The good, the bad and the ugly in books, exhibitions, cinema, TV, dance, music, podcasts and theatre.
The recent furore over a freakshow ice rink in Japan, with hapless fishes embedded beneath the skaters’ feet, was inexplicable to some. The fish were dead already, weren’t they, bought from the market? What’s the difference between eating them and gliding over their artlessly strewn bodies, posed as if in a frozen shoal like the
Jeremy Corbyn will probably enjoy this book — which doesn’t mean you won’t. Asked to name the historical figure he most admired when first standing for the Labour leadership, Corbyn answered that in English history a very interesting character is John Lilburne.Very interesting character, because of the way he managed to develop the whole debate
A few years ago, I fell hopelessly in love with Harriet Walter. It only lasted an hour or two: she was playing Brutus in Phyllida Lloyd’s all-female production of Julius Caesar, and there she was, aloof, damaged, burning with pride and suppressed sorrow. The Donmar theatre’s production was set in a women’s prison, as if
All biography is both an act of homage and a labour of dissection, and all biographers are jealous of their subjects. Most keep it cool, but some like it hot and have created a distinct category in which jealousy becomes murder followed by necromancy: the one they hug is asphyxiated — but lo! — they
Frankie Howerd, the great, if troubled, comedian, was once asked whether he enjoyed performing. ‘I enjoy having performed,’ he replied. Many top-level sportsmen would say something similar. The satisfaction often comes from having done, not always from doing. Performing offers great rewards, but it can also leave scars that heal slowly, and sometimes not at
One of the most interesting developments in modern publishing has surely been the revival of interest in women writers of the past. Beginning with Virago Press, publishers have delved back and rediscovered exceptional female writers from the 17th century onwards. These have either been rescued from oblivion, or from the frequent fate of being dismissed
‘I pray I shall not find a biographer,’ said Steven Runciman, eminent historian of Byzantium and the Crusades, Grand Orator to the Patriarch of Constantinople, Astrologer Royal to King George II of the Hellenes, Laird of Eigg, screaming queen, howling snob and honorary whirling dervish. His prayer has been denied, but he could not have
I don’t really care — as I’m sure you don’t either — whether Duchess Kate agrees to a photoshoot or whether Dolce and Gabbana will show up at the gala centenary dinner. But you will when you read Alexandra Shulman’s Inside Vogue: A Diary of My Hundredth Year (Penguin Fig Tree, £16.99). In a candid,
I must admit that I write a beautiful essay about my dad in My Old Man: Tales of Our Fathers (Canongate, £14.99, edited by Ted Kessler), but it would be nearly as good without me. James Bloodworth is one of the most elegant and passionate (not an easy combo) writers about politics in this country
‘Light as a feather, free as a bird.’ Günter Grass starts this final volume of short prose, poetry and sketches with a late and unexpected reawakening of his creative urge. After peevish old age had brought on such despondency that ‘neither lines of ink nor strings of words flowed from his hand’, he was gripped
‘The Birds is coming’ screamed the posters for Tippi Hedren’s only famous film. Well, the cats is coming in her memoir. More than half the book is given over to Shambala Preserve, the lion and tiger sanctuary that Hedren set up in California in the 1980s. If you want to know how to stroke a
Most of us lead lives of quiet desperation. So we’re told. Frits van Egters apparently leads a life more desperate than most. He lies in bed too long. He eats green pickled herrings and brown onions. He turns the radio on. He turns it off. Half the day gone already. He squeezes his spots. He
When George Omona first saw soldiers in the infamous Lord’s Resistance Army, he was amazed. The scary fighters who had terrorised people for decades across a big chunk of Africa turned out to be emaciated teenagers with dirty clothes who could hardly hold the big guns they carried. Some were unarmed children, barely ten years
Did you know that 190 out of 200 nations in the world have either red or blue on their flags? (The wheel in the middle of India’s flag is blue, for example, and the Vatican flag has a red cord hanging from the keys.) Did you know that four of those 190 — Andorra, Chad,
There has never previously, I believe, been a novel about Margaret Cavendish, Duchess of Newcastle, one of the 17th century’s foremost female authors, philosophers and eccentrics. But there have been several near misses. Virginia Woolf’s Orlando tips its cap to her: Orlando, just like Cavendish, is a feverishly imaginative, androgynous aristocrat afflicted by the ‘honourable
