good, the bad and the ugly in books, exhibitions, cinema, TV, dance, music, podcasts and theatre.
In 1919, only months after the end of the Great War, a French airman called Jacques Trolley de Prevaux, accompanied by a cameraman, piloted an airship down the line of the old Western Front that stretched from the Belgian coast to the Swiss border. The result is a haunting piece of film in many ways,
Alex Dehgan is clearly someone with a penchant for hazardous jobs. Even in the first few pages we find him in postwar Baghdad, he had spent the early part of the century searching for Iraqi scientists who had previously worked on weapons’ manufacture for Saddam Hussein. Presumably the life-threatening risks entailed in that role were
The love of money, says St Paul, is the root of all evil. The Snakes makes much the same point. The novel is Sadie Jones’s fourth, and the first to be set in the present. It’s the story of Bea and Dan, a nice young couple who are struggling to make the repayments on their
English as the world’s lingua franca isn’t going anywhere. Why, then, should we Anglophones bother to learn another language? What’s in it for us? And what, more seriously, are the implications if we decide not to bother? Digging deeply into these questions, Marek Kohn’s book asks what it actually means to have some mastery of
‘I still think he was a bastard.’ This is the opinion that Julia, daughter of the novelist Arthur, has about Peter Abelard. In Melvyn Bragg’s narrative, Arthur is finishing his novel about Abelard and Heloise, living in Paris, separated from his wife, and visited by Julia. She gives a modern woman’s view of the behaviour
Let us imagine that a book which Catholics find insulting is published in Britain, and a prominent Polish bishop calls for the author’s death. Catholics march on British streets, burning copies of the book. One of its Latin American translators is killed. A conference is held in Italy, where one of the attendees has announced
Some people might argue that Deborah Lipstadt has given us the book we desperately need from the author best equipped to write it. After all, in just the past few weeks the dumpster fire over the Labour party’s hand-ling of anti-Semitism burst into acrid flame again over general secretary Jenny Formby’s release of Labour’s record
The journalist Auberon Waugh, in whose time-capsule of a flat I briefly lived in 2000, once summed up what he took to be the primary motivations for writing books. ‘With women, there is this tremendous desire to expose themselves. With men, it is more often an obscure form of revenge.’ In the case of the
Mister Miracle is, on the face of it, one of the cheesiest of all costumed super-heroes. Created by Jack Kirby in 1971, he’s a gaudily dressed glint from the last gleaming of the Silver Age. Like the fictional ‘Escapist’ created by Michael Chabon in his Kirby-drenched Kavalier and Clay, Scott Free is part superhero and
There’s no getting away from that title. I will never see the world again. It catches your eye on the bookshelf. I will never see the world again. It’s there, at the top of every page. I Will Never See the World Again. It’s a killer opening, before the book has even begun, and it’s
Charlotte Bingham has had an extraordinary writing career. She wrote her first book, Coronet Among the Weeds (newly republished by Bloomsbury), when she was just 19. It was a memoir of her life as a 1950s debutante — the ‘weeds’ were the chinless wonders she met at debs’ dances — and it became an instant
Max Porter’s first book, Grief is the Thing with Feathers (2015), got a lot of credit for finding original ways to talk about two of the oldest subjects under the sun: human love and human death. It’s hero is a young father writing a book about Ted Hughes, whose distress at the death of his
A good question for your upcoming Lent quiz: where are angels mentioned in the Nicene Creed? I asked this at a vicarage supper party after finishing Peter Stanford’s highly informative book about angels, which had left me angel-obsessed and an angel bore. No one came up with the answer. ‘Of all things visible and invisible,
Walter Gropius (1883–1969) had the career that the 20th century inflicted on its architects. A master of the previous generation in the German-speaking lands, Otto Wagner, could create his entire oeuvre without venturing outside the city limits of Vienna. Gropius found himself thrust into one unprecedented role after another, uprooted and exiled repeatedly. His work
In this week’s Spectator Books I’m talking to Peter Stanford, author of Angels: A Visible and Invisible History. Why is it that, according to some polls, more people believe in angels than believe in God? Peter takes us on a tour through history, theology and literature to find how the winged cherubs on our Christmas
