The good, the bad and the ugly in books, exhibitions, cinema, TV, dance, music, podcasts and theatre.
Once upon a time there was the arche-typal Manchester band — half of which came from Macclesfield, in leafy Cheshire, and a quarter of which grew up in Salford, a city in its own right, full of fans of a famous football club equally confused about its true home. This combustible combo was Joy Division
What is it that distinguishes humans from other animals? The default answer nowadays is tediously misanthropic, but a more interesting distinction is that humans keep pets. Why this should be is the subject of this book. Jacky Colliss Harvey investigates the men and women who have owned, doted on, and in some cases mistreated their
In 2011, when the editor of Charlie Hebdo put Muhammad on the cover, he did so as the heir to more than 200 years of a peculiarly French brand of anti-clericalism. Just as radicals in the Revolution had desecrated churches and smashed icons, so did cartoonists at France’s most scabrous magazine delight in satirising religion.
There is a paperback on my bookshelves with an inscription from Claus von Bulow, who died this week. ‘To Damian,’ it reads, ‘who is also quite innocent.’ The title of the book? Insulin Murders. This may surprise anyone old enough to remember the tragedy and the two trials that made Claus notorious in the early
All cities are shapeshifters, but London is special. London is a palimpsest of places gone but not lost. Even as it is taken apart and rebuilt reaching to the skies, London remains rooted in the lay of the land, shore ditches, hills and fields still giving their names to the neighbourhoods upon them, and all
Several years ago, I was interviewing the garden writer and designer Sarah Raven at her home in Sussex when a tall, tanned figure bounded up from the woods towards us. It was Adam Nicolson, her husband, and he carried an axe over his shoulder. A few months later, an email arrived from Nicolson, inviting me
Mary Norris’s book about her love affair with Greece and the Greek language starts with a terrific chapter about alphabets. That may sound like an oxymoron, but I was fascinated to learn why the Y and the Z come at the end of our alphabet. When the Romans were adapting the Greek alphabet, they ditched
We ought to cherish the haunted landscape of the Thames Estuary while we can. The grey hulks of old power stations, the white domes of oil refineries, the sternly rectilinear factories, all of which once seemed oppressive, are now instead poetic because of their near extinction. Caroline Crampton’s atmospheric and movingly written exploration of the
Few Peruvians today are interested in ‘the Shining Path years’, which left no traces besides 70,000 mutilated bodies and a wrecked country. Modern Lima, by and large, is a thriving city of five-star restaurants, shopping malls and newish Toyotas. Yet between 1980 and 1992 it was a vile and violent place, under siege from a
We live in a logic-obsessed world, from computer modelling of the economy to businesses run by spreadsheets. But we also know, from decades of behavioural economics and evolutionary psychology research, humans are not robots. The social world is not a machine but a complex system. In Alchemy: The Surprising Power of Ideas that Don’t Make
Q: What’s worse than listening to someone ranting hysterically about Donald Trump? A: Listening to Bret Easton Ellis ranting hysterically about people ranting about Trump. I gave him a fair hearing, I really did. Some of what Ellis has to say in White, his first work of non-fiction, is not stupid. It’s true that teeth-gnashing
I must have seen hundreds of opera productions in my time. Out of these, hardly any made a lasting impression on account of their design: the great Tarkovsky Boris Godunov for Covent Garden; Hockney’s Rake’s Progress for Glyndebourne; Es Devlin’s Les Troyens; the Richard Peduzzi Bayreuth Ring preserved on film. Very few others. For many
In this week’s books podcast I’m joined by the physicist Jim Al-Khalili (host of Radio Four’s The Life Scientific) to talk about his first novel, a science-fiction thriller called Sunfall. In it, Jim uses real science to conjure up a plausible but fantastical near-future crisis in which the earth’s magnetic field falters and dies. What
Rory Stewart is the back-of-field Tory leadership candidate who’s catching most attention at the moment; popping up all over London inviting all comers to talk to him about policy and ideas. He’s a politician with real hinterland- and you can get a flavour of that hinterland in the conversation we had when he came to
