The good, the bad and the ugly in books, exhibitions, cinema, TV, dance, music, podcasts and theatre.
How did the cherubim, solemn figures of beaten gold in the Holy of Holies of the Hebrew Temple, become chubby toddlers (such as the pair in Raphael’s Sistine Madonna), popular on greetings cards? It was surprising in the first place that their graven images should be set up at all, with eyes cast down and
The son of a fish-paste factory manager in London’s East End, Alan Root fell in love with ornithology as a Blitz evacuee when he first clapped eyes on the pea-sized egg of a goldcrest, England’s smallest bird. After the war his father got a job manufacturing bully-beef in Kenya, where Root discovered a much richer
Ports can challenge national stereotypes: think of the difference between St Petersburg and Russia, or Naples and Italy. Since England is so small, and London so big, few English ports have generated their own identities. In France, however, despite the alleged stranglehold of Paris, ports such as Bordeaux, Nice and Marseille have remained remarkably different
Published at the author’s expense in 1896, A.E. Housman’s A Shropshire Lad did not at first attract many readers. It was only after it had been taken up by an ambitious young publisher called Grant Richards that it began to sell. The poems’ popularity increased further when English composers, deciding that they had found their
In his book The Black Swan, Nassim Taleb told us that the world is a much weirder place than we can bear to believe. It is full of occult forces and strange events. If we think we can control or predict these forces and events, we’re sorely mistaken. One minute, we think we’ve mastered the
William James considered an hallucination to be ‘as good and true a sensation as if there were a real object there’, except that the ‘object happens to be not there, that is all’ — an admirable definition, and a favourite of Oliver Sacks, the eminent neurologist, who has written what he calls ‘a sort of
There can be few phrases in the language more debased than ‘Christmas gift book’. (Well, ‘friendly fire’, maybe, or ‘light entertainment’.) Needless to say, every writer worth his overdraft wants to do one, having already spent in his head all the lovely money he is going to earn from it. But you are essentially writing
At last! At the age of 80, I have read my first digital book. According to Penguin, these brief ‘Specials’ are written to be read over a long commute or a short journey, in your lunch hour or between dinner and bedtime, a short escape into a fictional world or … as a primer in
We know a great deal about Keith Vaughan both as a painter and as a man, from the journals he kept between 1939 until his death in 1977. They have been described as ‘one of the greatest pieces of confessional writing of the 20th century’, and provide a fascinating record of an artist’s thoughts and
What does fashion look like? When intellectual or artistic vogues change, how do we know when they have happened? The most popular men’s trousers in the UK at the moment are probably ones in a sort of indeterminate beige colour, if you go by the number of people wearing them. But I don’t think that’s
Editor of Vanity Fair, Graydon Carter, is this week’s Shelf Lifer. He reveals a predilection for Herman Wouk, an in depth knowledge of certain sections of the Eaton’s catalogue and a fondness for a particular character in P.G. Wodehouse. What are you reading at the moment? Don’t Stop the Carnival by Herman Wouk As a
The literary world anticipates Salman Rushdie’s response to Zoe Heller’s cauterisation of his memoir, Joseph Anton, in the New York Review of Books. Heller’s pointed review is deeply considered. It is a delight to read, even though some of its arguments are uneven and some of its conclusions are trivial next to the themes of
350 years ago, Charles II ruled over a Britain whose destiny – as a world power or a defeated backwater – was intricately tied to its relations with Europe. The King’s chief minister was the Lord Chancellor Edward Hyde, Earl of Clarendon. Sober and high-principled, Clarendon favoured alliance with the Hapsburg powers of Spain and
‘Whig and Tory Scratch and Bite’, by Aaron Hill Whig and Tory scratch and bite, Just as hungry dogs we see: Toss a bone ‘twixt two, they fight, Throw a couple, they agree. Tribal party politics are three-hundred years old in Britain. So is the fashion for satire which aspires to rise above it all.
