The good, the bad and the ugly in books, exhibitions, cinema, TV, dance, music, podcasts and theatre.
Robert Cumming’s opening sentence is: ‘Kenneth Clark and Bernard Berenson first met in the summer of 1925.’ One is then transported to terraces of cypress and statuary, sunshine and high art, Edith Wharton and Paul of Yugoslavia cooing over a balustrade. Clark was 22 and had just finished at Oxford; he was ‘doing’ Italy with
If Mary Wollstonecraft, as she once declared, ‘was not born to tred in the beaten track’, the same with even greater reason could be said of her daughter Mary Shelley. Not only was she the child of the author of A Vindication of the Rights of Woman, she was also the daughter of William Godwin,
Work is a funny old thing — a four-letter word to some, the meaning of life to others. There have been occasions during the past three years, since I was given the heave-ho from my last regular newspaper column, when I’ve felt that I didn’t exist any more, despite having a happy marriage and more
Gore Vidal has form as a crime writer. In the early 1950s, when his sympathetic literary treatment of homosexuality had brought him into critical disfavour, he turned to writing sprightly detective fiction under the name of Edgar Box. It’s much less well-known that he also took a dip in the far murkier waters of the
Mario Vargas Llosa likes to counterpoint his darker novels with rosier themes: after the savagery of The Green House came the soufflé of Aunt Julia and the Scriptwriter with its mischievous nod to TV soaps, followed by The Feast of the Goat, a searing portrait of the Dominican Republic under Trujillo. Sixteen novels on, The
‘Good night, sleep tight, don’t let the bedbugs bite,’ my mother used to say when she tucked me in at night, which may be why, like the author of this book, I never thought bedbugs were real. ‘Bedbugs? Are you crazy? That’s not even a real thing,’ Brooke Borel told her father (a pathologist who
I knew there had to be a point to Monopoly. The game itself is tedium made cardboard, the strongest known antidote to the will to the live. There is a 12 per cent chance that any given game of Monopoly will go on for ever (the other 88 per cent just feel like that). In
Among the more intriguing insights into an election that seems to be taking longer than a Cliff Thorburn 50 break is the fact that Ed Miliband is a snooker fan. Which doesn’t mean he was a Steve Davis fan. Davis was ‘boring’, Miliband told the Guardian recently. The sentiment was widely shared during Davis’s 1980s
What did St George do? Killed a dragon, as everyone knows. And yet, as Samantha Riches points out, no mention of the dragon is made before the Norman Conquest. Nor is the pairing ‘England and St George’, invoked by Shakespeare’s Henry V, much noted outside Britain. Foreigners do not know that the English think St
The Spectator will host a debate at 7.00pm this evening on whether ‘Politicians should leave the wealthy alone, because they already contribute more than their fair share’. Fraser Nelson, Toby Young and William Cash will go head-to-head with Owen Jones, Jack Monroe and Molly Scott Cato, with Andrew Neil chairing the debate. The debate has now sold out, but
This is a transcript of a speech given at this year’s London Book Fair: Over the course of the last few years, it has come to feel that we bookish types are stuck in our very own world war one re-enactment, in trench warfare over where the money lines are drawn. The skirmishes in the global book
When last Sunday Pope Francis took the brave step of acknowledging the Armenian tragedy as the ‘first genocide of the 20th century’, he knew he was entering a minefield. On 24 April Armenians will commemorate the 100th anniversary of their genocide. There can be no single date for a genocide but that was the day
T.S. Eliot liked to recall the time he was recognised by his London taxi driver. Surprised, he told the cabbie that poets weren’t often recognised. ‘I’ve an eye for celebrities,’ the driver replied. ‘I ’ad that Lord Russell in the back o’ the cab the other day. I said to ’im, “All right, then, Bertrand,
The Lost Child begins with a scene of 18th-century distress and dissolution down by the docks, as a woman — once a slave in the West Indies, for a time a weaver and now an itinerant single mother dubbed ‘Crazy Woman’ by those who might toss a coin in her direction — finally gives up
Since his debut with the Booker-nominated The Restraint of Beasts in 1999, Magnus Mills has delighted and occasionally confounded his loyal readers with a series of novels and short stories about projects, schemes and expeditions that never quite seem to pan out. In these situations, his characters tend to dither politely between cautious enthusiasm and
