The good, the bad and the ugly in books, exhibitions, cinema, TV, dance, music, podcasts and theatre.
Authors seem to be more unhealthy than most people. Sometimes the sick room simply offers time to read and a sense of grievance or detachment; but the relationship between health and writing may be more complex. John Ross, a practising physician and assistant professor of medicine at Harvard, has happily violated every rule of patient
I suppose I may be one of the few people still alive to have known Krystyna Skarbek (aka Christine Granville), though, perhaps regrettably, not as well as many others in her brilliant, stormy but eventually tragic life. Today she would have been over 100. Of all the women agents who risked their lives in Nazi-occupied
In the year when East and West Germany were being reunited Günter Grass felt he must start keeping a diary. He was sure what was taking place was a dreadful mistake: At night I often toss and turn, haunted by images of a Germany that can no longer be mine. This Kohlian abomination: egomaniacal, bombastic,
The Impressionists adored clothes. They delighted in strapontins, polonaises and paletots; fans, hats and umbrellas were an extra treat. They were keen on couture, but they didn’t restrict themselves to painting grand ladies; it was the golden age of flânerie, and Paris had been transformed from a higgledy-piggledy labyrinth into an elegant public space of
The Grimm brothers’ fairy tales are gruesome. Heads are cut off and sometimes stuck back on again. Children are maimed, or chopped up, cooked and eaten. Broken promises are punished horribly, though a magic bird or a talking animal can sometimes make everything come right. Yet those tender-minded parents are misguided who keep their children
Here’s the paradox. By any standards, Arthur Conan Doyle was an extraordinary man; a doctor, a politician, a keen sportsman (he once took the wicket of W.G. Grace and he was skiing almost before the word was invented), a social campaigner, a spiritualist and of course a very great writer, not just of detective stories
A century ago, Antarctica was a seriously tough place in which to be a scientist. In February 1912, a German expedition established its research station on an ice-shelf in the Weddell Sea, only for that section of shelf to break loose ‘with an explosive boom’, and drift away — pursued by the German ship. When
The first volume of Peter Ackroyd’s six-volume history of England took us from prehistory to the death of Henry VII. Now the great charabanc rattles on. Here is a fat book of old-fashioned, great-man history taking in the second of the Harries twain, Ned the Lad, Mary and Bessie. Things don’t begin well; the speed
If you have five minutes to spare this evening, read Teju Cole’s account of meeting V.S. Naipaul. Writing from the covetable position of a column in the hallowed New Yorker, Cole is man enough to admit feeling awkward when he meets Naipaul, and, worse still, when he is addressed by him as an equal. It’s a winning
The real shock of the new came in 1991. It was sobering, and it was reverent, which aren’t exactly the first words one would associate with The Shock of the New art critic Robert Hughes. No wonder it went largely unacknowledged when he passed away last month. While Hughes’ seminal art history series continues to
‘How the War Began’ by Thomas Jordan, 1663. ‘I’ll tell you how the war began: The holy ones assembled (For so they called their party then Whose consciences so trembled). They pulled the bishops from their seats, And set up every widgeon; The Scotch were sent for to do feats With oat-cakes and religion. They
The publication of Joseph Anton (tomorrow), Salman Rushdie’s much anticipated memoir, has given newspapers cause to revisit The Satanic Verses. The commentary focuses on the bloodthirsty and backward response that the book continues to provoke. The novel has become a totem in various political and religious ‘debates’ (a word that is hopelessly misplaced in this perverse
Winning the Booker can do strange things. For one, critics tend to become noticeably shyer around authors with some bling in their trophy cabinets, hyperbole blunting their edge. But if ever there was a writer primed to dismantle automatic appreciation it is Howard Jacobson. Zoo Time, his first novel since The Finkler Question won the
In a promotional video clip, Sebastian Faulks describes his new novel, A Possible Life, as like ‘a symphony in five movements… or an album in which the tracks are separate but the whole thing adds up to more than the sum of its parts.’ The idea of the musical novel – held together by themes,