Giles Coren’s piece in the latest issue of the Spectator has caused a stir in the world of graphic novels (‘comic books’ to the uninitiated). He notes that two excellent comics, Days of the Bagnold Summer by Joff Winterhart and Dotter of Her Father’s Eyes by Mary M Talbot and Bryan Talbot, have been included
You cannot have failed to learn that a new film adaptation of Great Expectations has been released today. Publicity for the film is ubiquitous: posters of Ralph Fiennes as Magwitch and Helena Bonham Carter as Miss Havisham adorn the billboards of train stations and the hoardings that overlook thoroughfares. The stars have been interviewed on
Loins are girded and members tumescent, for next Tuesday sees the presentation of this year’s Bad Sex Award. The Literary Review’s annual prize for the worst description of sex in a novel never fails to raise the spirits. (Yes, I know there’s a double entendre there, but at first I wrote ‘raise a titter’, so
You sense that writing Seb Coe: The Autobiography (Hodder, £20) must have been a pleasurable task for the Lord of the Five Rings: it’s about his favourite subject. ‘I am known for many things,’ he says. And ‘I’ve always been able to read people pretty well.’ ‘Good athletes tend not to be good ball players,
There are, I believe, only two jokes in Diarmaid Ferriter’s latest voluminous tome: one, citing Liam Cosgrave, sometime Taoiseach, considered a rather dull character, who apparently said that ‘the Jews and the Muslims should settle their differences in a Christian manner’ (which is almost as insightful as the Tyrone newspaper which once carried the headline:
My 20-month-old granddaughter totters into the room. Her eyes are shining with the fervour of St Bernadette. She has caught a glimpse of the divine. Two small stuffed pigs are clasped in her arms. Clearly she has been in heaven. Actually she has just returned from a visit to Peppa Pig World, the most exciting
By any standards, Haiti represents a great concentration of misery and dashed hopes. From the air, the Caribbean republic is a sun-scorched clinker; deforestation, caused by a ruinous cutting of timber for charcoal, has destroyed much of the green. Since independence in 1804, moreover, a succession of emperors, kings and presidents-for-life has contrived to instil
The ladies that he spoke to, soft and sure, Believed in dresses longing to be made Of no material but that very shade Of fabric he laid out. So his demure Debs’ fingers would dip gracefully to azure Yards of silk, and his housewives’ eyes, displayed A deep vermillion with a silver braid, Would find
Aunts, generally of an antic or highly unconventional kind, are a literary staple. Anyone wanting to find the best of them would do well to turn to Rupert Christiansen’s excellent companion study of the breed, The Complete Book of Aunts. Literary uncles are rarer, but no less enjoyable to meet. Nancy Mitford’s Uncle Matthew is
With one or two exciting exceptions, almost all art books fall into a very limited number of easily identified categories, such as the monograph and the exhibition catalogue. In some cases, of course, they cunningly manage to be both, not least since the authors of some exhibition catalogues seem to feel that the last thing
Despite its playfully obfuscating title, the rationale behind this anthology is pretty straightforward. A ‘fake’ is a fictional text that purports to be — or, perhaps more accurately, is presented in the guise of — a non-fictional document. Of course, there’s nothing new about stories of this type: the epistolary novel has been around for
Ladies and gentlemen,’ Laurence Olivier declared in his clipped, semi-metallic tones to the audience at the Vic as he took his curtain call, ‘tonight a great actress has been born. Laertes has a daughter.’ The man playing Laertes to Olivier’s Hamlet on that evening in January 1937 was Michael Redgrave. The daughter was Vanessa, who
‘I’m the President, but he’s the Boss’, Barack Obama declared a couple of years ago, and most Spectator readers will know Bruce Springsteen as the President’s celebrity pop star friend. (One of the first of the many pleasures Peter Ames Carlin’s book affords is the story of how Springsteen came byhis nickname: he was a
Though lasting literary friendships between natural rivals are not rare — Byron and Shelley, Coleridge and Wordsworth and Edward Thomas and Robert Frost spring to mind — few have been as durable as the one that began in the Front Quad of St John’s College, Oxford, one afternoon in May 1941 when a mutual friend
When, many years ago, I finished reading Cecil Woodham-Smith’s fine and tragic The Great Hunger, I swore never to read another book about the Irish famine of 1845-9. But they continue to be published, and they do not always agree. Tim Pat Coogan’s The Famine Plot: England’s Role in Ireland’s Greatest Tragedy, whose title says
