The good, the bad and the ugly in books, exhibitions, cinema, TV, dance, music, podcasts and theatre.
Paris, Venice, Montevideo, Cape Town, Hobart. There are cities, like fado, that pluck at the gut. In my personal half dozen, having also lived there, Lisbon ranks high. ‘What beauties doth Lisboa first unfold,’ gasped Byron’s Childe Harold. Two centuries on, Portugal’s capital remains Queen of the Sea. Yet beyond a sombrely sentimental gift to
When I picked this book up, I already loved it — or at least I loved the idea of it: heroic sporting underdogs, a new coach with nothing in common with his players, and the forging of an indestructible bond of comradeship, all topped off by success on the world stage. But I felt trepidation
One day in December 1908, a wealthy 81-year-old spinster named Marion Gilchrist was bludgeoned to death in her Glasgow flat. Miss Gilchrist, who lived alone with her maid, was an obsessive collector and hoarder of jewels, which she hid among her clothes. There was no sign of a forced entry, but a valuable diamond brooch
Tim Winton’s novel about a journey of teenage male self-discovery is raw, brutal and merciless. You need to be familiar with Australian vernacular to appreciate the first-person narration by the young protagonist who says he is 17 but is thought to be ‘more like 15’ by an old renegade Irish priest he meets in the
‘I think you’re an adult when you can no longer tell your life story over the course of a first date,’ says Glen David Gold. I emerged from his weighty memoir feeling more like I’d been through a marriage: sadder, wiser, still sifting the decades of detail for the moments when a little self-awareness could
The true tragedy of the last Romanovs was a failure of imagination. Both during his last disastrous months in office and throughout the slowly unfolding catastrophe of his imprisonment, Nicholas II failed to conceive of how quickly the world around him could change, or just how desperate and ruthless the revolutionaries could be. A similar
Boyd Tonkin is superbly qualified to compile this volume. As literary editor of the Independent, he revived that newspaper’s foreign fiction prize, first won by Orhan Pamuk and his translator Victoria Holbrook. Translators are routinely undervalued. As with stage-lighting technicians, one is apt consciously to notice only glaring blunders; so it is good to know
Seven years ago Stella Tillyard, a successful historian of the 18th century, broke into historical fiction with Tides of War. This historically faithful and scrupulously detailed Napoleonic saga was thought in some quarters to have met its period’s gold standard: Patrick O’Brian’s Jack Aubrey novels. It also received the accolade, now obligatory for success in
‘The first thing we do, let’s kill all the lawyers,’ says Dick the Butcher in Henry VI, Part II. Mostly, this has been written off by literature undergraduates and fridge magnet makers as a joke at the expense of one of the oldest professions; but there’s another interpretation. Dick, although a comic character, was a
It seems somehow symptomatic of David Edgerton’s style as a historian, of a certain wilful singularity, that even his book’s title requires explanation. On the face of it ‘the rise and fall of the British nation’ seems a comforting enough notion, but when Edgerton deploys the term British nation he is not talking about any
Espionage, Christopher Andrew reminds us, is the second oldest profession. The two converged when Moses’s successor Joshua sent a couple of agents to spy out ancient Jericho. There they were sheltered by the madam of the local brothel. All three are heroes in Israel today. Generals and politicians have always needed secret information to track
This week’s books podcast is a family affair: I’m talking to the children’s writer and illustrator Judith Kerr (Mog The Forgetful Cat; When Hitler Stole Pink Rabbit; and The Tiger Who Came To Tea), and her son the novelist and historian Matthew Kneale, author of English Passengers and Sweet Thames, and most recently, Rome: A
When I read about the author on the flyleaf of this book, I must admit my heart sank: ‘Tristan has led expeditions in five continents and is the only living person to have both flown solo and sailed singlehanded across the Atlantic.’ Oh no, I thought, not another gung-ho memoir by some posh explorer, chronicling
What makes a barrister famous? At one time, many of the best advocates were also prominent politicians, whose day job was in court and who moonlighted in the Commons — think F.E. Smith. But it is impossible today to double up with any distinction. As long as capital punishment survived, public attention also attached to
