The good, the bad and the ugly in books, exhibitions, cinema, TV, dance, music, podcasts and theatre.
First a confession. Like many modern British readers, I have contracted a severe case of Jihad Overload Syndrome. Symptoms of this unhappy condition include bouts of despair, melancholy, lassitude, irritation and impatience, and an ostrich-like tendency to pretend none of it is really happening. These can be regularly triggered by Muslim taxi drivers attempting to
Elisabeth Luard has a fascinating and rich subject in the relationship between food and place. Humans eat differently according to where they live. Their diets both in daily life and in feast-day magnificence are influenced by seasonal and regional availability, sumptuary laws, convention, history and even political diktat. I was in Norway last week, and
Pascal Garnier’s novella Too Close to the Edge (Gallic, £7.99, translated by Emily Boyce) deals with the boredom of middle age and how passion and violence can take on the guise of salvation. Éliette has moved to the French countryside following her husband’s death. She seeks an ‘atom of madness to stop herself sliding into
France’s problems today should lessen the condescension of posterity towards Louis XVI. Presidents of the Republic have proved just as incapable as the King of reforming privileged corporations — stemming the flight of skills and capital — and winning popular confidence. Louis XVI’s failure to manage France after 1789 is easier to understand after reading
On 1 July 1916, along a frontage of 18 miles, 100,000 British infantrymen — considerably more than the entire strength of the British army today — climbed out of the trenches to begin the great offensive that would become known as the Battle of the Somme. By nightfall there were 60,000 casualties, 20,000 dead or
Such is the veneration in this country for the St Ives school of painters, it’s easy to forget that other art colonies existed, let alone thrived, in the mid-20th century: that in Great Bardfield, Essex, perhaps chief among them. The village near Saffron Walden was home to the likes of John Aldridge, Kenneth Rowntree, Michael
‘How can you come into this room and ask me “What is the purpose of life?”,’ wails Massive Attack’s laconic DJ Mushroom after a typically searching interrogation by the veteran music journalist Sylvia Patterson. In this powerful, enjoyable memoir she fares better with Spike Milligan (‘I wake up every morning and think, “Thank God, another
Which disease are you most scared of catching: Ebola or influenza? Before I read this medical memoir, I would have said Ebola. Now, I’d say flu. As Dr Ali S. Khan points out, Ebola is fairly hard to catch; flu is fairly easy. And unlike wimpy man flu, proper flu can be a killer. You’ve
Craig Raine is a pugnacious figure in the fractious world of contemporary poetry. When his poem ‘Gatwick’ appeared in the LRB (2015), social media had one of its habitual spasms. Here was a piece which indulged the male gaze and celebrated lustful yearning — an older man for a younger woman. Hardly new ground one
‘La France,’ as everyone knows, is female. Perhaps this is due to gendered assumptions about the beauty, cuisine and couture of the French capital, the symbolic revolutionary Marianne, or the patriarchal nature of language. Between 1940 and 1945, however, Paris was more literally female. Most of the capital’s men were serving with the Allied effort
Rose Tremain sets the true story of Police Captain Paul Grüninger, commander of the Swiss border force in Canton Saint Gallen, at the core of this powerful novel. Grüninger helped hundreds — some sources say thousands — of Austrian Jews fleeing the Nazis in 1938–1939 to enter Switzerland illegally. After a long trial he was
In 1927, while delivering the lectures that would later be published as Aspects of the Novel, E.M. Forster made a shy attempt to get to know his Cambridge neighbour, the classical scholar A.E. Housman. At first all appeared to be going well. After one lecture the two men dined together, and Housman told Forster ‘with
Are writers born or made? The answer, by the end of Love from Boy — a selection of Roald Dahl’s letters to his mother drawn from the 40 years of correspondence they kept up, lovingly edited and deftly commented upon by his biographer Donald Sturrock — is surely that they are both. Even as a
If it was not yet ‘The Age of Anxiety’ in 1947, when Auden published his long poem of the same name, now it most certainly is, given the manifold global uncertainties that keep any sane person awake with worry. Nearly 20 per cent of adult Americans have been diagnosed with a general anxiety disorder, while