One of the great joys of the 18th-century novella La petite maison is the way Jean-François de Bastide matches the proportions and shape of the book to the architecture of the exquisite country house at the story’s heart. Zuzana Ružicková, the outstanding Czech harpsichordist who died in 2017 while working with Wendy Holden on this
Charles Kay Ogden once proposed that conversations would be conducted more efficiently if participants wore masks. Apart from confirming the hypothesis that Britons don’t care much for philosophising but rarely miss an excuse to dress up, this made me think if only Theresa May had visited Brussels as Darth Vader to meet Jean-Claude Juncker in
The rebranding of John Browne has been a long and, to those of us living overseas, instructive affair. Readers will recall the unedifying circumstances leading to his dismissal from BP ten years ago, when the country’s usual gang of disagreeable and unkindly figures such as Paul Dacre and Tom Bower were snapping busily at his
I am so, so sad to hear about the death of Judith Kerr. I last saw her only a month or two ago, at an Oldie Literary Lunch, where she was in fine form and did not stint herself on a glass or two of wine. She seems to have been constitutionally a merry person,
Damian Barr explains the upsetting genesis of his impressive debut novel, You Will Be Safe Here, in his acknowledgements: This story began with a picture of a boy in a newspaper. That boy was Raymond Buys and he’d been killed in a camp not unlike New Dawn. He was just 15. This book is dedicated
IN ASSOCIATION WITH THE PRINCIPAL PARTNERS OF SHAKESPEARE’S GLOBE’S 2019 SUMMER SEASON ‘Small Latin and less Greek’ was Ben Jonson’s verdict on Shakespeare the linguist. But as Henry V (the latest play in the Globe’s Merian-sponsored summer season) shows, he knew a bit of French, too. As well as all that blood-and-thunder stuff on
In 2012 OUP published Geoffrey Hill’s Collected Poems; they could have waited, because they’re now going to need another edition. Between 2012 and his death, aged 84, in 2016, Hill wrote another 271 poems, and here they are — although, given his productivity since the mid-1990s, I wouldn’t be surprised if there were plenty more.
In Edo (now Tokyo), before the Meiji restoration, bells marked the beginning of each hour. The hours were named after the animals of the Chinese zodiac; the cow had its own hour, as did the mouse, the chicken, the horse, etc. In winter, daytime hours were shorter than in summer, and night hours were long.
In this week’s books podcast my guest is Emma Smith, Professor of Shakespeare Studies at Hertford College, Oxford, who’s talking about her new book This Is Shakespeare. What is it that makes Shakespeare special — and is it defensible that, as even in university curricula, we talk about Shakespeare apart from and above the whole
Of how many magazine articles can you recall where you were and what you felt when you read them? If any occur, there’s a reliable chance John Hersey’s ‘Hiroshima’ will figure among them, and not just because it will have been assigned at an impressionable age in school. For the first time in its history,
Years ago, a friend persuaded me that a reviewer should almost never give a book a bad review. Most books, he argued, are written with honest effort. Writers often devote years of their lives, whereas reviewers put in hours. Even a mediocre book that hardly anyone will ever read generally contains something worth passing on
Mr Todd is a lonely man, out of work, nursing a thousand grudges while he ekes out a living with his grown-up son, Adrian. He believes Adrian is dangerous, a threat to other people. But the real evil might be living inside Mr Todd’s head. This is the squalid battleground set out by Iain Maitland
A stiff, invigorating breeze of revisionism is blowing through stuffy art history. Is it really true that all the valuable traffic was on a mainline between Paris and New York, with modest sidings in London, Barcelona and Zurich? Was the adventure of modern art an exclusively masculine journey across the North Atlantic? Suddenly, it has
These two refreshingly concise books address the same question from different angles: how should we deal with Russia? Mark Galeotti focuses on Vladimir Putin himself, his background, aims, tactics and strategy (if any). Andrew Monaghan takes a wider approach, analysing Russia’s strengths and weaknesses, its self-image, its perceptions and misperceptions of us, ditto ours of
Working in the Public Record Office some years ago, I ordered up the logbook of the badly damaged HMS Scylla on her return to Britain after D-Day. There was something very moving in seeing the bare navigational details noted in my uncle’s familiar hand. But then can anything be so immediate a point of contact