The good, the bad and the ugly in books, exhibitions, cinema, TV, dance, music, podcasts and theatre.
One of the most notorious episodes in the siege of Drogheda, when more than 3,000 Irish people were killed by an English army headed by Oliver Cromwell, came when Cromwell and his troops chased a renegade band of the enemy up into the steeple of St Peter’s church. When the fleeing detachment of soldiers refused
Nicholas Jenkins takes, as a point to navigate by in this rich and ingenious study of the early Auden, a remark by the poet’s friend Hannah Arendt. Auden, she said, had ‘the necessary secretiveness of the great poet’. You can’t always trust what Auden, in his prose and in his later interviews, claimed to have
Two books in one: you flip it over, and it becomes the other. A Winter in Zürau is about Franz Kafka’s stay in a small Bohemian village with his sister Ottla after being diagnosed with tuberculosis. Or, as Gabriel Josipovici arrestingly puts it in the preface: ‘One day in the summer of 1917 the writer
This is a book like no other. Part artwork and part compendium of a lifetime’s experience in design, it is meant to be looked at as much as read. Nor is it titled Colourful for nothing: entire pages are in vivid hues of vermilion, lime green, canary yellow, emerald and toffee. On them are displayed
There are about 7,000 languages currently spoken on this planet. By the end of this century, all but 600 will have disappeared – the inevitable result of an unstoppable process as the last speakers of the world’s little languages die out, usually leaving no trace, for the vast majority are spoken only, with no written
Some years ago, following a Christmas performance of Tchaikovsky’s Nutcracker, I sat in one of the dives near the theatre with a member of the corps de ballet, the gay son of close friends. The audience had been populated largely by children and teenagers, most of whom were either smitten by the intrepid, empathetic Clara
Bees and mammoth bones, a shipwreck, horse urine (preferably female), a 17th-century craftsman and a 20th-century genocide. Playing an extended narrative game of Only Connect in her latest book, the musicologist Kate Kennedy takes a bird’s-eye view of four lives and five centuries as she turns her own instrument, the cello, into a prism. Part
In Food for Life, Tim Spector’s book on the science of eating, the author gives the chemical makeup of a mystery food, listing more than 30 scary-sounding E numbers, sugars, acids and chemicals, before revealing that it is an… apple. Sally Coulthard’s book shows that it’s the apple’s complexity as well as its familiarity, that
A better title for this book might have been ‘Lula: A Drama’. In the first of two long- anticipated volumes, Fernando Morais has delivered an unconventional but riveting account of the key moments of tumult in the career of Brazil’s President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva (2003-11; 2023-present). A veteran journalist, Morais is clinical in
Is autism the worst thing that can happen to a person? Is ABA – Applied Behaviour Analysis – the right treatment for an autistic child? Should an autistic person get away with being rude? Do autistic individuals not feel empathy? If, as exists for unborn Downs Syndrome babies, a precise test is found to diagnose
Lee Child has sold more than 200 million books. He reckons his royalties at about a dollar per book. He doesn’t write short stories to make money. He contributes to anthologies, largely pro bono. ‘Fabergé eggs they ain’t,’ he says, in the introduction to this collection of 20 stories, but they are real gems nonetheless.
