The good, the bad and the ugly in books, exhibitions, cinema, TV, dance, music, podcasts and theatre.
When it comes to choosing good books to read on holiday, I am a great believer in selecting reading matter to match the destination. What better to read in Sicily than Giuseppe Tomasi de Lampedusa’s The Leopard, for instance? And how wonderful to read Laurie Lee’s beautiful As I Walked Out one Midsummer Morning while
Tamsin Greig is so busy at the moment that Debbie Aldridge, the character she plays in The Archers, has to spend most of her time in Hungary. Star of TV shows like Black Books, Green Wing and Episodes, Tamsin Greig is also an accomplished stage actress and is about to reprise her role in Jumpy
The sea has always been a powerful stimulant for the literary imagination, most famously, of course, for the likes of Messrs Hemingway and Melville. Both, indeed, are name-checked in Monique Roffey’s novel Archipelago, a new addition to the canon of ocean-inspired work, taking the trope of the waters and recasting it for the twenty-first century.
Richard Ford published his debut novel A Piece of My Heart in 1976. But it was The Sportswriter — which introduced the world to Frank Bascombe, and other marginalised characters trapped on the edge of the American Dream — that distinguished Ford as a serious literary force. The two books that followed, Independence Day, which
EL James has a lot to answer for. Yesterday brought news that a British publishing house, Total-E-Bound Publishing, will sex-up some of the classics in the hope of cashing in on the Fifty Shades of Grey phenomenon. In the forthcoming editions: Cathy and Heathcliffe will do a little bondage. Sherlock Holmes will bed down with
Any idea what an Ouroboros is? It’s not the name of the cloud hanging over London at the moment but, according to Will Wilkinson, in his review of Joseph Stiglitz’s The Price of Inequality on the Economist blog, a perfect symbol for the ‘progressive master narrative’ championed by a new technocratic coterie (which also counts
Metamorphosis, a temporary exhibition at the National Gallery, London, showcases a range of contemporary artistic responses to Renaissance painter Titian’s Diana and Actaeon and Diana and Callisto metamorphosis paintings, inspired by Ovid. Daisy Dunn looks at the new poetry inspired by the collaboration. When the hapless youth Actaeon peeled back a curtain dangling in
One of the great tragedies of political history is that the foresight, clarity and prescience of Enoch Powell are too often viewed though the murky prism of his notorious Rivers of Blood speech. His kindness, courtesy, love of his family, nation and the House of Commons can be so easily overlooked. And his dry and
This week’s Bookbencher is Stewart Jackson, the Conservative MP for Peterborough. He tells us which Chilean communist poet he read recently, which children’s classic has stayed with him since childhood and which three books he would save from a burning British library. 1) Which books are at your bedside table at the moment? All Hell
The husband-and-wife team that is Nicci French wrote 12 standalone psychological thrillers before switching to a series with last year’s Blue Monday. Their central character, Frieda Klein, a psychotherapist who moonlights as a quasi-detective, returns in Tuesday’s Gone, together with a number of other characters, including the melancholy DCI Malcolm Karlsson and his team. The
Whereas it is generally agreed that music has charms to soothe a savage breast, Congreve might have added that music also has the power to inflame bellicose fervour. Patrick Bade, who lectures at Christie’s Education and the London Jewish Cultural Centre, has written a commendably exhaustive history of how all sorts of music were used
Reg Harris by Robert Dineen (Ebury Press, £16.99) is about a man who was once Britain’s number one athlete: a professional cycle track sprinter who dominated the worldwide sport for 15 years. And what is cycle track sprinting? It is racing on a prepared track with one or more opponents. It is also a form
This is an entirely pointless but curiously engaging and even tantalising book. A youthful love affair in Montreal with a girl of Latvian descent plants the word ‘Courland’ in the author’s mind. He finds it mellifluous and somehow magical. The girl’s beauty and otherworldliness add a sense of mystery. An Alsatian cousin whose father, drafted
In real life, Stephen Spender was gentle and very tall, with wide-open pale blue eyes and a persistent air of slight hesitancy, as if he expected to be violently contradicted at any moment. He had one of the nicest voices I’ve ever heard, a voice which might have been made for poetry: impossible to imagine
