The good, the bad and the ugly in books, exhibitions, cinema, TV, dance, music, podcasts and theatre.
He’s not what you’d call prolific, Bernard MacLaverty. Midwinter Break is his fifth novel in 40 years, and his first in 16. And, in that time, it could be argued that Irish writers have moved away from his bare and declarative style into the wildness of, say, a Barry or a Barrett or a Baume;
Writing of his grandmother’s cremation, Kushanava Choudhury reflects in The Epic City that, while his expatriate Indian cousins are separated from the occasion, ‘I was sipping tea in Nimtala, present in the moment at the centre of our world’. It’s Choudhury’s longing to be back in this centre, which might have seemed less than obviously
‘New York stories in a way are always real estate stories,’ says the journalist Alan Light in Lizzy Goodman’s bustling oral history of the city’s music scene at the dawn of the century. The same goes for all music scenes. Talent clusters and thrives only where there are cheap places to live, hang out, play
Walking out of one’s own life — unpredictably, perhaps even without premeditation and certainly without anything approaching a plan — is a common staple of fantasy, and therefore fiction. But why, when we spend so much of the rest of the time fretting about losing what we have and hatching plans to safeguard it? In
Martin Amis once said that the writer’s life is half ambition and half anxiety. While one part of your brain is jabbering away to the effect that, with proper application, you might be the next Jane Austen, George Eliot, Virginia Woolf, a larger part — almost always more tenacious and assertive — is busy insisting
Here is the opening sentence of Karl Ove Knausgaard’s meditation on beds.: With its four legs and its flat, soft surface, the bed gently accommodates one of our most basic needs: it is good to lie down in bed, and it is good to sleep in them through the night. Well, you learn something every
Until the mid-1960s many historians believed witchcraft was a pre-Christian pagan fertility ritual, witches worshipping the Horned God, whose consort was the Triple Goddess. The most notable advocate of this theory was the Egyptologist Margaret Murray. Then came revisionists led by Norman Cohn. Examination of witch trials suggested there had been no witchcraft: it was
You can never completely leave a religious cult, as this strange and touching memoir demonstrates. Patterns of thinking, turns of mind, will linger with and haunt former members long after they escape. Rebecca Stott was born in 1964 into the Brethren, a low-church sect that had broken away from the Anglican church in the early
Samuel Pepys, wrote John Evelyn, was ‘universally beloved, hospitable, generous, learned in many things’ and ‘skilled in music’. John Evelyn, wrote Pepys, ‘must be allowed … for a little conceitedness; but he may well be so, being a man so much above others’. Pepys’s assessment of Evelyn was made early in their relationship, in 1665,
In the sixth form we’d get assigned essays to be written over the Christmas holidays. I always did these right away, either on Friday night or Saturday morning. Not because I liked writing but because the homework cast such a blight over the holiday that it was best to get it over with. I look
The latest comp, which called for extracts from a mash-up of a literary classic of your choice and horror fiction, was a nod to the recently deceased George Romero but also owes a debt to Seth Grahame-Smith’s 2009 Pride and Prejudice and Zombies, which weaves scenes of ‘ultraviolent zombie mayhem’ into Jane Austen’s original text.
