The good, the bad and the ugly in books, exhibitions, cinema, TV, dance, music, podcasts and theatre.
The illustrated manuscripts of the European Middle Ages are among the most beautiful works to survive from a maligned and misrepresented age. The darkest of the Dark Ages produced the Book of Kells and the Lindisfarne Gospels. Out of the most vicious period of France’s medieval history emerged the exquisite books of hours painted by
Bogotá airport, immigration form in hand. Tourist, migrant, businessman? Andrés Neuman ponders the descriptors, unsure which to tick. He opts for the second. ‘I’d like to be a migrant.’ The decision is telling, and frames much of what follows in this curious, delightful, if disjointed book. Neuman is hot property in contemporary Latin American literary
Helen Rappaport’s new book makes no claim to be a complete account of the Russian revolution. Instead it presents a highly readable and fluent description of the events of 1917 in the capital, Petrograd, as experienced by the city’s many foreign residents. Russia’s booming prewar economy had attracted every sort of business person and technical
The year is 1963. A girl is walking around Stepney with a pack of index cards, visiting old residents in their dilapidated houses, drinking strong tea with tinned milk, listening to their stories of happy days past and looking at cracked walls and leaking roofs. As she promises them help on behalf of her employer,
For Jonathan Safran Foer fans and sceptics alike, Here I Am comes as a wonderful gift, a truly painful, honest book which purports to be about a lot of things but is mainly about one thing: the breakdown of a marriage between a whiny, self-obsessed Jewish novelist turned scriptwriter and his blameless wife. Whether or
Never speak on the same platform as Sir Malcolm Rifkind. I tried it once, at a Spectator debate held during the Scottish independence referendum campaign in 2014, and I will not be repeating the experience. The former Foreign Secretary spoke as usual without notes, and with such ringing clarity and confidence that all the other
A more appropriate subtitle to this homage to the queen bees of the interwar years might have been ‘How to Suck Up in Society’, for the servility of these six stately galleons simply beggars belief. Each was a mistress of her art, but the oiliest of the lot has to be Mrs Ronnie Greville, the
Some years ago, when I stepped from an unstable boat onto Juan Fernández island, a friendly man took my bag and introduced himself as Robinson. Ten minutes later, I found a room to rent. The homeowner’s first name was Crusoe. Get the idea? Although Defoe set his story hundreds of miles away, near the mouth
The flour is what matters, and not the mill, Georg Christoph Lichtenberg wrote in his notebook in 1799. ‘When we ask what time it is, we don’t want to know how watches are constructed.’ A telling assertion, considering Lichtenberg’s place and time. For nearly two centuries, the ‘mechanical philosophy’ had ground down tradition and metaphysics
You could say that this book contradicts itself. Robert Moor’s chosen topic is trails — not just walking, where you go for a bit of a stroll and might turn here or might turn there, but specifically trails, where you can only follow one route. He likes them because ‘they are a rigidly bounded experience.
