The good, the bad and the ugly in books, exhibitions, cinema, TV, dance, music, podcasts and theatre.
Margaret Evison spent Easter 2009 with her 26-year-old son Mark, who was about to go to Afghanistan as a lieutenant in the Welsh Guards. They walked around her garden talking about death in a general sort of way; Mark was worried that he might make a mistake which would lead to someone else dying. ‘He
Ronald ‘Trader’ Faulkner is that relative rarity: an unassuming actor. In their memoirs most actors, after the obligatory two or three chapters describing the hardships at the outset of their careers, indulge in a paean of self-glorification — mentioning their failures, certainly, but only so as to highlight their far more considerable successes. Faulkner is
Michael Gorra’s Portrait of a Novel is a lucid critique of how Henry James came to write a book that would permanently change the art of literary fiction. The Portrait of a Lady was first published in 1881, with a second revised version appearing in 1908. James’s heroine is the spirited Isabel Archer — a
When Ellen Fein and Sherrie Schneider read this review, they’ll exchange a pitying smile and quietly start waiting for my distress call. For woe betide any woman who thinks she can live without the Rules: they are hard and fast and apparently foolproof: ‘You can truly do the Rules on any guy, in any situation,
Reading this new edition of W.G. Sebald’s discursive meditation upon the blanket bombing of German civilians during the second world war took me back to Berlin in the early 1960s when German writers from the Gruppe 47 were in the ascendant, and no self-respecting avant-garde author wrote novels with stories or plots. They did not
There are already two excellent books about the Profumo Affair — An Affair of State (1987) by Phillip Knightley and Caroline Kennedy, and Bringing the House Down (2007) by David Profumo — as well as five not-so-excellent ones by poor old Christine Keeler. Now Richard Davenport-Hines has marked the scandal’s 50th anniversary with An English
The Costa Book Awards has made its own history tonight by selecting, according to its press release, an all women shortlist* for the first time. Here are the category winners, each of whom bags £5,000: 1). Mary and Bryan Talbot win the Costa Biography Award for Dotter of Her Father’s Eyes, a book that examines
The children who grew up when Christopher Martin-Jenkins began to commentate on cricket (both in print and on the air) have got old. CMJ’s 40-odd year career has been brought to a premature end by cancer; and the cricket writing world has paid tribute to its companion. The pieces by Mike Selvey, Jonathan Agnew and
2012 is done. Here is the final selection (published in the magazine last month) of the Spectator’s best books of the year. Happy 2013. Susan Hill Spitalfields Life by The Gentle Author (Saltyard Books, £20). The writer started a daily blog about his life in Spitalfields — people, jobs, buildings, street life, monuments. A whole
2012 is very nearly finished. Here is a selection (published in the magazine last month) of the Spectator’s best books of the year. Matthew Parris There’s been a fad for publishing ‘biographies’ of entities that are not human beings: everything from longitude to the mosquito, and the format can prove forced. But Robert Shepherd’s Westminster,
As the first British winner of the Tour de France and a gold medalist at London 2012, Bradley Wiggins is a national hero, and though he insists he is an ordinary Kilburn lad he keeps dropping hints about a knighthood. So it is only fitting that, at the age of 32 and with the help
On 1 September 1978, the then prime minister Jim Callaghan invited six leading trade unionists to dinner at his Elizabethan farmhouse in Sussex. By all accounts it was a very jolly affair with Callaghan’s wife Audrey doing the cooking and their granddaughter Tamsin Jay handing round the dishes. The trade union grandees went away convinced
In 1471 Galeazzo Maria Sforza, Duke of Milan, led a brash entourage of wine-swilling, jewel-bedecked courtiers into Florence. It was Lent. This was not the most auspicious way to begin a diplomatic mission to settle the dispute over Imola, the tiny Romagna fiefdom that Galeazzo had offered to sell to Lorenzo de’Medici. Even Lorenzo, epitome
The fascination with the last of the cavalry is enduring, perhaps partly because of the horseman’s apocalyptic links: one of the contenders for the last cavalry charge, about which there is still no consensus, is the battle of Megiddo in 1918, on the Plain of Armageddon. Now we have another question: who was the last
