The good, the bad and the ugly in books, exhibitions, cinema, TV, dance, music, podcasts and theatre.
Nell Freudenberger is one of the brightest young novelists in America, and she takes the Shelf Life hot seat this week. She suggests that Michael Gove should introduce English Literature GSCE students to international authors, and confides that she needs to read the self-help book she would like to write. Her latest novel, The Newlyweds, is
Only America, a friend of mine once insisted, could produce the New Criterion. This friend happened to be American, but his point stands nonetheless. America alone is sufficiently large, wealthy and self-confident to sustain a conservative arts journal of such consistent quality. The New Criterion is 30 years old this year. The anniversary has given its
This is a nice big question to ponder on the holiday beach or in the rented villa. A vast amount has already been written on the rise of China and whether the US will be replaced as the global superpower. And where exactly does Europe fit into all this? It is easy to make a
The House of Lords has yet again survived reform. ‘We have been discussing this issue for 100 years and it really is time to make progress,’ the Prime Minister said last month in a pleading, exculpatory tone. What then is the trend in popular culture? Writing for the Times Literary Supplement in 1949, Anthony Powell
The story is well known. One wet summer by the shores of Lake Geneva, Mary Shelley — 18 years old, living out of wedlock with the poet Shelley — had a horrifying dream, one that she would later write as the novel Frankenstein. What is less well known is that another of the key pillars
James Kelman is famously not a man fond of making concessions — whether to bourgeois interviewers, literary fashions, traditional punctuation or his own readers. Sure enough, his latest novel comes in familiar form: a continuous, chapterless slab of interior monologue from a working-class Glaswegian struggling against the un-remitting toughness of what a character in his
Moriz Gallia from Moravia and Hermine Hamburger from Silesia met and married in Vienna in 1893, when the city was the third largest European capital after London and Paris. They were rich, from making and supplying gas mantles, and they were generous patrons of Vienna’s exceptionally lively artistic world. When their two daughters, Gretl and
The landscape is treeless and windswept but spectacular, with volcanoes, glaciers and geysers, the climate and cuisine nearly always disagreeably challenging: it is sometimes hard to explain the affection and loyalty Iceland has inspired in so many visitors, from Auden and Isherwood in the Thirties to the academic and novelist Sarah Moss in 2009. She
‘Despite 30 years of war,’ remarked General Stanley McChrystal, the commander in 2009 of NATO forces in Afghanistan, ‘civilisation grows here like weeds.’ Unfortunately for the Afghans, their tribal, rural, autarchic civilisation that grows so readily has never been acceptable either to the western allies or to the Taleban. However much NATO’s military goal has
In the days of cheap paperbacks, publishers sometimes printed two pulp novels in one volume, back to back. Ariel Winter has done one better, because The Twenty- Year Death consists of three novels, dealing with murders committed over the course of two decades, each told in the style of a great crime writer. The first
Holker Hall is situated in a beautiful Cumbrian landscape within sight of Morecambe Bay, and in 1950 it became the second stately home, after Longleat, to be opened to the public. The house itself dates back to the 16th century, with a Victorian west wing replacing one that burned down in 1871. It is, however,
Titian’s paintings have always been both loved and revered, and he is without question the most influential artist who has ever lived. In the 17th century, Rubens, Van Dyck, Velázquez and Rembrandt were all under his benign spell, but even more remarkably over 400 years after his death his power continues to impress. It is
The title of A.A. Gill’s latest book comes from Emma Lazarus’s poem ‘The New Colossus’ (1883), which is inscribed on the pedestal of the Statue of Liberty: ‘Give me your tired, your poor… I lift my lamp beside the golden door!’ And its subtitle is a tribute to Alistair Cooke, who was a friend and
Middle age lays many hazards and traps for us, not the least of which is golf. Breaking 80 (Yellow Jersey Press, £10.99), the first book by the eminent literary agent David Godwin, shows what can happen when you let this essentially ludicrous sport into your life. In Chapter 1 he is a normal person, thinking
