The good, the bad and the ugly in books, exhibitions, cinema, TV, dance, music, podcasts and theatre.
Lord Palmerston is remembered today not for his foreign policy nor for his octogenarian philandering, but for his management of the press. He was the first prime minister to grasp that dealing with journalists was all about pragmatic negotiation and buttering people up. The deal between Palmerston and the newspapers was: ‘I’ll tell you something
Sir Alistair Horne, like that other great knight of military history, Sir Michael Howard, served in the Coldstream Guards during the second world war. According to Clausewitz (in Vom Kriege), his judgment will therefore be invested with insight denied to those who have never been shot over: As long as we have no personal knowledge
These Collected Poems, published halfway through Carol Ann Duffy’s time as poet laureate, make clear that she is a true Romantic poet in the tradition of Byron, Wordsworth, Elizabeth Barrett Browning, Anne Ridler and Elizabeth Bishop. In his introduction to Lyrical Ballads, Wordsworth defined Romantic poetry as ‘the spontaneous overflow of powerful feelings’. And these
Nowadays a vampire is usually a Transylvanian in need of an orthodontist. But, as Nick Rennison demonstrates in this entertaining anthology, it was not always so. Bram Stoker’s Dracula was simply one of a crowd when it was published in 1897. Nor was the novel particularly successful at the time. It was only in the
‘Would Washington have ever been commander of the revolutionary army, or President of the United States, if he had not married the rich widow of Mr Custis?’ asked John Adams. The answer, says Flora Fraser, is no. We like to see our ‘men of destiny’ as striding the world alone before stepping onto the customary
Laurence Scott’s The Four-Dimensional Human: Ways of Being in the Digital World (Heinemann, £20) is the year’s most surprising book. I expected a dour, lumbering tract about the dehumanising influence of new technologies, social media and information overload. Instead, I found a real flirt of a book. It’s full of impish gaiety, elegant and lithe
My top title of the year is Satin Island by Tom McCarthy (Cape, £16.99), convincing proof that the best writers of our time are anthropologists, and that James Joyce, were he alive today, would be working for Google. I also enjoyed Ben Lerner’s 10:04 (Granta, £14.99), a self-deconstructing novel whose metafictional plot speaks of the
The Whitechapel Fiend is a psychic conduit for the vilest aspects of Victorian sex and class, and a creature mainly of the imagination. In 1888, the year of the murders, John Francis Brewer published The Curse Upon Mitre Square, and novels have followed from such writers as Edgar Lustgarten, Colin Wilson and Iain Sinclair. Many
Anyone who enjoyed Ali Smith’s novel How to be Both, with its charmingly loopy monologue of an Italian Renaissance painter prattling away to us through one of the book’s famously interchangeable halves, will be glad to see her new book of short stories, Public Library and Other Stories (Hamish Hamilton, £16.99). It looks reassuringly similar:
The easy way round buying books for children at Christmas is just to get them the latest David Walliams and have done with it. And indeed, Grandpa’s Great Escape (Harper Collins, £12.99), about the sympathetic friendship of a grandfather and grandson, is funny, productive of intergenerational goodwill and spikily illustrated by Tony Ross, though, as
It’s been a memorably productive year for art books (I have published a couple myself), but certain volumes stand out. Chief among the illustrated monographs is Maggi Hambling: War Requiem & Aftermath by James Cahill (Unicorn Press, £30), a spirited examination of this wonderfully unpredictable artist. The book focuses on her recent paintings and sculptures,
It might seem an odd choice, but after reading Jon Savage’s new book, I think if I had a time machine I’d now be tempted to set its controls for 13 January 1966 and the annual dinner of the New York Society for Clinical Psychiatry. Andy Warhol had been booked to give a speech, but
Who’d get old? Bits fall off, your loved ones start dropping like flies and, perhaps worst of all, the only afternoon delight you’re up to is a cup of tea and a soporific radio play. Wealthy New Yorker Vanessa Wonderman, Erica Jong’s 60-year-old narrator, isn’t there yet, but she can see it coming down Fifth
In March 1987, as Professor Robert Service records in his new account of the end of the Cold War, Margaret Thatcher visited Moscow. She had been reluctant to do so, largely out of fear that such a visit would only make it easier for a credulous Reagan — as she saw him — to offer
Oliver Sacks’s autobiography On the Move (Picador, £20) is full of surprising details —for example, the eminent neurologist was a weightlifting champion in his youth who hung out with Hells Angels. Sacks — who died in August — was an inspiring person with an extraordinary breadth of interests and enthusiasms. I also enjoyed Anne Tyler’s
Richard Bourke’s Empire and Revolution: The Political Life of Edmund Burke (Princeton, £30.95) is a monument of exact scholarship and careful reflection, by a long way the best book that we have on this profound and much misunderstood politician and philosopher. For those who want more thunder than even Burke can offer, Rory Muir’s Wellington:
This has been a good year for biographies, especially of all-rounders. Hugh Purcell did a lot of digging to uncover the nine lives of that secretive man John Freeman. A Very Private Celebrity (Robson Press Biteback, £25) lists them as follows: pre-war advertising executive, wartime officer (Monty called him ‘the best brigade major in the
Royalty Inc. by Stephen Bates (Aurum Press, £20) is a superb account of how ‘the Firm’ (Windsors rather than Krays) became ‘Britain’s best-known brand’. Bates is a veteran royal journalist, though much of his career was on the Guardian, which wouldn’t let him use that title. He reveals that the palace’s own term for their
I am unashamedly sticking to my own home territory. Cambridge has become something of a literary hotspot. Last year it was Ali Smith (How to be Both) and Helen Macdonald (H is for Hawk). This year we have Clive James’s wonderful (and let’s hope not last) collection of poetry, Sentenced to Life (Picador, £14.99), including
Helen Simpson is not a prolific writer; six slim collections of short stories in 25 years, each timed quinquennially with what seems, at least retrospectively, like impeccable forward planning. In fact, time, we shall see, is what her career so far has been about. She has also heroically resisted the pressure —and there must have
Reading Tintin when I was a child, in Britain in the 1970s, I always assumed Georges Remi’s creation was just a harmless bit of fun. However, when I went to Belgium I discovered, to my amazement, that over there they take him very seriously indeed (this year, a single Tintin picture sold for €2.5 million
There is not, sadly, a dedicated Trivia Books section in your local Waterstones, although at this time of year there really should be. But what would we call it? Trivia sounds too trivial. Loo Books sounds too lavatorial. Books for the Man or Woman who Has Everything, Except this Book is probably closest, but might
‘The best prime minister we never had’ is not an epithet exclusive to Rab Butler. Widely applied to the late Denis Healey, it was also said of Hugh Gaitskell, Iain Macleod and Roy Jenkins. (More recent candidates would include Michael Heseltine and Kenneth Clarke.) All had arguably greater intellects than the prime ministers they ended
Dan Rhodes apparently had trouble finding a publisher for this short novel, and it’s possible to envisage a certain amount of sorrowful head-shaking in legal departments at its theme. In the dead of winter, accompanied by his long-suffering ‘male secretary’ Smee, a ‘thrice-married evolutionary biologist’ named Richard Dawkins gets stranded in rural England while en
I spent the summer of 1976 working as a trainee gardener at the Arboretum Kalmthout in Belgium. My employer was charming and kind, but I could not suppress a prickle of shame-faced irritation every time she mentioned a former student called Susan Dickinson. Whenever I leant on my hoe for a moment in the pelting
In late Victorian south London a ‘lower-middle-class’ boy, Arthur Ward, is lingering over his copy of The Arabian Nights. The book falls open at a colour illustration of Scheherazade, mysteriously pictured with a white peacock. Twenty years later, she materialises as Kâramanèh, the dazzling female sidekick of Fu Manchu. Young Arthur, who by now had
On 14 November 1940, at seven in the evening, the Luftwaffe began to bomb Coventry. The skyline turned red like an eclipse of the sun as clouds of cinders, lit red by the blaze, floated down over the great West Midlands city. Coventry seemed to have been hit by a meteorite. The mile-high roar of
In his youth, Samuel Palmer (1805–1881) painted like a Romantic poet. The moonlit field of ‘The Harvest Moon’ (1831–32) glows with uncanny significance; for Palmer, as for Tolstoy’s Lieven, the bowed forms of the peasants at the harvest are shadows of divinity. Palmer aged like a Romantic poet too. The long-haired mystic became a High
The Silent Deep is a compelling and fascinating exposé of a service that for too long has had to remain in the shadows. Peter Hennessy and James Jinks are to be congratulated on producing what must be the definitive work on the Royal Naval Submarine Service from 1945 to the present day. In his inimitable