A fanciful and doubtless risky parallel between Charles de Gaulle and the Russian emperor Alexander I suggested itself while I read Marie-Pierre Rey’s superb new biography of the latter. Both men came to power through an act of political parricide: Alexander because he was tacitly complicit in the plot to overthrow his father, a plot
2012 is drawing to a close. Here is a selection (published in the magazine last month) of the Spectator’s best books of the year. A.N.Wilson Sidney Chambers and the Shadow of Death by James Runcie (Bloomsbury, £14.99). At last, an Anglican Father Brown. Runcie has sensibly set his detective stories in the 1950s, before the
Find out which books PD James, Sam Leith, Susan Hill, Mark Amory, Barry Humphries and many more hate, then tell us about yours in the comments section. Craig Brown Which classic work do you think this comes from? ‘Her teeth were white in her brown face and her skin and her eyes were the same
The word ‘turboparalysis’, coined by Michael Lind (who has a brilliant piece on the subject in the Spectator Christmas double issue), is paradoxical, even illogical. And yet it is clear, perfect for our times. Lind defines his term as: ‘a prolonged condition of furious motion without movement in any particular direction, a situation in which the engine
If you’re still struggling to find a present for the inscrutable toddlers and children in your life, fear not for behold we bring you good tidings of great joy: Juliet Townsend’s annual selection of the best children’s books on the market, published in the Spectator a few weeks back. My 20-month-old granddaughter totters into the
In the upper outer corridor of the Summer Palace, with its views of the palm fringed courtyard below, the young man was waiting with his gun. It was a no frills 7.65 Ruby automatic pistol, one of thousands a Spanish small arms manufacturer had supplied the French Army during the First World. Some of the
Faustus to Helen of Troy from Doctor Faustus, by Christopher Marlowe Was this the face that launched a thousand ships? And burnt the topless towers of Ilium? Sweet Helen, make me immortal with a kiss. Her lips suck forth my soul, see where it flies: Come Helen, come give me my soul again. Here will
Sean O’ Brien was born in London in 1952. Shortly afterwards, he moved to Hull, where he grew up, thus firmly cementing an allegiance to the North of England: a subject he explores in much of his poetry. In these Collected Poems, that begin with his debut, The Indoor Park (1983), and end with his
It is, if Noddy Holder is to be believed, Christmas. And so those of us who pen trivia books listen for the ring of tills or, as is increasingly the case these days, for clicks on Amazon’s ‘Add to Basket’ icon. Will our offering be the one bulging the stockings this year? Will the royalties
I’m writing this from a hotel room in Stockholm where I’ve been stranded for the last 24 hours thanks to bad weather. Turns out the Swedish airport authorities aren’t any better at coping with snow than ours — which is surprising given how often it must snow over here. Nevertheless, it has given me an
If you’re short on ideas for minor Christmas presents, then you can’t do better for expert guidance than read Marcus Berkmann’s choice of stocking fillers from last week’s issue of the Spectator magazine. There can be few phrases in the language more debased than ‘Christmas gift book’. (Well, ‘friendly fire’, maybe, or ‘light entertainment’.) Needless
Rod Stewart once tried to convince his mother that he had made a lot of money, and wanted to buy her a really big Christmas present. After much thought, she chose a new bread bin. Feet that stay on the ground are obviously a family trait. Rod: The Autobiography (Century, £20) is excellent, like listening
This book shouldn’t work. A memoir written by a 40-year-old, who has never written a book before, hardly sounds promising. The topic, education, moreover is death to good literature: barely has a book been written about the subject that is not dull beyond belief. Yet, against all the odds, this book turns out to be
Twice in my career, in very remote places, I encountered lunatics who had been chained for many years to the wall or to posts in the ground. The reasons why they were so enchained had been lost in the sands of time, but their keepers were convinced that they were far too dangerous to be
As fewer people write by hand, some of us who do venture to squeak a thin call of alarm, like mice behind the frescoes during the last days of Pompeii. Philip Hensher (novelist and university teacher) voices dismay more manfully in this eloquent account of what has been and will be lost by the ending