Lionel Shriver’s We Need to Talk About Kevin has a lot to answer for. In the months after its publication, it became the printed equivalent of holy communion: wheresoever two or three people gathered together to break bread, it was earnestly discussed. Shriver’s novel explored the possibility that a child could be born wicked; further,
At 6 o’clock on the evening of 16 October 1834 the old House of Lords burst into flames. By 3 a.m. most of the Palace of Westminster was a burned-out wreck. The Lords and the Commons, the Law Courts and the ramshackle mess of medieval offices, kitchens and houses which made up the Palace had
Gore Vidal was famously waspish or infamously nasty, depending on your point of view. Most outspoken (and successful) writers divide opinion, but Vidal does so more than most. His distinctive prose and the righteous fashion in which he expressed his liberal opinions are not for everyone; one man’s crusading iconoclast is a preachy monomaniac to
Born in Glasgow in 1946, James Kelman left school at fifteen to begin an apprenticeship as a compositor. His first collection of short stories ‘An Old Pub Near the Angel’ was published in the United States in 1973. It was another nine years before his first novel ‘The Busconductor Hines appeared. Kelman has received several
Whatever Mitt might think, if there’s one thing that makes us proud to be British, it’s the fact we’re not American. Alright, it’s true we don’t have a black president but we still think we’re cooler: less brash, more sarcastic and ready to give Tim Berners-Lee a starring role in the Olympic show. The differences
An easy, sure-fire way of generating a bit of publicity is picking a fight with a provocative public intellectual. Rather than criticising Bernard-Henri Lévy’s blow-dry, or kicking David Starkey in either of his legs, Pankaj Mishra memorably attacked Niall Ferguson in his review of Civilisation in the LRB last November. So the threat of a lawsuit from
Not many beekeepers ferry so many black bin liners in and out of their tower block that the local council suspect them of running a crack den (the same council who have missed the real crack den in the basement). Not many beekeepers transport their hives in a decommissioned London taxi, narrowly avoiding disaster when
A re-telling of Edith Wharton’s The Age of Innocence, Francesca Segal’s debut The Innocents (Chatto, £14.99) takes the action to contemporary Golders Green. The daily minutiae of Jewish life are documented, from eating challah at Shabbat to the moments preceding a circumcision, alongside more sweeping statements: ‘For a people whose history is one of exodus
As a subject for literature, virtue and its celebration is fairly unfashionable. This is particularly true in Britain, where we like to maintain ironic detachment. This perhaps explains why Robert B. Parker and his private eye, Spenser, have never found their way into regular dinner-party chat on this side of the Atlantic. In America, as
In the middle of last summer’s riots, Mash, a member of a South London gang I have befriended, phoned me. He was standing outside a shop that was being looted. ‘It’s the funniest thing, Harry man,’ he declared. ‘This day I can go anywhere in London and there is no beef.’ Mash is usually confined
Impressed by Alethea Hayter’s A Sultry Month: Scenes of London Literary Life in 1846 (1965), which describes the close relations between Benjamin Haydon, the Carlyles and the Brownings in the summer of 1846, Hugh Macdonald has written a similarly ‘horizontal’ and highly readable biography of intersecting musicians in 1853. His theme is the relations, not
Niall Ferguson, in his impressive and exuberant book Civilization, published last year, sought to explain why Western civilisation triumphed in the centuries after the Renaissance with reference to six factors. He identified them as competition, science, property, medicine consumption and work, or a particular work ethic. These historical tours d’horizon are never without their critics,
This book, by the architectural historian Richard Davies, is remarkable in many ways — for the importance of its subject matter, for the excellence and variety of the many photographs, and for the imaginative choice of the accompanying texts. The fruit of ten years of long and difficult journeys in the far north of European
Don Paterson was born in 1963 in Dundee. He moved to London in 1984 to work as a jazz musician, and eventually began to write poetry. In 1993, Faber published his debut collection, Nil Nil, which won the Forward prize. In total, he’s published seven collections and three books of aphorisms. Paterson has won the
Boris will recite an ode in honour of the Olympics – of course he is. He commissioned Dr Armand D’Angour, an Oxford Greats don, to compose the ode in the style of Pindar. Peter Jones, our Ancient and Modern columnist, wrote about Boris’ enterprise in this week’s issue of the magazine. We reproduce it here: