The good, the bad and the ugly in books, exhibitions, cinema, TV, dance, music, podcasts and theatre.
Two ambitious volumes of interviews with artists have just been published. They are similar, but different. The first is by Richard Cork, a veteran with a Cambridge education who enjoyed a distinguished stint as art critic at the Times. He is nicely old school: chatty and avuncular. The second is by Hans Ulrich Obrist of
As Dear Mary so wittily demonstrates, our need for advice is perennial. But fashions change. Mary would probably take issue with The Handbook of the Toilette (1839), which advises that one should take a weekly bath whether one needs to or not, and also with the recommendation of Cassell’s Home Encyclopedia (1934) that ‘bloater cream’
At the eye of apartheid South Africa’s storm of insanities was a mania for categorisation. Everything belonged in its place, among its own kind, as if compartments for scientific specimens had been laid out across the land. Or, as Christopher Hope puts it in his caustic new satire, people were ‘corralled in separate ethnic enclosures,
How many books are there about Shakespeare? A study published in the 1970s claimed a figure of 11,000, and today a search of the British Library catalogue yields 12,554 titles that contain the playwright’s name. But good short introductions to Shakespeare’s life and work are not exactly plentiful. Students and teachers are therefore likely to
Funnily enough, after my editor sent me these three books to read, my guts started playing up. Suddenly, food seemed to go straight through me. At first I wasn’t bothered, but when it didn’t get any better I began to worry. I went to see my doctor. She told me to bring her a piece
Louis the Decorator and his chums in the antiques trade use the word ‘airport’ adjectivally and disparagingly. It signifies industrially produced folkloric objects (prayer mats, knobkerries, masks, toupins, necklaces, tribal amulets, djellabas etc) which are typically sold by hawkers to departing holidaymakers. This is the basest level of fakery and is ignored by the otherwise
Christmas Eve 1944 found thousands of Allied — mostly American — troops dug into trenches and foxholes along the Belgian front, where they sucked at frozen rations and, in some places, listened to their enemies singing ‘Stille Nacht’. Their more fortunate colleagues in command posts gathered around Christmas trees decorated with strips of the aluminium
Tony Barrell can’t play the drums, but he’s in awe of those who can. ‘A band without a drummer is like a rocking chair that somebody has cruelly bolted to the floor,’ he writes in Born to Drum’s introduction. ‘While it may appear to rock, it actually doesn’t.’ Those who thrill to the sounds of
I was riveted to read about Ione Wells, an Oxford student, aged 20, who was savagely attacked on a London street. She then wrote about the experience for her university paper and has now hit the national news, prompting other students to write about their experiences too. Ione has kick-started her career as a journalist,
Bit of Kant, bit of Kierkegaard, bit of motorcycle maintenance. That’s one take on The World Beyond Your Head, Matthew Crawford’s philosophical polemic about how virtual reality is impinging on real reality. Actually, his targets in this book are Descartes and John Locke, with whom, he reckons, the rot started when it comes to thinking
The Green Road is a novel in two parts about leaving and returning home. A big house called Ardeevin, walking distance from an unnamed town on the coastline of County Clare, is home to the Madigan family. At the centre of the family is Rosaleen Madigan, the matriarch: ‘A woman who did nothing and expected
It is ironic that this weighty biography of Hitler’s evil genius of a propaganda minister is published on the day of a general election filled with Joseph Goebbels’s hallmarks: mendacity, media manipulation and the big lie. Seventy years after the spectacular suicide of Goebbels and his wife Magda, and their murder of their six children,
Bicycles — in Britain, anyway — are the Marmite means of transport. I am among the bicycle-lovers, almost religious and certainly addicted in my need to have a daily bike ride. But I can see why people — and drivers in particular — hate some of us: for our smugness, our need to keep on
As a young student, the atheist Alan Turing — disorientated with grief over the death of his first love Christopher Morcom — wrote to Morcom’s mother with an atomic theory of how one’s spirit might transmigrate. Years later, he brought the modern computer age into being by positing machines imbued with consciousness. You can’t help
