The good, the bad and the ugly in books, exhibitions, cinema, TV, dance, music, podcasts and theatre.
The first volume of my biography of Margaret Thatcher was published on Tuesday. Since Lady Thatcher had stipulated that the book could appear only after her death, we were, in principle, ready. But it is still a huge undertaking to finish correcting a 900-page book on a Tuesday (the day before the funeral), and get
She divided us in life, she’s dividing us in death. Baroness Thatcher was so controversial that a single letter in a single word in the subtitle of a book that someone else has written about her and is being published after her funeral can get people’s backs up. Charles Moore’s biography is, according to its
Master your disappointment. The Politics of Washing: Real Life in Venice (Hale, £9.99) is as far from the fantasy-relocation genre of hapless writer transposed to sunny European idyll with cast of gurning locals and comic anecdotes involving insects as Prospero’s unnamed island was from Stratford. Mercifully, Polly Coles stuck to a year’s tenancy; she and
Wilhelm Gustloff was a Nazi leader in Switzerland, who was shot dead in his Davos apartment by a Croatian Jewish medical student in 1936. Hitler at the ensuing state funeral promised that Gustloff would remain ‘immortal’ under the Third Reich. But his name is now only remembered because it was bestowed on a ship which
‘One afternoon in September 1942,’ Edward Stourton opens this important and rewarding book, ‘a young man and a young woman could be seen sitting on the back steps of a farmhouse in south west France, looking up at the Pyrenees.’ It is like the first image in an album packed with snapshots set against this
The following novel re-assessment is typical of Andrew Lambirth: Although Eileen Agar exhibited with Miro, Magritte and Ernst, she was never a ‘card-carrying surrealist’. The origins of her work were rooted in ‘the great English Romantic tradition’ — medieval illumination, William Blake, Edward Lear. Lambirth approaches painters and paintings not through the prism of current
David Sedaris writes principally for The New Yorker. Urbane, then, American, smart. But is he a memoirist, a fabulist or an essayist? He is most often described as a humorist, but he’s not funny like, say, Woody Allen. He’s no Stephen Leacock. The aim of his writing is not to make the reader laugh. Which
There is a much reproduced image of the great Welsh poet R.S. Thomas towards the end of his life. A gaunt and angular figure leans defiantly out over the half-gate of his cottage on the Llyn peninsula, wild of hair, curmudgeonly and altogether unwelcoming. The photograph, taken after Thomas’s retirement as vicar of the fishing
At the start of 2004 Howard Leedham, a former British special forces officer who had taken up US citizenship, addressed the raw Pashtun recruits he had made into a US-backed militia capable of operating on the Pakistan-Afghan border, surely one of the world’s most hostile environments. He told them about Lawrence of Arabia’s famous cross-desert
‘Caelum certe patet, ibimus illi’ was the phrase blazoned on the side of the Royal Vauxhall, an 80-foot, red and white candy-striped coal gas balloon launched from Vauxhall Pleasure Gardens in 1836 to fly overnight from London to the continent. The motto is from Ovid: ‘Surely the sky lies open, let us go that way!’
