The good, the bad and the ugly in books, exhibitions, cinema, TV, dance, music, podcasts and theatre.
An ordinary woman, rather like yourself.’ These were Peter Fleming’s words when he commissioned Jan Struther to write what became her ‘Mrs Miniver’ columns for the Times. Critics complained then, and have complained ever since, that Mrs Miniver is no ‘ordinary woman’. She rings the bell for tea, takes taxis everywhere, and has a second
Where our great Victorian writers are concerned we live in an age of rolling biography and contradictory interpretation. I’ve read half a dozen lives of the poet since picking up, as a schoolboy, the Penguin paperback of Harold Nicolson’s Tennyson: Aspects of his Life, Character and Poetry, with its diagnosis of a crippling case of
Montesquieu observed that popular governments are always more vindictive than monarchies. So it proved in Iran in 1979, where the demise of a 2,000-year-old monarchical tradition made most ‘Arab spring’ revolutions seem like child’s play. More than 30 years on, the descent of Ayatollah Khomeini from a jumbo jet, wearing an American bullet-proof vest, also
On a ridge high above the River Ancre, four miles to the north of the town of Albert, stands the greatest of all Britain’s memorials to its dead. For some curious reason the Thiepval Arch has never touched the imagination in the same way as Blomfield’s Menin Gate, but as an evocation of the pity
Building on the success of his acclaimed Radio 4 series and bestselling book A History of the World in 100 Objects, Neil MacGregor has now successfully narrowed down the format. Selecting 20 objects that he suggests formed part of ‘the mental scenery’ of Shakespeare and his contemporaries, he exploits what he calls ‘the strange potency
Donna Leon’s The Jewels of Paradise (Heinemann, £17.99)has a promising premise. A young musicologist, Caterina Pelligroni, returns to Venice to trace a legacy left by the 17th-century composer Agostino Steffani, a slippery customer who mixed libretti with realpolitik in the courts of Europe. The bequest turns out to consist mainly of nasty secrets, which seem
Rebus is back, in a novel long, meaty and persuasive enough to make up for the years of absence. Actually, he is only part-way back — on a civilian attachment to the Edinburgh & Lothian Police, and working on cold cases. However, the retiring age has been raised, and he has applied for re-instatement. He
This is a story of impossible gifts. The Chancellor, George Gideon Oliver Osborne, stands to inherit a 17th-century baronetcy and a large fortune accumulated by his enterprising father. He was also blessed with intelligence, charm, ambition, eloquence and the mysterious ability to seek out power and use it for his own ends. His biographer, Janan
Parish churches are the sentinels of England’s past. They soar over every town and village, pinning it to the nation’s soil. The nave may be empty, the graveyard unkempt and the roll-call of the faithful soon to cede primacy to the mosque. But the Church of England guards our rituals and speaks for our communities.
There are quite a few candidates competing for the title of the first novel in English literature. You can make a strong case for Robinson Crusoe, published in 1719, or Gulliver’s Travels of 1726, or even – at a push – argue for Sir Philip Sidney’s Countess of Pembroke’s Arcadia, issued over a hundred years
Scottish novelist Iain (M) Banks is this week’s Shelf Life provocateur. He tells us how he likes to test his potential lovers and what extreme punishments he exacts on books he doesn’t like. 1) What are you reading at the moment? The Hell of it All by Charlie Brooker and Anatomy of the Orchestra by
On starting a new job at Westminster in the early 2000s, and despondent about my party’s lot, I began to write a political novel. Aspiring writers are told to write about the world around them, and, as an observer on the ‘inside’, there was no shortage of material. Gloom and frustration hung heavily in those
‘The German sense of humour,’ Mark Twain famously observed, ‘Is no laughing matter.’ Although many Greeks, stretched on the Euro’s rack at Berlin’s behest, may be inclined to agree, Rudolph Herzog’s intriguing study of humour in and against Hitler’s Germany, Dead Funny: Telling Jokes in Hitler’s Germany, proves conclusively that the Teutonic funny bone, while
‘To the Grave’ Unclasp thy womb, thou mortuary shrine, And take the worst part of the best we had. Thou hast no harbourage for things divine, That thou had’st any part was yet too bad. Graves, for the grave, are fit, unfit for thee Was our sweet branch of youthful royalty. Thou must restore each