Blessings from Beijing will inform readers who know little about Tibet, and those who know a great deal will discover more. Both groups will be surprised. The newcomers especially will be disabused of any belief that Tibetans were always non-violent, deeply spiritual and unworldly. Tibetanists and advanced students will learn that, decades after the Chinese
Guy Stagg walked 5,500 km from Canterbury to Jerusalem, following medieval pilgrim paths, and he records the expedition in The Crossway. It was a journey from darkness to light, as the author, who suffers from mental illness, looked for redemption. It was also a considerable feat, especially as Stagg proclaims lugubriously at the outset: ‘I’m
Olivia Laing has been deservedly lauded for her thoughtful works of non-fiction To the River, The Trip to Echo Spring and The Lonely City. Her first novel, Crudo, is every bit as intelligent and provocative, with a roar of energy that comes from having been written, remarkably, in just seven weeks. Perhaps the novel’s most
The tricky term ‘Krautrock’ was first used by the British music press in the early 1970s to describe the drones and industrial kling-klang of difficult German bands such as Kraftwerk, Tangerine Dream, Popul Vuh, Faust and Can. A British fear and loathing of Germany and the Germans informed numerous New Musical Express Krautrock articles. (‘Kraftwerk:
Ghosts of the Past by Marco Vichi (Hodder, £18.99) is unashamedly nostalgic in tone. The title could not be more apposite. The action takes place in 1967, when Inspector Bordelli of the Florence police force is called to a house where a wealthy industrialist has been run through with a sword. Each member of the
On a recent Guardian podcast, Chris Power — who has written a short story column in the Guardian for a decade — recognises the tendency of reviews of the form to begin with ‘an obligatory paragraph on “The Short Story” in capital letters, rather than talking about the work’. Power’s debut collection is itself a
For someone who is only 47 and has won a Pulitzer Prize, Andrew Sean Greer certainly knows how to get inside the head of someone who is 50 and hasn’t. Less is, among other things, a novel about the aches and pains of midlife, real and imagined; its hero, Arthur Less, turns 50 in the
Nikola Tesla, the man who made alternating current work, wrote to J. Pierpont Morgan, the industrialist and banker. It was 1902 and Tesla was broke. ‘Am I backed by the greatest financier of all time? And shall I lose great triumphs and an immense fortune because I need a sum of money? Are you going
I wrote foul-mouthed marginalia throughout Benjamin Markovits’s A Weekend in New York. Not because Markovits is a bad writer — he has a deserved reputation for excellence. But because this study of a privileged American family reaches for a significance it doesn’t achieve, and leaves a self-consciously literary novel with a surfeit of detail. There
For a brief moment in 2011, standing among thousands of people occupying Syntagma, the central square in Athens, it looked as though social media would change the world. A row of laptops set up next to the subway entrance became the beating heart of an anti-austerity movement that promised to go well beyond simple protest
The titans of the podium, a late 19th- and 20th-century phenomenon, a species now extinct, have on the whole been well served by their biographers, with Peter Heyworth’s Otto Klemperer: His Life and Times as the ideal. Wilhelm Furtwängler, by far the greatest of them all in my and many other people’s opinion, has not
This week’s Spectator Books Podcast asks: is LSD good for you? I’m joined by the author Michael Pollan, who talks about the fascinating lost history of psychedelic drugs, speculates on what they may tell us about the human mind and the universe, recalls his own mind-blowing encounter with toad venom, and reveals that serious scientific
In 1988, James Joyce’s grandson Stephen destroyed all letters he had from, to or about his aunt Lucia Joyce, the novelist’s daughter. Many saw the destruction of documents pertaining to Lucia, who had spent the majority of her life in asylums and had been close to her father, as the destruction of keys to understanding
If social media manipulation has influenced elections, and dark money has influenced our elected representatives, then we are already on the road to unfreedom, as Timothy Snyder, the well-known historian of Russia, argues in his new book. He sees threats to democracy in Europe and America as following the Russian model of oligarchic takeover: ‘The
Girl with Dove is a memoir by Sally Bayley, a writer who teaches at Oxford University, of growing up in a squalid, dilapidated house in a Sussex seaside town. It contains her mother Ange, her aunt Di, her grandmother, an unspecified number of siblings and a variety of temporary inhabitants who joined the Zion-seeking cult
