The good, the bad and the ugly in books, exhibitions, cinema, TV, dance, music, podcasts and theatre.
Nick Pyenson, curator of fossil marine mammals at the Smithsonian Institute in Washington, is quick to tell us he’s not a ‘whale hugger’. ‘I didn’t fall asleep snuggling stuffed whales or decorate my room with posters of humpbacks suspended in prismatic light.’ Pyenson sees whales through their ancestral bones, and their contemporary entrails, digging up
The role of Hamlet is, Max Beerbohm famously wrote, ‘a hoop through which every eminent actor must, sooner or later, jump’. In this book, and in its online supplement, Jonathan Croall charts the flight through that hoop of pretty well all of the ‘eminent actors’ — male and female, young and not so young, white
When I was younger, one of my favourite books was James Stevens Curl’s The Victorian Celebration of Death. His latest is much less cheerful. Like one of those innocents who re-enact the Civil War in embarrassing costume on Bank Holidays, Curl has been time-travelling backwards into a pre-modern world. He returns from the past with
All Among the Barley, Melissa Harrison’s third ‘nature novel’, centres on Wych Farm in the autumn of 1933, where the corn fields are ‘acres of gold like bullion, strewn with the sapphires of cornflowers and the garnets of corn poppies and watched over from on high by larks’. Our narrator, 14-year-old Edie, has finished school
For the latest competition you were invited to imagine a well-known author who doesn’t normally write in the genre trying their hand at science fiction. In a 2015 interview, the wonderful Ursula K. Le Guin, always a staunch and eloquent defender of the genre, took a pop at writers of literary fiction who move into
Despite his having one of the most famous names in the world, we know maddeningly little about William Shakespeare. His private life was lost in the swirling debris of the early modern world. Buildings such as the Globe or New Place (the house he retired to in Stratford) were demolished in the centuries after his
Among the biggest surprises of this year’s Man Booker Prize longlist was the inclusion, for the first time in the prize’s 50-year history, of a “graphic novel”. Nick Drnaso’s Sabrina — a chillingly claustrophobic account of the aftermath of a murder in post-truth America — is undoubtedly a brilliant example of its form. But does
Recently there has been a spate of retellings of the Iliad, to name just Pat Barker’s The Silence of the Girls, focusing on the female slaves, and Colm Tóibín’s take on the aftermath of the Trojan war, House of Names. For his second novel, Michael Hughes attempts something more literal and more challenging: to transpose
‘The most interesting novels are a bit strange,’ Kirsty Gunn once told readers of the London Review of Books. ‘They reject the predictable progress of conventional plotlines in favour of something that feels more risky.’ It’s surprising then that Gunn’s latest novel-ish offering is about unrequited love — a middle-aged banker for his glamorous landlady
Anita Leslie knew how to tell a story. Arranging to sit for a portrait six months before she died, she planned to borrow a khaki shirt on which to pin her second world war decorations, the Africa Star and the Croix de Guerre. The portrait was never commissioned, but it is clear that Leslie —
This is a well-written, scrupulously researched and argued account of an enduring mystery that neatly illustrates the haphazard interactions of politics, bureaucracy and history. In 1924 Grigori Zinoviev was head of the Communist International, the propaganda arm of the Soviet regime. A letter in his name, dated 15 September and addressed to the Communist Party
It is always interesting to see what art historians get up to when none of the rest of us is looking. It is hard to know what the inspiration for The Mummy’s Foot and the Big Toe can possibly have been, but if this very short book offers the kind of approach that will go
‘I have a very poor opinion of other people’s opinion of me — though I am fairly happy in my own conceit — and always surprised to find that anyone likes my work or character.’ This admission by Robert Graves — made to his then friend Siegfried Sassoon in the mid-1920s — goes to the
As the great Bossa Nova musician Tom Jobim liked to say, Brazil is not for beginners. This tends to be the case for biographies too: an admiration for the protagonist comes first. But once one has a taste for the flair, language and music of Brazil, the extraordinary tale of the pressure cooker that forged
Approaching her death, and the end of Claire Fuller’s third novel, Frances Jellico — for the most part a stickler for order and rules — admits that ‘the truth isn’t always the right way’. A wasting disease has given her dementia, ‘but is kind enough to leave the summer of 1969 intact’. She dips in
