The good, the bad and the ugly in books, exhibitions, cinema, TV, dance, music, podcasts and theatre.
This remorselessly slow-moving, hazily allegorical drama about ageing and xenophobia is Jim Crace’s 12th book, and the first to appear since he announced his retirement from writing in 2013. Like much of his other work, it lays its scene in a topographical and temporal bubble of the author’s own devising, where recognisable aspects of society
A parliament of owls. A gaggle of geese. A convocation of eagles. But what is the generic term for the army that has recently advanced over the literary landscape? Perhaps a drizzle of nature writers? Here they come, heads down in the rain, turning out their pockets for the samples of fungi and moss they
That there’s a direct correlation between sex and spying is probably Ian Fleming’s fault. Hard to think of Bond without thinking about his women. For Charlotte Bingham, though, the connection occurred at a deeper level. When her father, John — legendary spook, long believed to be the model for George Smiley — called her into
Powerful memoirs by such eloquent doctors as Oliver Sacks, Atul Gawande, Henry Marsh, Gabriel Weston and Paul Kalanithi have whipped the bed curtains open on a previously secretive profession. Steeped as medicine is in uncomfortable facts about debilitating illness, pain and the stress of treating intractable conditions, it was a subject ripe for exposure. Under
I saw a biopic about Morecambe and Wise recently. The actors impersonating the comedians were not a patch on the originals — how could they be? You need a genius to play a genius. I often wonder if my own HBO Peter Sellers movie would have been improved if someone fiery, of the calibre of
Spanish restaurants in Germany are relatively rare, but not nearly as rare as biographies of General Franco. So when the Spanish-born waiter in Bonn’s Casa Pepe approached my table, it struck me as an opportune moment to solicit his opinion about the former dictator. ‘No sé mucho,’ he shrugged. ‘I don’t know a whole lot.’
Often a blurb exaggerates, but rarely does it fundamentally misrepresent (unless it contains the words ‘In the tradition of…’). The Adulterants, however, talks of ‘the modern everyman… stubbornly ensconced in an adolescence that has extended well beyond his biological prime’. We thus expect a man-child, resiling from responsibility and dependent on internet porn and gaming
This week’s books podcast was recorded live at a special Spectator subscriber event in London, where I was talking to the Harvard scientist and leading public intellectual Steven Pinker about his new book Enlightenment Now. Steven argues that – despite what the news tells us by every measure human well-being now is greater than at
Does J.G. Ballard’s ‘disquieting equation’, ‘sex x technology = the future’, still hold? Not in Lidia Yuknavitch’s novel, which imagines a society better described by the formula ‘the future = technology – sex’. There is no procreation in it, and any manifestation of sexuality is a crime. Its inhabitants have left Earth for a space
The well-written spy novel is not a hotly contested field. Le Carré, Fleming, Deighton, a few Greenes, and that’s largely it. However, we now have a new contender: Mick Herron’s Jackson Lamb series. It was a brief but intriguing review in the TLS that first alerted me to the books, with their sidelined spooks, contemptuously
The Spanish journalist Alberto Arce worked for Associated Press in Honduras in 2012 and 2013. After a year, he says: ‘My wife and daughter left me. It was the right choice.’ Arce stayed on in the capital, Tegucigalpa, ‘fighting against addictions, sadness and depression’. He believes he ‘won’ that fight, ‘but only because each morning
It is hard to be honest about anorexia. The illness breeds deceit and distortion: ‘It thrives on looking-glass logic. It up-ends your thoughts, turns bone into flesh, makes life unlivable, death seem glorious.’ In her first book, the literary critic and art historian Laura Freeman is determined to tell the truth about her recovery from
At the end of his study of Debussy, Stephen Walsh makes the startling, but probably accurate, claim that musical revolutionaries tend to be popular. We generally think of radicals as being primarily like Schoenberg, Charles Ives and Pierre Boulez, whose works, after decades, still mainly appeal to a small group of sophisticates. But if one
The year 1971 was a busy one for Mary Whitehouse, self-appointed ‘Clean-up TV’ campaigner. Not only did she help establish the Nationwide Festival of Light, making religious inspired protests against the so-called permissive society, she also wrote an autobiography, Who Does She Think She Is?, published by New English Library. Thus her thoughts regarding the