‘Clonakilty, God help us,’ my Irish mother would say automatically when we drove into the town, in pious remembrance of those who had died there during the famine. Clonakilty acquires another corpse in Closed Casket, Sophie Hannah’s second novel to feature Agatha Christie’s Hercule Poirot, which is set mainly in a country house nearby. The
There are now enough books about Bletchley Park for it to become part of national mythology, along with the Tudors, Trafalgar, Waterloo, the Somme and Winston Churchill. Rather than rehearse the Enigma story, however, Sinclair McKay describes what happened to the organisation that became GCHQ (Government Communications Headquarters) during the immediate postwar years. This was
Not all novelists lead a public life. Those who do, however, tend to make a bit of a performance out of it. Beryl Bainbridge’s life, even before she started publishing novels, was an act, and during her period of fame she was famous for presenting herself in a certain way. It was an effective strategy
Assignats are the bane of every student of the French revolution without an economics background. They were the bonds issued by the National Assembly from 1789, underwritten by the sale of newly nationalised church property, and all I ever really grasped about them was that they contributed to rampant inflation. In fact, as Ian Davidson
I see that Geoff Dyer has a new book out. I’m sure it’s brilliantly written, devilishly witty, and as shallow as a mirror. He sums up, for me, the literature of today. The most critically lauded writers of our day are writers of stylish non-fiction. Or of fiction that looks like non-fiction, that presents itself as
In the beginning was Fellini’s La Dolce Vita, pleached and Proustian, released in February 1960. This was followed soon after, at Cannes in May 1960, by Antonioni’s L’Avventura, which invented slow cinema by taking a Hitchcock premise through a maze with no end. In June the following year, Last Year in Marienbad was released, in
A short-story renaissance has been promised since 2013. That year Alice Munro won the Nobel, Lydia Davis won the Booker International, and George Saunders’s bestselling collection The Tenth of December won the Folio Prize. The rise of the form was declared, but it is mainly now that we’re reaping the harvest. Established novelists such as
The Mexican author Juan Pablo Villa-lobos’s first short novel, Down the Rabbit Hole (Fiesta en la madriguera), was published in English in 2011. It was narrated by the young son of a drug baron living in a luxurious, if heavily guarded palace, whose everyday familiarity with hitmen, prostitutes and assorted methods of disposing of unwanted
The Penguin History of Europe reaches its seventh volume (out of nine) with Richard J. Evans’s thorough and wide-ranging work on the 99 years from 1815 to 1914. It comes between two formidable books by formidable scholars: his fellow Cambridge historian Tim Blanning took the story from the close of the Thirty Years’ War to
Ian McEwan’s novels are drawn to enclosed spaces. There is the squash court upon which the surgeon plays a meticulously described game in Saturday, and the honeymoon suite in a little seaside hotel for the awkward newlyweds in On Chesil Beach. In Atonement, the mother is kept in her bedroom by migraines while her daughter
It was the brightest of futures; it was the End of Days. Three hundred and fifty years before Brexit, England experienced a series of epochal events which forced subjects to rethink their relationships with each other, their political leaders and their European neighbours. In the space of a tumultuous 12 months England endured the devastation
John McEntee — ‘the Chancer from Cavan’, as he bills himself — has enjoyed a long career as a gossip columnist on various national newspapers. Gossip is thirsty work, and in the anecdotes that comprise the bulk of his memoirs he is almost invariably ‘well-refreshed’. That can also be dangerous. He recalls, for example, attempting
Memoirs of old men, baldly, tend to be tricky. Sir Peter Wright, one of the founding pillars of the British ballet establishment, is now 90, and a charmingly chatty man; but I’ve personally never found him reluctant to get to the point when asked. As inaugural director of Birmingham Royal Ballet, director of Sadler’s Wells
In the American way, the child psychologist Alison Gopnik’s new book has an attractive sound-bitey title dragging a flat-footed subtitle in its wake: ‘What the New Science of Child Development Tells Us about the Relationship Between Parents and Children’. And what this new(ish) science tells us is that we parents — or at least, our
The Orwellian past is a foreign country; smells are different there. Pipe smoke and carbolic, side notes of horse dung and camphor — and that most inescapable odour, the ‘melancholy smell of boiled cabbage and dishwater’ seeping under a parishioner’s front door in A Clergyman’s Daughter. In Nineteen Eighty-Four, too, the hallway of Victory Mansions
This exhilaratingly lowbrow first novel concentrates on money and lust or, to put it more bluntly, sex and the City. Its young heroine or chief victim — or is she actually the villain? — has already joined an investment bank and had her first one-night stand a few minutes before this savage saga begins. Melanie
It may be difficult to believe when you think of Donald Trump, but the age of super-humans is almost upon us. Some people are confident that over the next century genetic engineering, electronic implants, new drugs and the medical defeat of ageing will give rise to a race of beings with capabilities far beyond our
To Edinburgh for the book festival, where I am to explain Fools, Frauds and Firebrands to respectable middle-class Scots, who have an endearing way of suggesting to me that I, like them, am a thing of the past. They queue to buy the book, which is nice of them; however, the publisher has failed to
He might be 85 but Tom Wolfe is going strong with a new book and a dustjacket photo that still sees him working the suit and hat look. And although the new book may be small, it’s got big ambitions: first, to take down an establishment icon, and, second, to reveal the secret behind humanity’s