Moura Budberg (1892–1974) had an extraordinary life. She was born in the Poltava region of Ukraine, and as a young woman she danced at the Sanssouci Palace at Potsdam with the Russian Tsar and the German Kaiser. In her twenties by 1917, she had a well-placed aristocratic husband, two children and several fine homes in
The story is an interesting one. Gunpowder had to be manufactured. In 1916 one of the places dedicated to the dangerous and difficult task was remote Kent. A fire broke out and led to a series of huge explosions. Deaths and injuries were not widely specified at the time for reasons of morale, but 109
The prodigious brilliance, blaring public ruin, dismal martyrdom and posthumous glory of Oscar Wilde’s reputation are almost too familiar. The facts have been rehashed in numerous biographies, and dramatised by such actors as Robert Morley, Peter Finch, Rupert Everett and Stephen Fry. The only way to attack the subject with any hope of surprise is
John Knox, Cranmer complained, was ‘one of those unquiet spirits, which can like nothing but that is after their own fancy, and cease not to make trouble and disquietness’. Yet this awkward cuss, son of a merchant in Haddington and initially a young Roman Catholic priest, became a pillar of the Reformation in Europe and
Allan Mallinson’s historical series concerning Matthew Hervey, the well-bred, thoughtful soldier, details a world where men are practical and not too clever; where the only sensible vote is Tory; where Moors make ‘uncommonly good cymbalists’. Everything gleams, buffed up to a shining surface: it is a fantasy of empire and glory. Two thirds of the
Lore has it that those viewing naughty books in the British Museum could once do so only with the Archbishop of Canterbury in attendance. Such pastoral care may be advisable for any institution ending up with the private archive of letters, diaries and artwork from which Joscelyn Godwin compiles this eccentric and nicely produced account
Understandably given its bulk, Antony Sher’s Falstaff in the Royal Shakespeare Company’s recent production of Shakespeare’s two Henry IV plays had a long period of gestation before it emerged, fully formed and laughing, from under the covers of a bed also occupied by Prince Hal and a couple of prostitutes. Sher tells the story in
We live in an age of generational turmoil. Baby-boom parents are accused of clinging on to jobs and houses which they should be freeing up for their children. Twentysomethings who can’t afford to leave home and can’t get jobs are attacked as aimless and immature. Both sides of the generational divide should take comfort from
God Help the Child, Toni Morrison’s 11th novel, hearkens back to two of her earliest. Like The Bluest Eye, it is a story of internalised racism and paedophilia; like Tar Baby it is a fable about sexual and racial autonomy in the form of a love story between a beautiful, vain woman and a man
I wonder what happened to my first edition of A Dandy in Aspic. I must have been careless about lending it when it could no longer be bought. Derek’s succeeding novels, from The Memoirs of a Venus Lackey (1968) to The Rich Boy from Chicago (1979), are in their place on my bookshelves; seven titles,
In a possibly apocryphal story, Henry Kissinger, while visiting Beijing in 1972 as Nixon’s national security adviser, asked Zhou Enlai, China’s premier on the significance of the French Revolution of 1789. ‘It’s too soon to tell,’ was Zhou’s answer. Zhou was not simply being enigmatic. His answer had a great deal to do with the
Saul Bellow died in 2005. He won the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1976. The first installment of Zachary Leader’s exemplary, scrupulous, dispassionate, detailed, well-read, enthralling biography runs to over 800 pages and takes us only as far as 1964. The length is important. It allows Leader to adjudicate calmly, weigh the evidence — sometimes
At the Political Book Awards earlier this year, Matthew Goodwin and Rob Ford took home the £10,000 top prize for their book on the rise of Ukip, Revolt on the Right. However, word reaches Steerpike that despite their success the literary duo have rather diverging views when it comes to their subject. In fact, the pair’s bickering on social
Thanks to David Pearn, who suggested that I invite competitors to write a paean to a famous racehorse and drew my attention to Right Royal, John Masefield’s 1920 fine narrative poem about a steeplechaser. It was strong field of champions past — Shergar, Desert Orchid, Frankel, Dawn Run — and present — this year’s victor
What do you get if you cross renegade psychoanalyst Carl Jung with lizard-men conspiracist David Icke? It is a question no one in their right mind would ask, but this book represents a kind of answer anyway. Offering a rambling pseudoscientific argument that some countries are better than others at enabling their citizens to flourish,