Ciaran Carson was born in Belfast in 1948, and published his first book of poetry, The New Estate, in 1976. Fans of Carson had to wait eleven years for his second book, The Irish for No (1987), which earned him the Alice Hunt Barlett Award. Belfast Confetti (1990) won The Irish Times Literature Prize for
Markus Dohle, Chief Executive of Random House, must have had a long hard think about what a booklover could possibly treasure more than a Kindle. The answer is, of course, a Penguin. Everyone loves Penguin. Their paperback covers have become such a design cult that people flock to buy not just their books, but also
The rainforests must be jumping for joy these days. Which is ironic, as they’ve largely got Amazon to thank for it. As the e-book continues its rise, there’ll be less and less demand from publishers for that horrible, immoral, eco-balance-wrecking stuff called ‘paper’. But before the trees get too complacent, they should remember that there’s
Ever since Sergeant Cuff appeared in The Moonstone in 1868, we English have loved our detectives. Moody Scandinavian fiction might come and go, but Peter Wimsey, Poirot, Marple and of course Sherlock Holmes continue to delight us. In Simon Serailler, Susan Hill has created a detective that ranks alongside all these greats. Like Cuff, he
The summer exhibition at the Royal Academy, with its overstuffed galleries and motley collection of overblown portraits, twee still lifes and garish landscapes has become an event where you go to be seen rather than to see; it’s less about the art than the experience. But the first-ever public show of paintings, sculpture, architectural drawings
After wading through 646 pages of narcissistic gush and breathtaking vulgarity in the accents of Dr Kissinger and Dr Strangelove, I am consoled by the thought that the ordeal has not been entirely a waste of effort. Frequently able to put the book down, yet obliged every time but one to lift it up again,
Cometh the hour, cometh the many men (and women). The 2012 centenary of Captain Scott’s death inspired a series of heroic forays into print: glory-hungry (or just plain hungry) authors questing for something new to say about this much-described event. Next year is the 60th anniversary of the first ascent of Everest, and so we
The wartime code-breaking successes of Bletchley Park are deservedly well known. The story of how they decrypted German and Japanese codes, most famously the Enigma, has been the subject of histories, novels and films, so much so that Bletchley is glamour. Much less well known, however, and much less glamorous — rarely even thought about
Being sent to finishing school in Bavaria in 1936 was a dream for some English girls: there were winter sports and sachertorte, opera and sausages, and troupes of handsome Nazis in shorts. In Rachel Johnson’s new book, Daphne Linden and Betsy Barton-Hill, 18-year-old beauties who’ve never properly met any boys, find themselves at large in
Two women are the only heroes of this book. One is Princess Margaret, whom the author points out was far more instrumental in the early years of Colin Tennant’s ramshackle creation of Mustique than merely lending it her unparalleled presence. Quite apart from insisting, after Tennant had fallen out with a slew of architects, that
I like Dawn French when she is playing a sinister nurse much more than when she’s a jolly vicar. As her new novel, Oh Dear Silvia (Michael Joseph, £18.99) is set in a hospital, her darker side is gloriously indulged. We are at the bedside of the comatose Silvia, who has fallen off a balcony.
It’s odd that this book should be about a cleaner, because it exactly conjures up the emotions I felt when I worked as a cleaning lady many years ago. Contemplating the grease-encrusted kitchen floor I was about to scrub, I’d cry aloud: ‘How long must I perform this thankless, gruelling task? Why me?’ These agonised
On his first day at boarding school in Kenya in the early 1950s, Ngugi Wa Thiong’o stood to attention as the Union Jack was raised on the school flagpole. Afterwards the boys sang Psalm 51 which contains the line, ‘Wash me Redeemer and I shall be whiter than snow.’ Then came a tour of the
Was a nation ever so beset by calamity as Poland? During the second world war, Polish cities were bombed, fought over hand-to-hand and crushingly shelled. Beyond their ideological differences, Hitler and Stalin were united in a determination to destroy the country. Without the Nazi-Soviet ‘friendship’ treaty of 1939, Hitler would not have been able to
The Quest for Corvo started something rather peculiar in biography. A.J.A. Symons’s 1934 classic — described as ‘an experiment’ — set out the biographer’s search for his subject, and not just the results. This was justified in the case of an elusive and unusual figure like the ‘Baron’ Corvo. Nowadays, many biographies are written like