State-of-criticism overviews and assessments almost always strike a bleak note —the critical mind naturally angles towards pessimism — so it can be worthwhile occasionally to announce that, against expectations, despite everything, literary criticism is still alive and in print. Recent technological and economic threats have not been as damaging as the so-called theory wars of
It’s surprising there haven’t been more novels drawing on London’s fascination with Russian oligarchs. But how to write about them without it all seeming a bit Jackie Collins? Vesna Goldsworthy has hit on the perfect solution with her witty novel Gorsky. If you’re going to write about being nouveau riche, why not model your book
When Ovid was seeking ‘cures for love’, the most efficient remedy, he wrote, was for a young man to watch his girl on the toilet. The American author of The Archaeology of Sanitation in Roman Italy begins with this worrying poetic advice. The evacuation of the human body has had little previous attention from historians
Mystery fans and writers are always looking for new locations in which murder can take place. Attica Locke has an absolute beauty in her latest thriller, Pleasantville. The eponymous district in Houston, Texas, was created in the aftermath of the second world war: ‘a planned community of new homes, spacious and modern in design, and
Can there ever have been another book in which one of the authors (Anne Thurston in this case) so effectively pulls the rug out from under the other? Of course Gyalo Thondup is entitled to tell his story, beginning with his life as a boy in a small town near the Tibet-China border where, in
‘I nauseate walking; ’tis a country diversion. I loathe the country and everything that relates to it… Ah l’étourdie! I hate the town too.’ Millamant’s expostulation about the unresolved pull between rural and urban life has echoed down three centuries since The Way of the World. With Melissa Harrison’s second novel this quandary brings all
Historical fiction is sometimes accused of being remote from modern concerns, a flight towards nostalgia and fantasy. It’s not an accusation you can reasonably level at M.J.Carter’s historical crime novels. The first, The Strangler Vine, was set in an unsettling version of colonial India. Its sequel, The Infidel Stain, takes place three years later in
‘Do it with scissors’ was Alfred Hitchcock’s advice for prospective murderers, though a glance at these two biographies reminds us that scissors are also the chosen implement of the silhouettist. Hitchcock’s profile —beaky nose, protuberant lips, conjoined chin and neck — is emblazoned on both dustjackets like a logo. A logo is what it was.
As words commonly used to write about the visual arts become increasingly useful to advertisers, ‘to curate’ is becoming the synonym du jour for ‘to choose’. For David Balzer however, this shift in language reflects a shift in behaviour. ‘Now that we “curate” even lunch, what happens to the role of the connoisseur in contemporary
With Alpine wreckage still being sifted, this is either a very good or a very bad time to write about the mystery and beauty of aviation. I am a nervous flyer, always imagining the worst will happen, so when I hear that ‘the captain has turned off the seat-belt sign’ I feel a jolt of
For most of us, the centenary of the Great War means recalling the misery and sacrifices of the Western Front: Ypres, the Marne, Arras, Verdun, Passchendaele, the Somme. Few of us give as much thought to the Eastern Front and, apart from regular studies of the ever-popular, self-mythologising Lawrence of Arabia, fewer still dwell on
The year 2015 has been designated one of Anglo-Mexican amity, with celebrations planned in both countries by both governments. But it looks as though one name will be missing from the list: Pedro Friedeberg’s. ‘Who?’ you may ask. Well, in 1982 I was in Mexico City to interview Gabriel García Márquez after he’d won the
This being the 800th anniversary of the signing of Magna Carta, it is not surprising that there should be two new biographies of King John; not surprising either that one should be billed as ‘The Making of a Tyrant’, the other as a story of ‘Treachery’ and ‘Tyranny’. King John has long been regarded as
Remember Ebola? It killed more than 8,000 people last year — before we were all Charlie — with a quarter as many again dying since January. Almost all the deaths have occurred in the war-weakened west African states of Guinea, Liberia and Sierra Leone; no licensed drug or vaccine yet exists for a virus that