The good, the bad and the ugly in books, exhibitions, cinema, TV, dance, music, podcasts and theatre.
Much has been written about Deng Xiao-ping (1904–1997), most recently by Ezra Vogel in Deng Xiaoping and the Transformation of China. But apart from his fondness for eating croissants and playing bridge, and the fact that his second wife left him for a party colleague — Michael Dillon records the divorce only — we still
The first interaction between two men recorded in the Bible involves a murder. In the earliest classic of English literature, one of the murderer’s descendants has his arm ripped from its socket by a young warrior who celebrates his gruesome victory by drinking himself blotto; the next day, our hero wakes up (not hungover, apparently)
Picture the map of Britain. Its strangely cadaverous shape, blobs of population and routes between them seem as familiar as our own faces; there is only one definitive map, surely? Not according to Joanne Parker, whose Britannia Obscura aims to tease out less corporeal cartography. Hers are not quite ‘maps of the mind’, for they
Earlier this year Patrick Modiano won the Nobel Prize in Literature ‘for the art of memory with which he has evoked the most ungraspable human destinies and uncovered the life-world of the Occupation’. A prolific and celebrated novelist in France, Modiano is not well known in Britain or America, where only a third of his
Have you ever met a sane accountant? I ask, because one of the more striking sentences in A Theft runs: ‘Long before this, though, and long before I learned that the insane, these days, might disguise themselves as money experts, I had heard that no one had met a sane accountant.’ To which an accountant
Before I read this book, I imagined the immune system as a defensive force, like the Germans on the beaches at Normandy on June 6 1944. When you’re young and vital, your immune system is the Germans in the early morning — scanning the horizon for movement, with plenty of ammunition in reserve. But life
Few people, perhaps, will immediately seize on this title as just the thing for a relative’s Christmas, even if their surname is Cooper. If it doesn’t have the wide appeal of the latest Lee Child or Jamie Oliver, though, there is plenty in it of interest, and not just for the many fans of wine
Mecca is the greatest paradox of the Islamic world. Home to the Kaaba, a pagan-era cube of black granite said to have been built by Abraham and his son Ishmael, it is the lodestar to which 1.6 billion Muslims direct their five daily prayers. Mecca is the single point on the planet around which Muslims
P.D. James was the Queen Mother of crime fiction. Her career as a writer stretched over half a century, and her death at the age of 94 deprives the country of an author who was cherished in person as well as for her books. She was probably best known for her crisply-written and elegantly plotted
P.D. James died today at the age of 94. She was a great friend of The Spectator. Here is her diary from 27 January 2010: Our protracted family Christmas with my elder daughter, Clare, came to an end when her son, with his Australian wife and two children, returned to Melbourne. The visit has been a
The people behind the people are the ones to watch for, and we have all been waiting for a book by Anna Jones. Who? Well, if you are a fan of Jamie Oliver, you will have read a lot of Jones. For seven years she worked as his ‘stylist, writer and food creative,’ which means,
On 17 May 1969 Leonard Bernstein ended his 12-year run as musical director of the New York Philharmonic with a performance of Mahler’s Third. The next night he went to see Jimi Hendrix play Madison Square Gardens. And there you have him. Was Bernstein a fragile romantic or a firebrand rocker? Was he the spiritual
Paul Fournel is a novelist, former publisher and French cultural attaché in London, and the provisionally definitive secretary and president of the select literary collective known as Oulipo, whose fellows have included Raymond Queneau, Georges Perec and Italo Calvino. Members of Oulipo remain members after their deaths. In this respect, it is the French literary
Death is big business in parts of the Caribbean. In the Jamaican capital of Kingston, funeral homes with their plastic white Doric columns and gold-encrusted ‘caskets’ are like a poor man’s dream of heaven. The dwindling belief in an afterlife — the consolation that we might ever join our loved ones — has taken much
Bitcoins are digital money ‘mined’ from satanically difficult mathematical problems. Madness, obviously. But five years ago, while the rest of us were saying ‘Huh. Geeks. Money in cyberspace’, or ‘Y’what?’ a young doctor I know bought a few quids’ worth for fun. Sold it later for £800. Now she’s out on a hillside in the
You might be forgiven for thinking that there is no need for yet another book about Margot Asquith. Her War Diary was published only a few months ago: surely we have had enough about this woman, extraordinary though she was. Anne de Courcy’s new book shows that this is not the case at all. Instead
On the surface Harraga is the story of two ill-matched women colliding dramatically, with life-changing consequences. What emerges, in throwaway fragments, is a picture of Algeria’s chequered past and present; a history of conquest and occupation. It’s a sugar-coated pill with a burning, bitter core. Boualem Sansal is an Algerian writer recently nominated for the
If it’s all right with you, I’d like to launch a campaign please. Right here. You may be wanting me to cut to the chase and just recommend some children’s books, but bear with me. I’m on the case. My campaign is to have pictures in books again. Adult books too, but obviously books for
Sabina Spielrein was a psychiatrist and psychoanalyst with groundbreaking ideas about the role of the reproductive drive in human psychology and the link between Darwinism and psychoanalytic theory. She was a pioneer of play therapy for children, and the first hospitalised psychiatric patient to progress to practising psycho-analysis. She worked with, among others, Freud, Jung
‘I ain’t never pretended to be anything,’ says the man they call the Killer. ‘I’ve lived my life to the fullest, and I had a good time doin’ it. And I ain’t never wanted to be no teddy bear.’ Jerry Lee Lewis is still recording and performing at the age of 79, but his legend
Bill Shankly, the manager of Liverpool FC in the club’s halcyon days of the1960s and 1970s, once said: ‘Football isn’t just a matter of life and death, it’s far more important than that.’ But as David Goldblatt shows in this penetrating study, it was a sport then in apparently terminal decline.The deaths in the next
In the early days of Victorian railways, train journeys were (rightly) considered so dangerous that ticket offices sold life insurance as well as tickets. There were no onboard toilets until the 1890s, meaning that passengers either had to cross their legs or buy a ‘secret travelling lavatory’, consisting of a rubber tube and bag hidden
George Bernard Shaw called him a ‘Yankee Shakespeare peopling his isle with Calibans’. He was dubbed ‘a fighting Tolstoy’ and ‘the great American blues man of the theatre’. Before he was 35, Eugene O’Neill had emerged as the first real titan of American theatre, a preeminence he has never lost. When Sinclair Lewis was awarded
Last week it transpired that Dylan Thomas’s mother-in-law tried to have a notebook of his draft poems burned, but did not succeed, because one of her household staff secreted it away in a Tesco bag. The superstore may just see what a real profit looks like next month when the bag of papers goes up for
A few years ago, you may remember, the distressing news went round that George W. Bush’s library had burned down. Both books had been destroyed, and what was worse he hadn’t yet finished colouring one of them in. The gag relied on a snobbery about what is in truth a wonderful and noble activity. The
Common People by Alison Light (Fig Tree, £20) is a shot in the arm for family historians like me. Her wise, wide-ranging interpretations of her family’s past elevate our dusty grubbings to the status of ‘real’ history. Sebastian Barry’s A Temporary Gentleman (Faber, £17.99) stood out amongst novels about Irish drunkenness, or drunken Irishness, because the grandeur of
Wonderful year for Pevsner, or rather for us who use the guides as we potter about. Four new vols: Bedfordshire, Somerset, Cornwall, Cambridgeshire, too big for the pocket, but a reasonable £28 a kick, thanks to Yale. A triumph of perseverance. Raymond Edwards’s biography Tolkien (Robert Hale, £25) is the best one could hope for
Muriel Spark wasn’t only one of the great British novelists but a cracking literary critic and a lovely essayist. Her book on Mary Shelley is extraordinarily perceptive; ditto, but more fun, is her writing on the Brontës. Carcanet Press, having last year reissued the Shelley book, has now republished The Essence of the Brontës (£12.95),
Music Night at the Apollo: A Memoir of Drifting (Bloomsbury, £14.99) describes the year Lilian Pizzichini spent with her cats on the Adam Bonny, a narrowboat moored on the Grand Union Canal amid the factories and sink estates of Southall. The boat stays moored but, on a tide of cider and cheap vodka, and fuelled