The life of Oscar Wilde is so wearily familiar that we assume that there is nothing new to think or say about him. This book proves us wrong. Carlos Blacker – the central figure of J. Robert Maguire’s research for more than half a century – rates, at best, a bare mention in Wilde’s many
My editor told me to read this book and write this review. Six hundred words, he said. Just like the psychiatrist Dr. Quinn instructed Charlie, the protagonist of said book, to write one thousand words a day. Therapy apparently. The big reveal is exactly why Charlie needs therapy. The suspense is meant to keep you
Does monotropa hypopithys, or yellow bird’s nest, still grow in Mickleham, Surrey, in the woods once owned by Sir Lucas Pepys the celebrity physician who, in ministering to King George III, ‘found the stool more eloquent than the pulse?’ The question is prompted by the Bodleian’s recent acquisition of a ‘Catalogus Plantarum’ kept in the
Philip Hensher was one of Granta’s 20 under forty in 2003, so what does he make of the new list? Writing in this week’s Spectator, he says that there are a dozen competent to superb writers on the list but you can keep the rest. ‘When you look at the seven truly regrettable inclusions it
Beginning with what he finds to be a rather implausible account of a meeting between Dickens and Dostoevsky, Eric Naiman’s recent essay for the Times Literary Supplement spins out an astonishing story of suspect scholarship. I very much recommend reading it if you haven’t already. At the centre of the mystery is an independent historian
‘My friend and I were working out how many more books we’ll read before we die,’ a customer said to me in the bookshop, the other day. ‘We read a book every couple of weeks, so we figured around 500.’ I rapidly did the maths. Twenty years. It seemed a little pessimistic for someone who
A year before he died from emphysema in 1990, the composer-conductor Leonard Bernstein agreed to be interviewed by the music journalist Jonathan Cott for Rolling Stone. Dinner with Lenny (OUP, £16.99) is the transcription of their 12-hour conversation, in which Bernstein’s frenetic energy — ‘Byronic intensity’ is how Cott puts it — is as vividly
In this memoir Julia O’Faolain, author of seven distinguished novels and many short stories, asserts that she has nothing to say about the ‘inner Julia’, because being a writer she is more interested in observing other people. And, importantly, ‘I write because Seán and Eileen did.’ Some women stop identifying themselves as their parents’ daughter
We care because our name’s on it. This was the slogan used by Warburtons, the family-owned bakery company, to set itself apart from its rivals, most of which had impersonal names like Premier Foods or Allied Bakeries. Is this just a marketing ploy, or do people actually prefer to buy from a company that has
The literary magazine Granta had the bright idea, in 1983, of promoting 20 British novelists under 40 by announcing that they were the ‘best’ around. The first list was a resounding success, taking Granta well out of its habitual mode by featuring some very un-Granta names, like Adam Mars-Jones and A.N.Wilson. Of course, there were
The last time I heard Kipling read aloud was last week at a Scout Gang Show. It was the grand finale. Centre stage on a dais stood a serving soldier and noble looking ancient veteran. On either side, a group of Scouts, an organisation dear to Kipling’s heart, stood with outflung arms indicating these heroes,
Back in the 1960s, England was a bad disappointment to many West Indians. In the grey city streets with their scruffy, bay-fronted houses they looked for somewhere to live. Many were surprised to find themselves categorised as ‘coloured’. (ROOM TO LET: REGRET NO KOLORED.) In the Anglophone Caribbean, the term ‘coloured’ applied to people of
C.S. Lewis became a celebrity but remains a mysterious figure. Several biographies have been written, not to much avail, and now Alister McGrath, a professor of historical theology, has compiled a painstaking, systematic and ungrudging examination of his life and works. Despite all the trouble he has taken, his book lacks charm and does not
If you mixed Lionel Shriver’s chilling We Need to Talk About Kevin with a Joycean stream of consciousness from a female Ulysses in contemporary Athens, you’d be approaching the spirit of Ioanna Karystiani’s Back to Delphi. Viv is the mother of a notorious rapist and murderer, now locked up in Korydallos prison. Granted five days
Once all our basic human needs have been met, and we can eat and we can sleep and we can live in comfort, what is next? The urge to express yourself in hardcovers might not be top of everybody’s list, but I suspect it’s near the top of Charles Saatchi’s. During a career of extraordinary
The spy George Blake, doyen of traitors, turned 90 last year. Almost blind, he lives with his Russian wife outside Moscow on an SVR (KGB in old money) reservation. Much has changed since 1961 when he was sentenced to 42 years in British jails — the ideology he believed in discredited, the empire he spied
In May 1913 a British delegation visited the United States to discuss plans for celebrating 100 years of Anglo-American peace. At their final meeting in New York’s Plaza Hotel, the representatives of both sides had just agreed on a five-minute silence to be observed across the English-speaking world on 17 February 1915, when Professor Hugo
The man who christened Wisden ‘The Cricket Bible’ had little religion. Wisden is an unprepossessing sight: a 1,500 page tome surrounded by a flame-yellow dust jacket covered in mud brown lettering. The book’s content often matches its artless appearance; thousands of statistics and scorecards that read like the turgid genealogical passages of Genesis. Abraham begat
‘I had decided that I wished to write a novel about the immediate present – this was the summer of 1930 – and I had been speculating about the way people were acting and feeling,’ wrote Helen Hull of Heat Lightning in 1932. Heat Lightning follows the tumultuous Amy Norton as she returns temporarily to
