The good, the bad and the ugly in books, exhibitions, cinema, TV, dance, music, podcasts and theatre.
William S. Burroughs is, alongside Jack Kerouac and Allen Ginsberg, the third part of the Beat generation’s holy trinity. Yet while those two were long ago ushered into the canon, Burroughs’ writing has stubbornly resisted a comparable assimilation into the mainstream. A less conventionally romantic figure than the unruly Kerouac or the hippie seer Ginsberg,
Astrophil and Stella 1 Loving in truth, and fain my love in verse to show, That she, dear she, might take some pleasure of my pain: Pleasure might cause her read, reading might make her know, Knowledge might pity win, and pity grace obtain; I sought fit words to paint the blackest face of woe,
It is upon us: the dreaded London Olympics. I’m not against the sport, not really. But the wall to wall advertising, the endorsements and the cultural tie-ins leave me totally cold. London is soon to be awash with Olympics-inspired arts exhibitions designed to snare the thousands of IOC plutocrats who will be attending the Games
There are so many axes being ground in Tom Watson and Martin Hickman’s fascinating and explosive new book, Dial M for Murdoch: News Corporation and the Corruption of Britain, that it should be handled with asbestos gloves and read behind protective goggles. The health warning that should be given before reading is that two of
From time to time, society rethinks what its institutions mean. Despite what fundamentalists will tell you, this may include — indeed, almost invariably does include — the institution of marriage. Previous rethinks have involved the admissibility of polygamy (mostly in non-Western societies), the marriageable status of the religious, and the precise borders of incest. Some
Bring Up the Bodies, as everybody knows, is the sequel to Wolf Hall, Hilary Mantel’s fictional re-imagining of the life and times of Henry VIII’s most effective servant, Thomas Cromwell. We have long been banging our spoons and forks for it. Speaking for myself, I finished the first with an almost unbearable curiosity to find
While studying Buddhist trance in Cambodia in 1971 the ethnologist François Bizot was ambushed and imprisoned by Khmer Rouge rebels. In his previous much lauded and horrifying book, The Gate, he described his interrogation by the prison commandant known as Comrade Duch. In a variation on the Stockholm syndrome (in which captive grows attached to
Rupert Murdoch is the kept woman of British politics. He inspires love, fear, paranoia and obsessive secrecy. Tony Blair suppressed the fact that he was godfather to Murdoch’s daughter, Grace. Gordon Brown wooed Murdoch but later declared war on him. Cameron smuggled him into Downing Street through the back door. Now, as his vast empire
I am no great fan of spy thrillers and positively allergic to conspiracy theories, but I found this book difficult to put down. In an earlier study, Edward Lucas examined Russia’s use of energy as a weapon against the EU and the Atlantic alliance. In this one, he dives below the surface into the murky
I have some sympathy with the pioneering incomers who moved to the Yorkshire mill town of Hebden Bridge in the 1970s. At the time Hebden was in a near terminal decline, its factories closing in rapid succession. As a result, the town suffered one of the fastest depopulations ever seen in Britain, as the more
Two shots killed Osama bin Laden, one in his chest and one in his left eye. ‘Two taps’ is standard practice for close-quarter shootings — firing twice takes virtually no longer than firing once and you increase (without quite doubling) your chance of an instant kill. He was in his top-floor bedroom, in the dark,
T.S. Eliot once commented that “humankind cannot bear very much reality.” Reality, Reality, Jackie Kay’s latest collection of short-stories, explores the thin line that separates art and the supposed real world. In these 15 stories, 14 of which are written in an intimate first-person voice, Kay brings the reader on a journey with the lonely
Maurice Sendak, the writer and illustrator of such dark children’s classics as Where the Wild Things Are and In the Night Kitchen, died on Tuesday. Sendak, though hugely popular, always alienated a section of the American public because his books did not conform to their view of childhood. His stories were fantastical, but he insisted
I am beginning to lose my patience with the weather. I suspect I am not alone in feeling utterly dispirited by this endless onslaught of rain. We have just come out of the wettest April on record, and still the rain falls … It’s too terrible for words. Except that nothing is too terrible for