Bad news for those of us with only one X-chromosome: men are on their way out. That’s the view of Hanna Rosin, an enterprising young American journalist who has turned an essay she wrote for The Atlantic two years ago into the most talked-about book of the moment — The End of Men: And the
The fundamental purpose of the literary critic is to incentivise his audience to read books of which he approves. He has two means at his disposal. The first of those means is the recommendation by virtue of excellence, which can be reduced to the basic formula ‘look at this, this is very good, to read
The English language is, as English would have it, an odd duck. Its nuances are capricious — to the non-native, maliciously so — but its lyricism widely praised. My preoccupation with language possibly stems from my first profession, that of a stage actress (throughout the course of this esteemed career, I made literally hundreds of
Naomi Wolf’s Vagina is not an organ so significant it needs italics; it is a book, and a catalyst for a swiftly assembled feminist lynch mob. In the New Statesman, Laurie Penny wrote, ‘Naomi Wolf’s Vagina is crassly attention-seeking… It’s upsetting to see a prominent feminist having what can only be described as a dramatic
If Britain is serious about this Olympic legacy thing, we should get ‘talking about the weather’ added to the list of official sports. We’d clean up at Rio. Strange, mind you, that we don’t actually know very much about the subject which consumes so much of our conversation. How rainclouds form, why lightning happens, where
‘He walked straight past the wolf and picked up the dead garter snake.’ This is the exemplary sentence that young teacher Connie writes out for a good-looking, baseball-loving pupil three grades behind in his studies. ‘Fifteen years old, and thick as a plank,’ the school Principal, Parley Burns considers him. Connie chooses her words to
Fiona Sampson has produced a vigorous and valuable guide to ‘the diversity and eclecticism’ of present-day British poetry. It isn’t a book for beginners but for those broadly acquainted, at the very least, with the work and influence of important poets of the last century — W.B. Yeats, T.S. Eliot, W.H. Auden, Dylan Thomas, Philip
At first I thought this was going to be a terrible book. It starts like a Hollywood B-movie Western on which Ingmar Bergman has done a quick rewrite. This, for example, is how the authors convey the simple fact that Oliver Cromwell died on 3 September 1658: ‘Death finally caught up with Oliver Cromwell on
Yes, shamefully, I did immediately look myself up in the index, since I had known Mary Robinson (née Bourke) when we were both young feminists in Dublin in 1970. Indeed, she sat in my Dublin flat sharing ‘conscious-raising’ sessions, and I published one of the first political interviews with her — which has been cited
We all love Oscar Wilde for saying, with his final breath, ‘I am dying beyond my means’. We love it because it’s funny, but also because it shows that he was dying in character. It matters very much to us that the people we are close to should retain the essence of their natures, until the
Starting with Lemprière’s Dictionary — an unexpected worldwide hit in the early 1990s — Lawrence Norfolk has never been a man for the slim novella. Complicated of plot and huge of cast, his books generally serve up a combination of almost obsessively researched history and somewhat arcane mythology. Now, 12 years since his last one,
In this intense, painful, excellent war novel, former Private John Bartle, a young man from rural Virginia, looks back on his tour of duty in northern Iraq in 2004. He tries to explain what it was like to kill, and what it was like to be under fire. He tries to make sense of the
I was sheltering in the dunes on a Hebridean beach, reading this book, when I happened to glance up and see an otter galumphing out of the machair and down onto the sand, 20 yards off. Long, hump-backed and shiny, it was the first wild otter I had ever seen. Such is the talismanic power
Most cultural tourists, apart from the Japanese, skirt the six towns of Stoke-on-Trent. They are wrong. The bottle kilns have tumbled and the smoke-ridden skylines are no more. Yet museums teem with quality. And remaining pottery firms disclose glimpses of the design and craftsmanship admired throughout the city’s history. The founding father of Stoke’s global
I have been reading a new book by Theodore Dalrymple which I highly recommend. Readers of the Spectator will need no introduction to the good doctor, his fresh prose or his startling insight. But even for people like me who read most of what Dalrymple writes, Farewell Fear contains a great collection of unfamiliar —
