The good, the bad and the ugly in books, exhibitions, cinema, TV, dance, music, podcasts and theatre.
The Twentieth Congress of the Communist Party in February 1956 passed off entirely without incident. Speeches on the next five-year plan were applauded and Stalin’s pet agronomist Lysenko made his customary appearance to denounce bourgeois genetics. A visiting communist from Trieste, Vittorio Vidali, noted his envy of two Uzbek party members who sat reading short
‘Do androids dream of electric sheep?’; ‘What porridge had John Keats?’; ‘And is there honey still for tea?’ Your answers to these, and a host of other literary questions, were skilful and ingenious, so congratulations all round. Two admirably pithy responses to Hamlet’s famous dilemma came courtesy of Carolyn Beckingham: ‘To be, or not to
In The Growing Pains of Adrian Mole, Sue Townsend’s hapless teenage diarist, reeling from the news that Argentina has just occupied the Falkland Islands, fails to locate the archipelago on his world map. Eventually, his mother comes to the rescue and discovers it ‘hidden under a crumb of fruitcake’. If general awareness of the Falklands
In this week’s Books Podcast, I’m joined by the novelist, broadcaster and serial user of arcane words Will Self. He has just published Phone, the third and final volume of the difficult but brilliant trilogy he began five years ago with the Man Booker shortlisted Umbrella. He talks to me about recurring characters, modernism, hating
Some 30 summers ago we were staying at a famously beautiful villa outside Turin; our hostess was — indeed is — renowned for her superb taste and distilled perfection of every aspect of douceur de vivre. Each night we dined in a different sylvan setting — under inky trees, in flower-filled gardens and in 18th-century
In his biography of Gaudí, published in 2001, Gijs van Hensbergen opined that ‘we should never try to finish the Sagrada Família, otherwise we undo the web of power that is elaborately woven into this mysterious religious spell’. But he now appears to take the view that it should, and will, be finished by 2026,
Arundhati Roy has published only one previous novel, but that one, The God of Small Things, won the Booker Prize. That was 20 years ago. Early success did not, however, block Roy into neurotic silence: instead, it offered her a platform for verbally intemperate political activism. She is an impassioned campaigner against globalisation, industrialisation and
Beyond the patricide and even the incest, the horror of the Oedipus myth lies in its insistence that our fates are not ours to change. And yet the story itself is far from unalterable, having been handed down in multiple variants — something that Natalie Haynes knows very well as a classics scholar. Now Haynes
I like Bella Pollen for her open-mindedness, self-deprecation and verve. Given her early success as a fashion designer — top client Princess Diana — her memoir is extraordinarily modest. Now in her mid-fifties, she has also published five novels — one, Hunting Unicorns, a bestseller. Unusually, this had a dead narrator, and Meet Me in
The group of kidnapped women were terrified. They had been brought back to the camp as booty and were being urged to convert to Islam with machetes pressed to their necks. They did their best to gabble words that sounded like the prayers they were being taught before one fighter noticed a captive with a
The symptoms of the Spanish flu could be ghastly. Perhaps Laura Spinney should have chosen her title with more care because rather than becoming pale and interesting, as with tuberculosis, frequently the flu’s victims turned completely black before dying. ‘It is hard,’ one US army doctor observed, ‘to distinguish the colored men from the white.’