For many of us, coffee is the lift that eases the load of our working day. Yet the sharpened mental focus it offers is rarely directed towards its origins. Coffee’s birthplace is Ethiopia and its beans remain high on caffeine aficionados’ hit lists. They produce smooth brews that carry an extraordinary range of tastes —
The British diplomat Robert Vansittart had been warning against Nazism for years, so it was a surprise when he and his wife showed up in Berlin for a two-week ‘holiday’ during the 1936 Olympics. ‘Van’ was impressed by German organisation. ‘These tense, intense people are going to make us look like a C nation,’ he
My guest in this week’s podcast is the incomparable spy writer Mick Herron – these days, happily, a less and less well kept secret. He’s the author of the Slough House stories – funny and gripping novels about an awkward squad of failed James Bonds under the aegis of the wonderfully unspeakable Jackson Lamb. The
There has been much debate recently about what exactly constitutes ‘literary’ fiction. If the term means beguiling, gorgeously crafted novels that are assured of their place alongside other writers, reacting to, and taking pleasure in discussing them; that are aware of the world’s events and their impact on humanity; that have delicately drawn characters; and
Science fiction, as any enthusiast will tell you, is not just about gazing into the future but also about illuminating the present. In a new collection of short stories by the veteran sf author M. John Harrison, lurid visions of aliens and spaceships play second fiddle to melancholic snapshots of plodding suburbia. Many of the
Dr Felix Klos is an extremely personable, highly intelligent American-Dutch historian who has undertaken much archival research, worked extremely hard and is an excellent writer. In trying to persuade us that Churchill favoured Britain joining a federal Europe, however, he comes up against several immovable obstacles. The most serious of these is that in the
A good, solid life-threatening illness can be the making of a writer. This has certainly been the case for Genevieve Fox, a long-serving journalist, whose delightful and moving first book Milkshakes and Morphine was inspired by a diagnosis of head and neck cancer. The illness, though treatable, is just as grim as it sounds: she
Yetemegn was barely eight years old when her parents married her off to a man in his thirties. Before she could become a spouse, he first had to raise her. Her education involved beatings when she left the house, even if it was only to borrow shallots from a neighbour. At 14, she gave birth
A Moment in Time reminded me of the sort of British expatriate women I used to meet in the south of France more than 50 years ago. They were very proud of their nationality, rather broke and talked down to most people. Colonel so-and-so and Lord so-and-so were distant relations or acquaintances. It also reminded
Surfing has come of age. Like rock and roll, it was once strictly for young people, edgy and alternative and physically way too demanding for anyone over the age of 27. But those young people grew up and they’re still at it. For millennials it’s hard to maintain a sense of cool when your parents
What’s the point of a cover if not to judge a book by? One look at the image on the dustjacket of From Byron to Bin Laden, one of my favourite statues in Rome — Anita Garibaldi, pistol in one hand, babe in the other, galloping side-saddle to escape an ambush — and I said
The publication of César Aira’s The Lime Tree in Chris Andrews’s assured translation is a reminder that much of the Argentinian writer’s massive literary output — now more than 70 books — remains inaccessible in English. In this novella, which teases readers with suggestions of the autobiographical, Aira has one eye on his country’s past
Early on in Amy Tan’s 1989 bestseller, The Joy Luck Club, a Chinese concubine slices a chunk of flesh from her arm and drops it into the soup she has made for her dying mother. She spills another bowl of soup over her young daughter, seriously scalding the child’s neck. When that scarred little girl
Sourdough has all the ingredients of a truly despicable work of fiction. Novels about food are awful, aren’t they? Especially novels about baking; they’re the absolute worst. Sourdough is not only a kooky satire inspired by that bread they sell for £6.50 down the farmers’ market – it’s set in San Francisco, the smuggest city
Alex Jackson is buried alive inside his own body, a body which lies in a long-term coma following a climbing accident. He can’t see, he can’t move, he can’t speak. This is the terrifying fate of the protagonist of Emily Koch’s debut novel If I Die Before I Wake (Harvill Secker, £12.99). The doctors believe