Eight decades after the second world war ended, for how much longer will we produce massive books about Hitler and the Nazis? Richard J. Evans, the former regius professor of history at the University of Cambridge, is one of the senior gardeners in this noxious orchard, having devoted a lifetime’s study to the subject. As
On Frank Zappa’s first date with Gail Sloatman, he blew his nose on her skirt. As acts of territory-marking go, it’s hard to imagine something more equivocal. But Gail, a 20-year-old secretary at Los Angeles’s Whisky a Go Go club, must have read it as love. She built her life around the musician, composer and
Rocks are still and lifeless things, and geologists are men with beards whose emotional bandwidth is taken up with an unnatural attachment to cherts and clasts and the chill beauty of the subducted lithosphere. Such is the stereotype. The academic geologist and New Yorker contributor Marcia Bjornerud has managed to go a fair distance towards
I am married to a wood snob. When we bought our house in 1999, my husband insisted that all the shelves (he is an antiquarian book dealer, so there are miles of them) should be made of ‘real’ wood, with not an inch of Medium Density Fibreboard. The price made me squeal. But a quarter
Emily Wilson, the distinguished translator of Homer, has remarked that Pat Barker’s The Silence of the Girls about the Trojan War is a distinctly feminist book. Renowned for her first world war Regeneration trilogy, Barker has now written a powerful novel about the first part of Aeschylus’s Oresteia. She takes the infrastructure of legend and
You must remember this… Harry Morgan is leaning on the bar wondering how the femme fatale and her wounded freedom fighter husband are doing. Then Slim walks in, wearing two wisps of black satin linked by a hoop around her navel. Harry tells her it’s time he checked on his patient. ‘Give her my love,’
I’ve just returned from five days in the Lake District, attending the biennial ‘Friends of Coleridge’ conference in Grasmere. All the other attendees were seasoned Coleridge scholars, but I was a newbie. The reason for my going was the fact that I’m engaged in a project that has at times felt something of a lonesome
Last year, the Proms had a ‘Northern Soul’ special concert; and Benjamin Myers won the Goldsmith’s Prize for Cuddy, his polyphonic novel about St Cuthbert’s afterlife. I do not think he will win the prize again this year for Rare Singles, his novel about Northern Soul. I am glad about the Prom though, since I
According to Clive James: ‘A life without fame can be a good life, but fame without a life is no life at all.’ In My Family: The Memoir, the famous comedian David Baddiel proves he’s also had a life. Or, at least, a family. For anyone who hasn’t been paying attention – and Baddiel, as
These days we use radar to help us park our cars, but during the early years of the second world war it was white hot technology and a closely guarded military secret. First used to detect aircraft in 1935, within a few years it had helped win the Battle of Britain and sink the Bismarck.
Charlotte Mendelson has been described in the Times as a ‘master at family drama’, and her previous novel, The Exhibitionist (2022), contained in Ray Hanrahan one of the most odious fictional husbands ever. Mendelson clearly has an appetite as well as talent for writing awful spouses. In her latest novel, Wife, Penny Cartwright is if
Three philosophers walk into a crypto-currency. Resistance Money: A Philosophical Case for Bitcoin, I’d argue, is a slightly inaccurate title. Messrs Bailey, Rettler and Warmke have composed a book that is a meticulous and unphilosophically lucid examination of the origins and properties of bitcoin. No Hegel, no Husserl, no fuss. ‘We don’t prophesy,’ they state.
Some 100,000 books have been written about the American Civil War since it ended in 1865. That’s hardly surprising, given the four-year conflict’s impact on society, and not just because of the immense death toll, which new estimates put as high as 750,000 – more than the losses from all other wars combined. The effusion
Goodbye to Russia is an elegy for a lost country – the warm, chaotic Russia of unlimited possibility that welcomed the 18-year-old Sarah Rainsford in 1992. She stayed on, studied, worked in an Irish bar in St Petersburg, joined the BBC in 2000 and, after spells in other parts of the world, returned to Moscow
Synchronised swimming isn’t really a sport, is it? It’s ‘artistic swimming’ now, of course, though many athletes don’t like that term precisely because it makes the Olympic event sound less like a real sport. But by the end of Swimming Pretty, Vicki Valosik’s meticulous history of synchronised swimming, it’s difficult to think of it as
It is hard to imagine any Victorian man living a fuller life in a flimsier body than Robert Louis Stevenson – and he certainly wouldn’t have managed it without the support of his partner and wife of several decades, Fanny Van de Grift. Born in Edinburgh on 13 November 1850, Louis suffered from countless childhood
‘The politics of Paul Foot are an extraordinary mixture of first-class reporting, primitive Marxism, family wit and fantasy.’ This judgment is taken from a review of Foot’s first book, The Politics of Harold Wilson (1968). The reviewer was well placed to assess it, and, according to this biography, he ‘tore the book apart’. As well
The liberation of Paris in August 1944, two months after D-Day, was one of the most highly publicised victories of the second world war, although it was of no military importance. General Eisenhower, the supreme Allied commander, originally planned to bypass the city altogether but was persuaded by General de Gaulle to allow the tanks