In this week’s Books Podcast, we honour the five hundredth anniversary of the nailing of that business with the 95 Theses, the church door and the mad monk by discussing Martin Luther and his legacy. Was he a Protestant? Was he a monk? Was there even a church door? And what did the Reformation mean for Henry VIII and the generations of English
J.L. Carr’s classic novel How Steeple Sinderby Wanderers Won the FA Cup (1975) contains a character named Arthur Fangfoss. Mr Fangfoss is a rural tyrant who, when standing for the local council, limits his election address to a pithy eight words: ‘If elected, I will keep down the rates.’ No such brevity, alas, attends the
In 2015 a pair of linen drawers belonging to Queen Victoria sold at auction for over £12,000. In old age Queen Victoria swathed herself in wraps and loose gowns which artfully concealed her figure, and her official photographers were ordered to photoshop her outline. But these knickers with their 45” waistband make plain that the
I once spent an evening, back in the mid-1980s, with William Colby, the legendary spy and director of the CIA. I was an undergraduate at the time, and the CIA’s Iran–Contra debacle was in the news. Lured by the agency’s mystique, I was eager to ask him about the fabled Phoenix programme he directed —
I once asked Baroness Manningham-Buller, the former head of MI5, what she did to relax. Nailing me to the wall with her no-nonsense look, she said: ‘I keep sheep.’ A similar association with the animal kingdom resounds through Henry Hemming’s excellent new life of Maxwell Knight, the famous spymaster and possible archetype for Ian Fleming’s
‘A shudder in the loins engenders there/ The broken wall, the burning roof and tower/ And Agamemnon dead’ intoned W.B. Yeats in his sonnet ‘Leda and the Swan’, seeing in this avian rape the germ of the Trojan war. Leda gave birth to Helen of Troy and her sister Clytemnestra, the one renowned as the
As well as being a leading architectural historian Mary Miers is an editor at Country Life. For her latest book she has mined the magazine’s unmatchable picture library and the photographs are by Country Life regulars Simon Jauncey, who lives in Highland Perthshire, and the late Paul Barker, who sadly died before publication. His memory
The bestselling humourist and New Yorker essayist David Sedaris is renowned for an almost hypnotic deadpan drollery and maybe especially for The Santaland Diaries, his uproarious account of earning part-time cash as a department store Christmas elf. Now he is bringing out an edited version of his personal diaries. It’s the first volume of two,
All animals, Scott Carney tells us, seek comfort. But human beings are a bit different. We don’t need to spend much time actively seeking it. He’s right: it’s all around us — in your nice warm house, your air-conditioned car, your shoes, your bed, the temperate shopping mall you visit. Here in the affluent west,
In the welter of Syrian bloodshed, why should we remember the death of a single man? Because he was the archaeologist Khaled al-Asaad, tortured and beheaded by Isis two years ago when they destroyed the remains of Palmyra, one of the world’s most important ancient cities. Their victim was its director of antiquities. In an
This is one of the most remarkable, hilarious, jaw-droppingly candid and affecting memoirs I have read for some time — not since, perhaps, Dave Eggers’s A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius or Rupert Thomson’s This Party’s Got to Stop. Patricia Lockwood is a poet — dubbed ‘The Smutty-Metaphor Queen of Lawrence, Kansas’ — who, after
Somewhere around the middle of the 17th century our modern concept of the museum began to take shape. Until then the cabinet of curiosities formed by a prince or a dilettante was on show solely to his friends or to scholars deemed worthy of having it unlocked. Nothing in the way of a systematic catalogue
Last night Channel 4 broadcast a deep and seriously important programme. ‘Isis: The Origins of Violence’ was written and presented by the historian Tom Holland and can be viewed (by British viewers) here. Five years ago, to coincide with his book ‘In The Shadow of the Sword’ about the early years of Islam, Holland presented
Is Enlightenment rationalism overrated? Do we spend too much time thinking and not enough time letting our conscious thoughts scatter to the winds? My guest in this week’s Books Podcast is the philosopher Jules Evans, who argues that we human beings have a deep need to get out of our heads. We talk about his
Whether it’s Coleridge’s nightingale or Petrarch’s, Ted Hughes’s wren or Shelley’s skylark, Helen Macdonald’s hawk or Max Porter’s crow, literature is measured out in warbles and wingbeats — metaphors that have long since broken free of their originals, birds made not of sinew and bone but ‘ink and sentiment’. Richard Smyth’s A Sweet, Wild Note
This daintily dress-conscious and rewardingly heavyweight novel is set mainly in a half imaginary stately home in Oxfordshire. The story begins in 1663, jumps forward to modern times and then back to 1665. On all occasions, our attention is less on the actual house, Wychwood, than on the power of nature, whatever’s left of the
David Hepworth is such a clever writer — not just clever in the things he writes, but in the way he has conducted his career. A decade older than me, he too started out at the New Musical Express; but he went on to take Smash Hits to glory as editor, to launch Just Seventeen,
Justice McCardie was anything but a conventional High Court judge. He left school at 15 and was called to the bar at 25. After ten years of provincial practice he turned down the offer from Joseph Chamberlain of a safe Conservative seat, although politics was then the conventional highway to the bench (unlike now when