The call for poems about the difficulty of writing a poem attracted a far-larger-than-usual entry. A.H. Harker’s punchy couplet caught my eye: I’m stuck. Oh ****. Elsewhere there were nods to Wordsworth, Milton and ‘The Thought Fox’, Ted Hughes’s wonderful poem about poetic inspiration. The winners below earn £25 each for their travails. Brian Allgar
Anyone who has issues with Tolkien (at 16, even in a suitably ‘altered state’, I could not finish The Hobbit, never mind The Lord of the Rings), anyone who falls asleep while watching a tedious Joseph Campbell-formula flick such as Star Wars, anyone saddened by the 2014 BBC poll of adult readers that included six
IN ASSOCIATION WITH THE PRINCIPAL PARTNERS OF SHAKESPEARE’S GLOBE’S 2019 SUMMER SEASON We’ve been looking at various aspects of Richard II, which has just opened at Shakespeare’s Globe. Now to turn our attention a little further into the future. Richard II was only the opener for the remarkable run of history plays that are the
When the poet George Szirtes returned as an adult to Budapest, the city of his birth which he had left as a child with his family in 1956, he experienced what became an abiding fantasy. He imagined his mother going back to the family flat but, instead of sitting down in a chair, she carried
The publication of In the Closet of the Vatican by the French gay polemicist Frédéric Martel has been meticulously timed to coincide with Pope Francis’s ‘global summit’ of bishops to discuss the sexual abuse of minors. The book appeared in eight languages on Thursday morning, just as the gathering began. It is being hyped as
I am undoubtedly, alas, an example of what the Fowler brothers, H.W. and F.G., of The King’s English fame, would have called ‘a half-educated Englishman of literary proclivities’. Fellow half-educateds of similar proclivities will doubtless recall that scene in the third chapter of Our Mutual Friend, when Gaffer Hexam shows Mortimer Lightwood and Eugene Wrayburn
For a practical at medical school on the subject of the nervous system, it was thought unwise to wire students up to a live electrical circuit, so we used worms instead. The task was to measure lumbricus terrestris’s giant neurons as they fired. My worm’s bruise-coloured rings concertinaed in a final effort to escape before
If the road to hell is paved with good intentions, the one to heaven may be surfaced with bad ones. We like to imagine otherwise. We are rational, sensible, moral creatures. If we only think scientifically and apply ourselves, we can achieve anything. Hence the recent secular historiography of the Enlightenment and modern world, which,
Hunter Stockton Thompson blazed across the republic of American arts and letters for too short a time. When in February 2005 Thompson, 67, killed himself with a .45 at home in Woody Creek, Colorado, freethinkers and lovers of his savage, beautiful words grieved the world over — and we still do. Thompson was a Southern
Stendhal likened politics in literature to a pistol-shot in a concert: crude, but compelling. When that politics largely consists of machinations within the European Commission in Brussels, readers may fear that the writer who pulls the trigger wields no more than a pop-gun. Yet the Austrian author Robert Menasse has scoured these corridors of power
When Yiyun Li first became a writer, she decided that she would leave behind her native language, Chinese, and never write or be published in it again. She has described this decision as being like a suicide. In languages, she suggests, we form our identities. Leaving one behind is a death of a version of
This is an ebullient, irreverent and deeply serious novel in the noble tradition of Mark Twain, Sinclair Lewis (especially Babbitt and Elmer Gantry) and John Kennedy Toole. Sam Lipsyte certainly hits his prime target — the cultish behaviour around mindfulness, motivational speakers and pallid spiritual beliefs — but one of the joys of the novel
Chances are, you are reading these words in some room or other. Build a wall down the middle of it, and in the middle of the wall, insert a tiny shutter. Conjure up a tiny critter who can open and shut this little door at will. When a hotter-than-average air molecule careers towards it, the
James Lasdun is my favourite ‘should be famous’ writer, his work extraordinarily taut and compelling. His eye-boggling psychological thrillers are understated, yet perspicacious and hilarious. By ‘psychological thriller’ I don’t mean they contain newsworthy physical violence. Lasdun is too English for that (although he now lives in New York). I mean the kind of dilemmas