Imagine a world where we’re all hooked to our individual electronic devices, which feed us our music, communicate with our friends and know our needs; imagine a tech company that dominates an entire city, where your social pecking order is reflected in the devices you possess. Actually, you don’t have to imagine. It’s all there
First it was McMafia. After which it was the Skripals. Then the World Cup. Come the end of the year even Buckingham Palace is getting in on the act with a new exhibition, Russia: Royalty & the Romanovs (‘Through war, alliance and dynastic marriage the relationships between Britain and Russia and their royal families are
A book that opens in a Lahore refugee camp, shifts to Cat Bells Fell, rising above the shores of Derwentwater, and then swoops between the Ranigunj coalfields in Bengal, Belsize Park, a handicrafts exhibition at Kharagpur, Kensington Gore, military intelligence headquarters in Calcutta, an aircraft factory in Wembley and the Himalayas is bound to keep
‘No testimony from this time must ever be forgotten,’ the great Lithuanian poet Tomas Venclova says in his afterword to Dalia Grinkeviciute’s memoir. The author was 14 in 1941, when the Soviets deported her with her mother and brother from their native Kaunas, Lithuania’s second largest city. In 1949, the women escaped from Siberia and
It was in his play Back to Methuselah that George Bernard Shaw honoured a lesser known aspect of Charles Darwin’s originality as a thinker, when he described him as ‘an intelligent and industrious pigeon fancier’. Britain’s greatest natural scientist was indeed a keeper of fowl, with pigeons among his favourites. The habit arose from Darwin’s
‘The Divine Comedy is a book that everyone ought to read,’ according to Jorge Luis Borges, and every Italian has read it. Dante’s midlife crisis in the dark wood, his journey down the circles of hell, up the ledges of Purgatory and into the arms of Beatrice is mother’s milk to Italian schoolchildren. Today lines
The writer and chemist Primo Levi saw poetry in Mendeleev’s periodic table, describing it as ‘poetry, loftier and more solemn than all the poetry we had swallowed down in liceo; and come to think of it, it even rhymed!’ So I thought it might be an idea to challenge you to write a poem inspired
Across the fields from the medieval manor house of Toad Hall, and the accompanying 16th-century timber-frame apothecary’s house which Alan Garner dismantled and moved 17 miles to join it in Blackden in rural Cheshire, sits Jodrell Bank Observatory. Here huge telescopes scour the cosmos, seeking radio waves from distant planets and stars. This juxtaposition between
Long ago, I interviewed Edmund White and found that the photographer assigned to the job was the incomparable Jane Bown — a bit like having Matisse turn up to decorate your kitchen. After we talked, Jane shot. She managed to convert a tiny hotel courtyard into a sort of antique Grecian glade. In her pictures,
China, wrote Adam Smith, is ‘one of the richest, that is, one of the most fertile, best cultivated, most industrious and most populous countries in the world’. It was an obvious exemplar for a man who was trying to write An Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations. In the late
A girl at a window, hidden behind curtains, watches three women in a dimly lit drawing room in the house across the road as they sit silently smoking, hands and faces pale against their dark clothes. She invents identities for the trio: they are criminals or abandoned spinsters. Sinister or pathetic. Curiosity grows into obsession:
Savi Naipaul Akal’s publishing house is named after the peepal tree, in whose shade Buddha is said to have achieved enlightenment. The author’s industriously detailed memoir reveals nothing quite so brilliantly life-enhancing but presents persuasive statements in favour of family loyalty, domestic order and higher education, while allowing herself opportunities to express resentment of a
The best royal biography ever written is probably James Pope-Hennessy’s Queen Mary. Published in 1959, only six years after the queen’s death, it is a masterpiece: no one has written better about her German relations, about her larger-than-life mother, Fat Mary, the Duchess of Teck, or about the royal family in the early 20th century.
Edmundsbury, the fictional, sketchily rendered town in which the action of this novel takes place, is part of a social experiment — its inhabitants lab rats for a digital overhaul that goes beyond surveillance. Everything they do is measured, tracked and recorded in exchange for treats, such as heightened security and increased download speeds. Sam