Roland Penrose (1900–84) was a Surrealist painter and object-maker, a collector and art world grandee, a writer and organiser of exhibitions, co-founder of the Institute of Contemporary Arts (ICA) and biographer of Picasso. He amply illustrates Goethe’s dictum that we are rich at the price of our contradictions. Born a wealthy Quaker, Penrose rebelled and
The Dancing Bees is a romantic title, evoking fantasy and fairy tale rather than scientific rigour, but actually this book is a story of fearsome determination. It is a biography of Karl von Frisch, who discovered the language of the honeybee, but Tania Munz’s account is much more besides, as it reveals the scientist’s struggle
Jessie Burton’s first novel, The Miniaturist, set in 17th-century Amsterdam, read like a lantern-slide show. Her churches were by Pieter Saenredam, her town-houses those of Vermeer and Gerard ter Borch. Her kitchens and corridors and eaves-dropping maids came from Nicolaes Maes. She proved herself a painterly writer with an eye for the telling detail. The
‘Is Geoff Dyer someone on your radar?’ inquired the courtly literary editor, inviting me to review this book. What a question! Envy is the writer’s sin, as everyone knows, and to a nonagenarian writer of my kind the very conception of Geoff Dyer, aged 57 and perhaps the most brilliantly original practitioner of his generation,
If you have legs, or a bicycle, or indeed both, you are going to love this book. Chaps, no matter how old or how fat or otherwise incapacitated you are, if you haven’t already received it for Father’s Day the chances are it’s coming your way this Christmas. Ladies: if you are a fell-runner, a
If photographs of ‘the deal in the desert’ made you queasy — you remember, Tony Blair and Muammar Gaddafi shaking hands for the cameras in 2004 — imagine how you would have felt if you were in exile in London and your father under torture in Gaddafi’s cells at the time. Now Blair is not
There is a wonderful portrait of Kenelm Digby by Van Dyke. He is dressed in black. His hand is on his heart. Behind him is a vast, wilting sunflower. The sunflower is a symbol of constancy — it follows the sun. When his wife Venetia died in 1633, when Kenelm was 29, he went into
Good historical fiction takes more than research. Henry James once said that writers needed to shed everything that made them modern to feel their way into a completely alien world view — a near impossibility. But this ideal historical novel, bristling with ancient prejudice, would be rather heavy going for a general readership, and successful
Let’s start with arithmetic. Edmund White’s 11th novel is a book about age and ageing. The young man of the title is a French model called Guy. Like Dorian Gray, Guy never seems to grow old. By the middle of the novel he is nearly 40, but he can still convince people — crucially, a
In wartime the housekeeping is a nightmare. While fighting Napoleon in Spain the Duke of Wellington sent an infuriated letter to the government in Whitehall. He complained that they had asked him to account for a petty cash deficit of one shilling and ninepence, and a ‘hideous confusion as to the number of jars of
I suspect some readers might be too cool for this lovely book, partly because, despite its gothic horror set-up, it sets out unashamedly to lift the spirits; and partly because historical novels are sometimes derided as escapist, as if they’re only a fallback for authors who can’t keep up with, say, immigration or the internet.
Tom Fletcher, a young star of the Foreign Office, made his reputation last year when he blogged his ‘valedictory despatch’ from Beirut, where he had served as ambassador for several years. From time immemorial ambassadors had written these despatches on quitting their posts. It was the occasion to spread your diplomatic wings with candid observations
The political trigger for the Ring was the 1849 Dresden uprising, when the young freedom fighter Richard Wagner financed the hand grenades and debated ethics with his co-revolutionary Bakunin. According to Bernard Shaw, the Russian stood model for Siegfried, the Ring’s hero who would overthrow the old order and install a new realm of personal
Readers of advanced years like me will almost certainly remember the bow-tied figure of Edgar Lustgarten, star of any number of ‘True Crime’ B movies which were an integral part of a visit to the cinema, or ‘flicks’, when we were young. Some of us also remember his catchphrase when describing the downfall of a
Petrichor. Coined as recently as 1964 but redolent of Eden onwards, the word appears in neither of these volumes but they are suffused with it. In denoting that tang which arises after rain has fallen upon dry ground, petrichor can make a stroll through park or hillside headier than any parfumier’s establishment. Down the centuries,