The good, the bad and the ugly in books, exhibitions, cinema, TV, dance, music, podcasts and theatre.
The intensely lyrical Ghost Moth is set in Belfast in 1969, as the Troubles begin and when Katherine, housewife and mother of four, finds herself remembering an old love affair. Michèle Forbes achieves a vivid depiction of family life — the daily squabbles and teasing, the nuances of Katherine’s love for her children through a
If there is one underlying source from which all our other societal problems stem, it is surely this: we no longer know who we are or how we got here. Worse, we mistakenly believe our situation to be inevitable, presuming that we have arrived in this modern liberal state through something like gravity. At the
I first mistook David Gilbert’s second novel for the sort of corduroy-sleeved family saga at which American writers excel. The main character, Dyer, is an elderly author gathering his sons about him in Manhattan after the funeral of a boyhood friend, Charles. There’s Richard, a Hollywood screen hack whose teenage journal Dyer lifted for a
The actor David Niven was once badgered by the American columnist William F. Buckley to introduce him to Marc Chagall, a neighbour of Niven’s in Switzerland. Buckley, a keen amateur painter, wanted to know what Chagall thought of his work. With grave misgivings, Niven agreed to set up a meeting. Chagall in silence gazed at
When James Whistler was two years old, he was asked why he’d disappeared from company and hidden under a table. ‘I’s drawrin,’ he replied. He started as he meant to go on. Daniel E. Sutherland’s well-appointed new biography of the American-born painter — whom Henry James described as a ‘queer little Londonised Southerner’ — keeps
Isabel Allende is not an author one usually associates with the thrillers about serial killers. Ripper, however, lives up to its title. It’s the name of an online game, set in Jack the Ripper’s London. Six players — five teenagers and an elderly man — inhabit their personas with fanatical fervour. They switch their forensic
About 30 pages in and unable to find my bearings, I flipped to the end of this novel — well, not the actual end, to the acknowledgements (always fascinating) and after them a very handy ‘Q & A with Nathan Filer’. And there I found the key I needed. As part of a creative writing
When John Buchan was appointed Governor General of Canada in 1935, the country was deep in depression, the western provinces a dustbowl and a quarter of a million people on public relief, while the prospect of war in Europe threatened great stresses in a newly independent country and its relations with Britain. Many or even
There are writers whose prose style is so fluid, so easy, the reader feels as though he has been taken by the hand and is being gently led down a path by a guide who can be trusted to point out interesting landmarks, allow the odd meander, but always keep firmly on course. Mark Gevisser,
What is the origin of left and right in politics? The traditional answer is that these ideas derive from the French National Assembly after 1789, in which supporters of the King sat on one side and those of the revolution on the other. Yuval Levin in The Great Debate, however, argues not for seating but
On 28 August 2005 — Sheri Fink’s Day One — Hurricane Katrina reached New Orleans. The National Weather Service warned that ‘human suffering will be incrdible by modern standards’. Fink’s enormous book chronicles that suffering as experienced inside the Memorial Medical Centre, one of the city’s biggest hospitals. Traditionally, staff had sheltered from hurricanes in
Modern Architecture, capitalised thus, is now securely and uncontroversially compartmentalised into art history, its bombast muted, its hard-edge revolutions blurred by debased familiarity. You have been to Catford? You have seen a heroic vision compromised. Modern Architecture is no more threatening than abstract art, although the Swiss-French Le Corbusier retains a heady whiff of the
‘King of Iraq’ has an odd ring even to those who know that Iraq was called Mesopotamia and was part of the Ottoman empire before falling into and out of the clutches of the British. Many people, including Iraqis, seem unaware that it was a monarchy until 1958. Some 45 years after its overthrow, members
I apologise for writing a blogpost about a tweet, which can look a bit like over-analysis, but I was intrigued by a couple of things that writer Graham Linehan wrote last week. Writers tend to the left because writers tend to have compassion. The nasty party has none so the BBC will never be just
Once below a time (to quote the man himself) the bloated poet Dylan Thomas slouched back to New York’s Chelsea Hotel in the dead of night and informed his mistress that he had just drunk 18 straight whiskies, which he suspected was a record. He then dropped to his knees, lowered his head onto her
Tom Bower’s first biography of Sir Richard Branson, in 2000, was memorable for its hilarious account of the Virgin tycoon’s accident-prone ballooning exploits — and for its trenchant thesis that he had ‘toppled from his perch onto a slippery, downward path’, both in business and personal reputation. But what Bower depicted as ‘the beginning of
William S. Burroughs lived his life in the grand transgressive tradition of Lord Byron and Oscar Wilde and, like all dandies, he had a nose for hedonistic hot spots which he could mythologise along with himself. On the occasion of his centenary, Barry Miles takes us through these gorgeous, macabre scenarios with an attention to
On 15 September 1885, the world’s most famous elephant, Jumbo, was killed by a train. Jumbo, the star attraction at P.T. Barnum’s travelling circus, was crossing the track at a station in Ontario, Canada. His handler, Matthew Scott, saw the danger. But ‘the elephant, fatally confused, trumpeted wildly and ran towards the oncoming train’. The
Owls have more associations for us than perhaps any other family of birds, suggested Jeremy Mynott in Birdscapes, so it is puzzling that it has taken Collins 70 years to add this ‘Natural History of the British and Irish Species’ to its famous New Naturalist Series. It is of course primarily a zoological work, with
Like an old woman in a fairy story, Germaine Greer, now in her late seventies, has taken to lurking in a forest. Always inclined to reinterpret the world through her own changing needs and perceptions, and to instruct the rest of us accordingly, she has now written a book of passionate didactic energy about her
We critics seldom write our memoirs, perhaps because we skulk away our lives in dark corners, avoiding the public gaze, plying our shameful trade like streetwalkers or pushers of hard drugs. We might occasionally, in desperation, recycle our ephemera between hard covers. Edward Greenfield, the former record and music critic of the Guardian, has daringly
If the gentle reader has any concerns that a study of land ownership might tend to the dry, they will be dispelled in the very first pages of this book by the spectacular flamboyance of its opening. There is not an economist in sight. Instead, we have the piratical figure of the Sir Humphrey Gilbert
As any author will tell you, literary festivals differ widely. If you are invited to Willy Dalrymple’s Jaipur Festival, with its renowned final party, you say yes within minutes of receiving the invitation. Other invitations you might take a little longer to accept. The Key West Literary Seminar, which took place a couple of weeks ago,
Q. I gave a copy of Dan Russel the Fox by Somerville and Ross to a couple I know to be very keen on hunting. It’s an out-of-print novel, hard to get hold of, and it cost quite a lot, but as I know it to be such a deeply enjoyable read, I thought it would
In 2004, ten days after I moved my family to a new life in India, I gave a reading at a small palace on the edge of the ‘pink city’ of Jaipur. Fourteen people turned up, of whom ten were Japanese tourists who had got lost. The next year, I helped organise a modest literary
London, 1794. It’s a different world from that portrayed by the Mrs Radcliffes and Anons of the time: rich young women are not all naïve and swoony in Katharine Grant’s first novel for adults. In Sedition, five girls (two of them sisters, the others unrelated) are more or less put up for sale by their
On his deathbed in Dublin in the spring of 1966, Flann O’Brien must have been squiffy from tots of Paddy. A bottle of the amber distillate was smuggled in to the hospital on April Fool’s Day by a couple of well-wishers. O’Brien rang the bell to summon a nurse. ‘Sister,’ he told her solemnly, ‘I
If a time traveller were to arrive in our world from, say, 1514 — a neat half-millennium away — what single feature would strike them most? What could they use on their return to try and explain the sheer weirdness of the future? A crowded mega-city? A hospital? An international airport? A computer? What about
The ‘dollar princesses’, those American heiresses who crossed the Atlantic in search of a titled husband, are familiar figures from the 19th and early 20th century. Less well known are the young ladies who made the much longer journey from Australia, and who, like their transatlantic counterparts, arrived in England with large fortunes, ready to