The good, the bad and the ugly in books, exhibitions, cinema, TV, dance, music, podcasts and theatre.
To understand quite how disgruntled the reviews of the latest Bridget Jones diaries have been, you have to recall quite what she meant to her readers first time round. It wasn’t just the way she seemed to sum up the female condition for unmarried women in their thirties — indeed, she put a name on
On 12 April 1945 the Berlin Philharmonic gave its last performance. The atmosphere in Germany was apocalyptic, the Allied invasion was expected at any moment. The concert playlist had been devised by Hitler’s architect, Albert Speer, and included Brünnhilde’s last aria and the finale from Wagner’s Götterdämmerung, the ‘twilight of the gods’. There were reports
What makes someone the fastest man on earth? The current tenant of the informal title held by such sporting icons as Jesse Owen and Carl Lewis starts with a version of the pastoral. Here is Usain Bolt as a child of nature, running free in the wilderness near the remote village that was his birthplace
The novelist David Plante is French-Québécois by ancestry, grew up in a remote Francophone parish in Yankee New England and came to London half a century ago when still an avid young man. For 38 years he lived there with the late Nikos Stangos, a cosmopolitan of the Greek diaspora, whose father had been expelled
We all know that if you can remember the Sixties you weren’t really there. But Graham Nash, of the Hollies, and later of Crosby, Stills & Nash, was there, and has decided at the age of 71 to prove that he can well remember both them and subsequent decades by favouring us with his autobiography.
When one notices the first symptoms of senile dementia (forgetting names, trying to remember the purpose of moving from one room to another, and so on), books can be wonderfully helpful. At the age of 80, Penelope Lively, the prolific, generally esteemed, novelist, has written an encouraging guidebook for the ageing: For me, reading is
Lord Arran was responsible for the bill to legalise homosexuality and a bill to protect badgers from gassing and terrier-baiting. One, he said, had stopped people badgering buggers; the other stopped them buggering badgers. The Homosexuality Act had an easier passage through the Lords. ‘Not many badgers in the House of Lords,’ he observed. The
Skip this book if you dislike dogs, or even if you are indifferent to them, or echo an acquaintance of Brian Sewell’s who told him: ‘We expected better of you than such silly, sentimental anthropomorphism.’ If you are such a person, you will be horrified by Sewell’s habits — starting with the one of the
This is a curious book. Its title and the name of its publisher suggest that it is going to be an indictment by two journalists of their old profession. These two are now safe and snug in higher education: Stewart Purvis, a former chief executive of ITN, became Professor of Television Journalism at City University
In the vast Benedictine monastery of Monte Oliveto Maggiore between Siena and Rome, the cycle of frescoes depicting the life of St Benedict by Giovanni Anionio Bazzi includes a charming self-portrait of the artist standing with a couple of pets at his feet, for all the world a 16th-century Italian Dorothy with a brace of
Ask any England cricket fan in his fifties to name his favourite batsman and chances are he will say David Gower. (Unless he says Geoffrey Boycott: the cavaliers and roundheads tend to divide along these lines.) In 114 Tests between 1978 and 1992, Gower’s elegance, timing and grace bewitched us all, not least because we
Spectator literary competition No. 2821 Following in the footsteps of Virgil This week, in a challenge inspired by Virgil’s Georgics, you are invited to supply a poem that provides instruction or useful information. The Georgics, a didactic poem that spans four books, is part agricultural manual, part political poem. Although it was published way back
Malcolm Gladwell, the curly-haired, counter-intuitive guru of modern thought who wrote The Tipping Point and Blink, certainly has a readable style, and often a striking way of turning received notions on their head. His latest book, David and Goliath — about the inspiring advantages of perceived disadvantage — is accompanied by a much-hyped speaking tour,
For susceptible Englishmen of a certain inclination — like Sir Edmund Backhouse or George Macdonald Fraser — the Empress Dowager Cixi was the ultimate oriental sex kitten, an insatiable, manipulating dominatrix who brought the decadent Manchu empire to its knees. While all seems lost, as foreign troops burn the Summer Palace in Peking, she is
If you are going to read a novel that plays with literary conventions you want it written with aplomb. In Three Brothers we are not disappointed, as Peter Ackroyd shows a deftness of touch that comes from being a real master. Here his theme is families. Or rather, it is London. Or rather, it is
When Prince Albert died in 1861, aged 42, Queen Victoria, after briefly losing the use of her legs, ordered that every room and corridor in Windsor Castle should be draped in black crepe. As a result, the country’s entire stock of black crepe was exhausted in a single week. One of the key factors of
Donna Tartt is an expert practitioner of what David Hare has called ‘the higher hokum’. She publishes a long novel every decade or so. Her first book, The Secret History (1992), was about some highly affected college students who took to studying ancient Greek in a cult and murdering one another in Dionysiac revels. It
The early 1990s in Russia were hungry years. At the time, I was a student, too idle to barter and hustle for food, and the collapse of the planned economy had left the shops empty. Instead, we staved off hunger- pangs with cigarettes, and if edible matter came our way, we fell upon it like
When we think of David and Goliath, we think of a young man, not very big, who has a fight with a terrifying opponent, and wins. We think of David as puny and Goliath as towering and strong — not to mention heavily armed. We see David’s victory as something that happened against all odds.
