The good, the bad and the ugly in books, exhibitions, cinema, TV, dance, music, podcasts and theatre.
Britain’s greatest post-war novelist is reported as having died today, at the age of 83. It seems a rather extravagant claim for David Storey, who, lumped together with other writers who had the great advantage of not coming from London or the Home Counties, as ‘kitchen-sink’ and ‘angry young man’, drifted out of fashion just
The centenary of the Russian Revolution has arrived right on time, just as the liberal democratic world is getting a taste of what it’s like to feel political gravity give way. In 2017, Lenin lives. ‘In many ways he was a thoroughly modern phenomenon,’ writes Victor Sebestyen in Lenin the Dictator, the kind of demagogue
The Reformation is such a huge, sprawling historical subject that it makes sense, in this the 500th anniversary of Martin Luther producing his 95 Theses, to break it up into bite-size pieces in order to sample its distinctive local flavours. Eamon Duffy, emeritus professor of Christian history at Cambridge, takes England as his territory, and
Kahlil Gibran was 40 years old, a short — he was just 5’3” — dapper man with doleful eyes and a Charlie Chaplin moustache, and in the first throes of the alcoholism that would result in his early death, when in 1923 he published The Prophet. A collection of 26 prose-poems, written in quasi-Biblical language,
In Yoko Tawada’s surreal and beguiling novel we meet three bears: mother, daughter and grandson. But there will be no porridge or bed-testing here: these are bears with a difference. Tawada has form in animal-linked fiction: The Bridegroom Was a Dog won a major Japanese award. Writing in Japanese and German, she is a prizewinner
Talleyrand was 76 when he took up the post of French ambassador in London in 1830. Linda Kelly deals only with the last phase of Talleyrand’s long and tumultuous career, but this short book brings him marvellously to life. He was not an impressive figure. Little over 5’3” in height, he walked with a limp
Michael Fishwick’s new novel tells the story of a young man called Robbie, who has been uprooted from his London home after his mother’s death. He finds himself in rural Dorset, where he inhabits a capacious present that has ample room for the intrusions of the mythic past. Struggling with his loss, Robbie has taken
Trailing rave US reviews, fan letters from Yann Martel and Khaled Hosseini and a reputation as ‘Doctor Zhivago for the 21st century’, comes this outstanding historical saga from debut novelist Sana Krasikov. It’s a dazzling and addictive piece of work from an author born in the Soviet Republic of Georgia whose family emigrated to New
The business of banking (from the Italian word banco, meaning ‘counter’) was essentially Italian in origin. The Medici bank, founded in Florence in 1397, operated like a prototype mafia consortium: it rubbed out rivals and spread tentacles into what Niccolò Machiavelli called the alti luoghi (‘high places’) of local power interests. Undoubtedly, Medici money was
Alone with her father’s dead body, Olive Piper says, ‘I don’t know anything, except what I feel, and how can anyone know more?’ In Susan Hill’s new novel, Olive’s acceptance of the primacy of feeling represents a coming of age. Her maturity is achieved at a cost. As in a number of her recent novels
Boualem Sansal’s prophetic novel very clearly derives its lineage from George Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four. A totalitarian surveillance state, a fundamentalist religious autocracy, is portrayed as being totally intolerant of free-thinkers. This is a powerful satire on an Islamist dictatorship. It is unsurprising that Sansal’s writings are censored in his native Algeria. The religious structure of
I can recall exactly where I was 40 years ago when I didn’t buy the first issue — or ‘prog’ —of 2000 AD. The just-launched sci-fi comic, featuring ‘space-age dinosaurs’, ‘the new Dan Dare’ and a ‘FREE SPACE SPINNER’, i.e. a mini frisbee, looked quite exciting and, at 8p, good value for pocket money; but,
Nowadays, most of us living in the liberal West agree that there can never be anything morally wrong with love between consenting adults. This is good for society but bad for novelists. The tale of the grand passion that runs foul of societal mores is a staple of literature. What is Madame Bovary if Emma
In the autumn of 1888 London was in a state of terrified excitement over Jack the Ripper. There had never been a killer like this in England before, wrote Meredith Townsend and Richard Holt Hutton, the joint editors of The Spectator. They congratulated the British public on not succumbing to the continental habit of lynching