Stand aside, Homer. I doubt whether even the author of the Iliad could have matched Alexis Peri’s account of the 872-day siege which Leningrad endured after Hitler’s army encircled the city in September 1941. I never knew, for example, that if an adult starved for months on a few ounces of bread daily, a sip
In the year of Roald Dahl’s centenary, the Spectator Books Podcast decided to debate this sacred cow. Lucy Mangan, author of Inside Charlie’s Chocolate Factory, drapes garlands of flowers; while the critic James McConnachie readies the captive bolt gun… Who will you agree with? Find out by listening here: And if you enjoyed this week’s episode
A good year for novels. Rachel Cusk’s Transit (Cape, £16.99) is a brilliant and original enterprise, as well as a hymn to the joys of the good story. Elizabeth Strout’s My Name is Lucy Barton (Viking, £12.99) shouldn’t work, but its frail texture was a triumph of tenderness, and sent me back to her excellent
Kate Loveman’s Samuel Pepys and his Books (Oxford, £60) abounded in memorable touches: Pepys buying a Mass book in 1660 and reading it aloud late into the night ‘with great pleasure to my wife to hear that she long ago was so well acquainted with’; or Pepys writing handy memos to self: ‘Consult Sir Wm
Easily the most original novel of the year was Charlotte Hobson’s The Vanishing Futurist (Faber, £16.99). It tells the story of an English governess who finds herself caught up in the Russian Revolution; but instead of retreating to the safety of Cornwall, she stays on in order to join a sort of prototype commune run
Hot on the heels of his books about the Bible and the Queen comes A.N. Wilson’s witty, learned, utterly self-possessed novel Resolution (Atlantic, £16), about the turbulent life of George Forster. He was the Polish-born, Warrington-raised, multi-lingual Enlightenment scholar-scientist who, aged 18, was appointed botanist on board the Resolution. His popular account of the voyage
Does size matter? This year my go-to stocking filler will be the pocket-sized Grow a Pair by Joanna Walsh, from Readux Books: 64 pages of unadulterated pleasure ($4.99). Walsh’s collection of hilarious, nimbly interlinked ‘fairy tales about sex’ (‘The Three Big Dicks’, ‘The Princess and the Penis’) is a comic gem to set beside Nicholson
Back in 2006, David Cornwell, aka John le Carré, hired me as guide for his first trip to the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC), to research The Mission Song. Evenings were spent on the terrace of the Orchids Hotel in Bukavu, watching pirogues languidly traverse Lake Kivu, ice cubes clinking in respective glasses of Scotch. It
The latest books podcast sees us sitting down with Michael Lewis – the author of Liar’s Poker, The Big Short, Flashboys and Moneyball — to ask how his latest book, The Undoing Project, comes to tell the story of the “intellectual bromance” between Amos Tversky and Daniel Kahneman; a friendship that completely reshaped the disciplines
As events unfolded this year, it was reassuring to read superb non-fiction that celebrated expertise. Two stand out. Trials: On Death Row in Pakistan (Penguin, £16.99) tells how Isabel Buchanan, fresh from a law degree, applied her feeling and intelligence to apprentice in a jurisdiction which, by 2014, saw a person executed every day. Ed Yong’s magnificent
Lionel Shriver’s The Mandibles: A Family, 2029–2047 (Borough, £16.99) is set in a bankrupt America where the middle classes are foraging to survive. All aspects of the dystopia are thoroughly and chillingly imagined — but without ever losing the psychological plausibility of a gripping family saga. My other favourite novel was Jonathan Unleashed (Bloomsbury, £14.99), Meg Rosoff’s first work
Best novel: no question, Razor Girl by Carl Hiaasen (Atlantic Books, £13.50). A Florida comcrime (I just made that word up) which makes you feel better about the US in a year when that’s been tricky. You can be sexually saucy and inoffensive — a lesson Donald has never learned. It’s been a crowning year for
Novelists can’t merely tell cracking tales. We’re supposed to save the world. At the University of Kent, a student implored me to inscribe The Mandibles with instructions for ‘how to keep this from happening’ — for the feverish young man now vowed to devote his life to preventing my new novel’s debt-fuelled near-future financial collapse.
Lyndal Roper’s Martin Luther: Renegade and Prophet (Bodley Head, £30) is an impressive and fascinating read. I have no idea what Lutherans have made of it, but for those of us who have harboured an irrational dislike of this extraordinary and unpleasant man, it’s a comfort to know we weren’t completely wrong. It’s taken me a long