No matter what anyone might say, no one ever really likes other people’s children. Now, it seems, we’re not even sure if we like our own. Culturally, children became a cause for concern during the seventies. It seemed the fruits of the loins of baby boomers had been spoiled rotten. Spates of possessed brats wreaked
It’s a dangerous business: rereading books you loved first time round. I found myself with some time on my hands last week and so returned to The Hare With Amber Eyes, Edmund de Waal’s award winning family history, told through an elaborate collection of netsuke, which he inherited from his great uncle. The book was
There is honour among thieves. Richard Foreman’s reinvention of A.J. Raffles is underscored by morality of sorts. The exploitative rich are robbed, habitual criminals are caught, and men of true nobility triumph — or at least do not suffer the indignity of having their baubles snaffled by our silver-tongued felons. At the centre of Richard
Three clichés walk onto a stage and start telling bad jokes. Welcome to Love, Love, Love, the newish play by Mike Bartlett, playing at the Royal Court until 3rd June. It is 1967, on the night of the first global TV show, when the Beatles sang All You Need is Love. Still reading? Here are
Last time I made an off the cuff comment calling a book chick lit, I realised the skill involved in making an apology sound genuine, rehabilitating an entire literary genre and standing one’s ground in the space of 140 characters. Why do women bristle at the term chick lit? Why do they forget that a literary
Hilary Mantel dominates the bank holiday books pages. Bring Up The Bodies, the sequel to the Booker winning Wolf Hall, will be published this Thursday, and the acclaim has already begun. Mantel has been interviewed for the Telegraph by the renowned Tudor historian Thomas Penn. They talked of history and fiction, very carefully and very
You know the script by now: the world’s economy is being built by the BRICs. It has been the standard analysis for more than a decade, but flailing western countries have come to place evermore trust in the enterprise of Brazil, Russia, India and China. But have expectations become excessive? Ruchir Sharma, author of a
What is with Toni Morrison? The Nobel laureate returned to fray this week with Home – a typically bleak novella, according to Daisy Dunn’s review. Morrison has forged a sparkling career in grim territory. Why? Simple, she says in the interview above, the black novelists of the ‘60s were predominantly men writing ‘revolutionary books’ that
I’ve realised what the perfect non-fiction book is. You’d think that as someone who writes non-fiction books for a living I’d be excited by this discovery, and would even now be scribbling feverishly away so as to hit the top of the bestseller lists before anyone else has the same idea. Trouble is, the perfect
In the US, Simon Mawer’s new novel The Girl Who Fell From The Sky is rather more optimistically entitled Trapeze. It opens as a girl with three aliases hurls herself through an aircraft hatch into occupied France. She’s an SOE spy, and the life she’s fallen into has all the surrealism of a circus. During
However often rehearsed, the facts remain eye-popping. Inequality has bolted out of control over the last three decades. Democracy has proved increasingly powerless to check the unaccountable runaway oligarchy that fails even to pay its taxes. Ferdinand Mount gives a lucid account of political decay alongside all this looting, a disengaged electorate and a cult
It is disconcerting to discover that a novelist a generation older than oneself has been trying to write ‘a sort of Margaret Drabble effort’, even if the book ‘hadn’t turned out like that at all’. This is how Barbara Pym described her then unpublished campus novel An Academic Question in 1971 to her friend and
Turnaround Books, the publishers of Timothy Mo’s remarkable Pure, are revealed to operate from Unit 3, Olympia Trading Estate, Coburg Road, London N22. From this we may deduce that the publishing history of the three times Booker-shortlisted Anglo-Chinese novelist continues on its maverick way. Imagine if Mo had approached a conventional publisher with a proposition:
At the end of Dreaming in French, in ‘A Note on Sources’, Alice Kaplan terms her narrative ‘this pièce montée’, which is the only time she neglects to supply an English translation. From a scholar of her eminence — she is a historian and critic of French modernity, a professor at Yale, and the acclaimed
Even nowadays, a 50-year career in pop music is a rare and wondrous thing, and for a woman triply so. And yet Carole King’s golden jubilee passed a couple of years ago without a murmur, let alone a box set. You get the impression from A Natural Woman (Virago, £20) that that’s the way she