This is an odd one, not least because it claims to be a novel, which it isn’t. Emmanuel Carrère, writer and film-maker, looks back on an earlier self when, as a young man, he had a phase of being a devout Catholic, going to Mass daily, making his confession, the whole caboodle. He decides to
When Australia imposed generic packaging in its war on cigarettes, there was consumer research into the most deterrent colour. Pantone 448 was chosen, a sort of sludgy green-brown. When it was described as ‘olive’, Oz’s federation of olive growers formally complained. Certainly, colours move us. Interior designers know that yellow makes people angry, while in
Roy Hattersley would never have been born had it not been that his mother ran away with the parish priest who instructed her in the Catholic faith before her marriage to a collier — the priest conducted the wedding; a fortnight later they eloped. This deplorable episode had one happy consequence: the birth of Roy,
The minister’s private secretary wrote to another cabinet minister about the previous day’s cabinet meeting: They cannot agree about what occurred. There must have been some decision, as Bright’s resignation shows. My chief has told me to ask you what the devil was decided, for he be damned if he knows. Will you ask Mr
Last year, I attempted to pass through security in an American airport carrying a small black box, containing eight batteries and a visible circuit board. If the switch was flipped, the display counted down in red flashing numbers. Unsuprisingly, the officer in Salt Lake City pulled it out of my hand baggage. ‘What’s this?’ ‘It’s
In my work as a reviewer, a small, steady proportion of all the books publishers send me concern the Holocaust. With middle age has come a curious foreshortening of my perspective on modern history so that, paradoxically, the Nazis’ inhumanity has begun to seem less distant in time and, therefore, more horrible still. Fortunately I
Christopher de Bellaigue, a journalist who has spent much of his working life in the Middle East, has grown tired of people throwing up their hands in horror at Isis, Erdogan and Islamic terror, and declaring that the region is backward and in need of a thorough western-style reformation. As he argues in this timely
On 5 February 1862, the night Abraham Lincoln and his wife gave a lavish reception in the White House, with the civil war swelling outside and their 11-year-old son Willie dying of typhoid fever upstairs, what was the state of the moon? Was it a ‘fat green crescent’? Or was it ‘yellow-red, as if reflecting
No disrespect to any of the present incumbents, but Karl Miller (1931–2014) was a literary editor in an age when such jobs mattered. Between the late 1950s and the early 1970s he not only ran the books pages of two weekly magazines — The Spectator, and the Paul Johnson-era New Statesman — before moving on
‘Women,’ Captain Selwyn Jepson, SOE’s senior recruiting officer, once wrote, ‘have a far greater capacity for cool and lonely courage than men.’ This questionable assumption is not actually the reason why the women were recruited. That was down to their ability to move around enemy-occupied territory carrying messages, arms or heavy wireless sets without arousing
If a single book could help you to be kinder and more compassionate, could expand and deepen your understanding of other people (and possibly yourself) and make you less afraid of dying in the process, you would surely be eager to acquire it at once. Well look no further, for Grief Works is that book.
Nothing will come of nothing, said Lear, because he wasn’t familiar with quantum physics. According to our current best theories, a region of space that contains nothing at all is still seething with pairs of virtual particles popping in and out of existence for no good reason. Meanwhile, it is possible to be mathematically sure
One hour in No. 5 Cheyne Row, Virginia Woolf observed, will tell you more about the Carlyles than all the biographies. The house lived in by Thomas and Jane Carlyle from 1834 until their respective deaths, and now owned by the National Trust, was one of the great battlegrounds of domestic history. Here Jane warred
The call for lessons in the art of seduction in the style of an author of your choice drew a large and stellar field. Henry James — whose labyrinthine sentences would surely bore the objects of his affection into submission — was a popular choice. Here he is, as expertly imagined by John Maddicott: ‘If
In Delmore Schwartz’s story ‘In Dreams Begin Responsibilities’, a young man dreams he is watching his father and mother’s engagement onscreen from a seat in a cinema. Weeping at the certain knowledge of the pain to come, he’s patted on the back by a woman. ‘There, there,’ she says, ‘all of this is just a