Elizabeth Taylor, the best-kept secret in English fiction, wrote novels and short stories in the 1950s and 1960s and thus contributed to the nostalgia for that modest period so keenly felt today by those who lived through it. She is an honourable writer; no publicity, no interviews, no mission statements — merely an unwavering production
If a pollster were to ask us which country we thought had produced Europe’s greatest artists, which had built its most beautiful cities and which had provided the world with it finest singers and composers, most of us would put Italy in first or second place. And if we were asked which country had developed
In ‘He Fell Among Thieves’ Henry Newbolt describes a young man’s voyage to service in India: He watch’d the liner’s stem ploughing the foam. He felt her trembling speed and the thrash of her screw; He heard the passengers’ voices talking of home. He saw the flag she flew. And, with any luck, as ‘the
As 1930s Europe moved towards the catastrophe of the Second World War, much of the greater part of the continent — for Jews — was being turned into a giant concentration camp. Bernard Wasserstein’s On the Eve, The Jews of Europe Before the Second World War, captures the sorrows and glories of European Jewry in
One of the puns that circulated the cultured elite of Italy during the Renaissance compared the potency of an artist’s paintbrush, his pennello, with his penis, il pene. Raphael, who by all accounts liked his women, perhaps embodied that duality best of all. The artist’s fascination with female kind, Antonio Forcellino suggests in his brilliant
Unpredicted Consequences of the eBook Number 371: more people are reading as they walk along. I say ‘more’. Actually I’ve seen two, in as many weeks. So this is a prediction rather than an observation. But it’s one I’m pretty confident about. It struck me as I watched the people in question — both 20-something
This week’s Shelf Lifer is Richard Bean. The British playwright recently won joint best new play at the Evening Standard Theatre Awards last year for both One Man, Two Guvnors at the National and The Heretic at The Royal Court. He tells us what he used to read to spite his father, which character in
‘It is time for me to chuck in the sponge,’ said Peter O’Toole with characteristic singularity. The 79-year-old has announced his retirement from stage and screen, after a career that will span 56 years: with two films in post-production to be released next year. He goes, he said, ‘dry-eyed and profoundly grateful.’ He will devote
Reading a short story by Kevin Barry is a bit like listening to a kraut-rock-record from the 1970s. The foundations are built on a solid rhythm. Then every so often, the form veers left-field, unveiling a portal to a world of magic. In this sense, you could argue that Barry is an experimental writer. He
Reading a new John Banville novel is like walking into a house you know but finding the dirty old armchair has moved. The shelf, still stacked with the same books, is now bathed in dusty light. The rug has shifted from right under your feet. Time and memory, ‘a fussy firm of interior decorators’, have
from Timber ‘There is a Necessity all men should love their country: He that professeth the contrary, may be delighted with his words, but his heart is there. Natures that are hardened to evil, you shall sooner break, then make straight; they are like poles that are crooked, and dry: there is no attempting them.
Hearing that rope sales were going through the roof in New York, many of us naively assumed it was bored housewives wanting to recreate scenes from 50 Shades of Grey. Now, after another weekend of wall-to-wall broadsheet analysis of the least sexiest bonkbuster of all time, you have to wonder whether it might have been
After a brief hiatus, the Spectator’s Bookbencher interview returns. First up is Douglas Alexander, the Labour MP for Paisley and Renfrewshire South and shadow foreign secretary. He tells which books he’ll be reading this summer. 1) Which book’s on your bedside table at the moment? Leaving Alexandria by Richard Holloway — the recently published memoir
The city might have been invented by the Ancient Mesopotamians, but for most of human history urban living has been a decidedly minority pursuit. For 1,000 years before 1800, only 3 per cent of the world’s people were city dwellers. Today that proportion has risen to more than one half and by 2050 it will
Jeremy Seal is a Turkophile, but don’t look to him for a grand history of the republic or lives of the Ottoman sultans. That is not his way. He prefers to approach things obliquely and, in particular, to come at them from an angle dictated by chance and beginning with a discovery. His first book,