According to the medical historian Professor Sonu Shamdasani, Sigmund Freud was not the best, nor actually the most interesting, psychoanalyst in early 20th-century Vienna. Rather, Freud’s genius lay in creating a loyalty cult around himself, collecting a group of acolytes who would ensure his reputation. This is worth bearing in mind when considering the life
How minor is minor? ‘Rings a bell’ was more or less the response of two English literature graduates, now successful fifty-somethings, when asked what the name Basil Bunting meant to them. It is, after all, a good name, a memorable name. I asked a younger friend, about to start his Eng. Lit. degree at Keble:
It must have been awful for Diana and Duff Cooper to be separated from their only child during the war, but we can be grateful for it because it’s a joy to read the correspondence it gave rise to. The letters in this book span the years 1939 to 1952 and take in the Blitz,
The centenary of August 1914 is still almost a year away, but the tsunami of first-world-war books has already begun. The government tells us that 1914 must be commemorated, not celebrated, and ministers worry about British triumphalism upsetting the Germans. But the debate about Germany’s responsibility for the outbreak of war in 1914 won’t go
Spectator literary competition No. 2820 Barbara Hardy’s Dorothea’s Daughter and Other Nineteenth Century Postscripts is a collection of short stories in which Professor Hardy imagines significant conversations between characters some time after their novel has ended. These postscripts enter into dialogue with the original narratives by developing suggestions in the text rather than changing the
Godfrey Bloom has finally rescheduled his postponed book launch. The Ukip MEP, who resigned after his unguarded comments at the party’s recent conference, was due to launch his book A Guinea a Minute in London, but the event was cancelled when the media scrum engulfed the Ukip conference. Well, the invitations have gone out again. They state
Fred Goodwin’s descent from golden boy of British banking to ‘pariah of the decade’ would be the stuff of tragedy if the former Royal Bank of Scotland chief were not such a rebarbative personality. A bully to his subordinates, obsessed with the wrong kind of detail, driven by an egoistic urge to trample his enemies,
First, an appalling admission: I have never read any of Ian Fleming’s Bond books. Nor have I read any of anybody else’s, the number of which seems to grow with each passing year. For a civilised man of a certain age this is a shameful oversight, given that I have seen all but three of
Though alcohol withdrawal is potentially fatal, booze has none of the media-confected glitz of heroin (imagine Will Self boasting of a Baileys Bristol Cream addiction). The 17th-century word for the sickness that follows excessive drinking — ‘crapula’ — effectively hints at the alcoholic’s sleazy kind of stupor. In his earlier years, Stephen King would drink
The last time the general reader was inveigled into the domestic intensities of the Wordsworth circle was by Frances Wilson in The Ballad of Dorothy Wordsworth. She engaged delicately with Dorothy’s inordinate love for her younger brother William, and seemed to think her passionate attachment was romantic and sentimental rather than sexual — though there