Of course I began with pen and ink and paper, and paper was expensive in terms of pocket money, so I asked for W.H. Smith tokens for Christmas. Then a neighbour brought up a stash of assorted old office notebooks from hiding somewhere, so the first novel was written in ‘Ledger’ and ‘Salaries’. I wrote
We live in an age when sequels to, and re-imaginings of, the classics, seem to be a larger part of the literary landscape than ever before. We’re seeing a steady stream of new Ian Fleming, new Agatha Christie, new Robert Ludlum, new Jane Austen, even new PG Wodehouse. What’s the attraction of these books? And
Neel Mukherjee has had a two-handed literary career, working as a reviewer of other people’s novels and writing his own. In 2014, his second novel, The Lives of Others, was shortlisted for the Man Booker Prize. His latest book is a state-of-the-globalised-nation novel which gives human particularity to those deadened concepts we pass around such
The story of Sweetpea Slight is a footnote to a footnote in the annals of British theatre. Even her name suggests it — a gentle, fragrant vanishing off the bottom of the page. In fact, it isn’t even her real name (which is Jane), but one given her by her formidable boss, the theatre producer
We don’t usually think of Hitler’s hated henchman Heinrich Himmler, architect of the Holocaust of European Jewry, as a comic turn, but the diary of Admiral Sir Barry Domvile, a former chief of British Naval Intelligence and fanatical admirer of Nazi Germany, proves otherwise. Domvile’s description of his visit to Himmler’s ‘hunting box’ high in
Levitation. We all know what it is: the ‘disregard for gravity’, as Peter Adey puts it in his new book, or as the dust jacket states, ‘the long-standing belief that we could float relatively unaided’. The cover of Levitation has an elegant lady in flowing robes apparently hovering in a bubble over New York. Who
On the evening of 28 October 1908, two unremarkable middle-class women wearing heavy overcoats gained admission to the Ladies’ Gallery, high above the chamber in the House of Commons. Suffragettes had previously hit the headlines by chaining themselves to the railings at 10 Downing Street and, emboldened by this success, the leaders of the women’s
What’s going on with book reviews? Here is the Pulitizer prizewinning (for ‘criticism’) Michael Dirda in the Washington Post, on this book’s cover: Let me say straight out that if all military histories were as thrilling and well written as Robert Gaudi’s African Kaiser, I might give up reading fiction and literary bio-graphy… Gaudi writes
Englishness is big business in the nation of shopkeepers, and not just in politics and tourism. In literature, the gypsy scholars of Clan Macfarlane range freely across the hills and lexicons in search of old England, the dying and undead. This paperchase confirms that a change in the self-image of the English is afoot too.
There are a number of reports by his contemporaries of Thomas Gainsborough at work. They make you realise what a very strange painter he was. There was an element of theatricality in his working practice — the public would expect to be astonished when they glimpsed it — but, even so, it is difficult to
Klara Goncharova, a Soviet anti-aircraft gunner, wondered at the end of the second world war how anyone could stand to give birth after learning about Auschwitz and Dachau. But as it turned out, she was already pregnant. Anastasia Voropaeva, a corporal and searchlight operator, recalled a pretty Russian girl in liberated territory who had been
This summer saw 20 years since the publication of the first Harry Potter novel. Love them or hate them, the adventures of JK Rowling’s boy wizard are now a huge part of the literary landscape. In the wake of a Harry Potter conference organised by the Spectator’s own Nick Hilton, I’m joined for this week’s
The first thing to say about Claudio Magris’s new novel is that it is, in an important sense, unreadable. There is no possibility of turning page after page engaged in finding out what comes next, of being lost in the characters’ stories. The usual pleasures of fiction are so thoroughly absent that the reader emerges
Remember Douglas Coupland? Remember Tama Janowitz? Remember Lisa St Aubin de Terán? Banana Yoshimoto? Françoise Sagan? The voice of your generation? (If you’ve forgotten the voice of your generation, the brilliant Christopher Fowler’s forthcoming The Book of Forgotten Authors will provide you with the necessary reminder. The voice of my generation, as far as I’m
Arriving at boarding school with the wrong shoes and a teddy bear in his suitcase, the hero of Elizabeth Day’s fourth novel is the latest in a long literary line of suburban lost boys sucked into the intoxicating orbit of a wealthy friend. F. Scott Fitzgerald, Evelyn Waugh, Patricia Highsmith, Ian McEwan, Alan Hollinghurst and
The Enigma of Kidson is a quintessentially Etonian book: narcissistic, complacent, a bit silly and ultimately beguiling. It is the story of Michael George MacDonald Kidson (MGMK, as he was known), who taught history at Eton from 1965 to 1994 and was an influential tutor to hundreds of boys, often the wayward and the damaged.
It is an unexpected pleasure when fiction has a soundtrack to accompany the work of reviewing. H(A)PPY is ‘best enjoyed in conjunction with Agustin Barrios: The Complete Historical Guitar Recordings’, Nicola Barker advises before her text gets underway. It’s tempting to dismiss this as a gimmick. But Barrios’s music strikes a deep chord with the
I often feel slightly sorry for the British nature writer. It’s not an attractive emotion — it sounds patronising — but reading David Cobham’s Bowland Beth: The Story of an English Hen Harrier I felt it again strongly. Your nature writer now has a hungry market, keen and generous publishers and a shelf in the