The good, the bad and the ugly in books, exhibitions, cinema, TV, dance, music, podcasts and theatre.
Britain can look back with pride and nostalgia to the great Olympic Games of the past. London in 1908, and the so-called ‘austerity Games’ of 1948, were great triumphs. Against the odds of time and money, these were Games to savour — etched in the memory with flickering black-and-white images of hope. This is the
Well, that was a turn up for the books. The expectation was that Waterstones would join forces with Barnes and Noble to compete in the digital market; it was almost a certainty. But, those predictions were dashed yesterday when Waterstones announced that it is going to get into bed with the digital devil itself: Amazon.
Sun Tzu is responsible for the age-old cliché about knowing your enemy. I wonder, then, what he might have made of Poetry of the Taliban, edited by Alex Strick Van Linschoten and Felix Kuehn. This is a new collection of verses translated from Pashtun and Urdu. The poems originally appeared on Mujahedeen websites, in newsheets
It’s a fact of life: death and destruction make for compulsive reading. The latest tome in the apocalypse genre is Callum Roberts’s, Ocean of Life: How our seas and changing. The book describes how man has ravaged and defiled the oceans, and explains how our rapacious stewardship is damaging us. Thanks to over-fishing, fossil fuels
It is easy, especially if one is not American, to feel ambivalent about the fictions of John Updike. The immaculate clarity of his prose style, the precision of his vocabulary, the tenderness underlying his Wasp comedies of manners, the puckish wit rising above a sorrowful temperament — none of these can be gainsaid. But the
The other evening my wife came home to find me watching re-runs of Steptoe and Son. The washing up had not been done, and everything was in a state of bedragglement (including Olga, the family dog). ‘How can you bear to watch that stuff? Steptoe’s got a face like a squeezed lemon. He’s perfectly horrible.
In 2009 a magazine survey found that many women in their twenties wanted to stay at home baking while their husbands went out to work: ‘I’d love to be a captive wife.’ Jessica Mann’s thoughtful and emphatic book is a riposte to this, an overview of the Fifties, which she calls a polemic and a
Sartre tried to prove that hell is other people by locking three strangers in a room for eternity and watching them torture each other. Similarly Will Cohu seems determined to show that hell is our own families. What is remarkable is that Cohu’s family members were not a collection of horrific monsters. On the contrary,
Christopher Isherwood kept diaries almost all his life. The first extant one dates from 1917, when he was 12, and like most schoolboys he used it more to measure than record his days: ‘Work in morning, walk in afternoon. In choir. More work. Nothing special.’ At Cambridge, however, inspired by the W.N.P. Barbellion’s The Journal
I was racking my brains, trying to understand money, trying to grasp exactly what it is, when I came across these two books. One is written by Aaron Brown, who is the risk manager of a large Wall Street hedgefund. The other is by David Graeber, the anarchist who has been called the leader —
In his introductory eulogy, Peter Parker calls In the Making: The Story of a Childhood (Penguin, £8.99) G. F. Green’s masterpiece, which, though not popular, attracted the admiration of E.M. Forster, Christopher Isherwood, Stephen Spender, J.R. Ackerley, John Betjeman, Philip Toynbee, C.P. Snow, Pamela Hansford Johnson, Frank Tuohy and Alan Sillitoe. According to Elizabeth Bowen,
‘I did not know about sympathy or sadness. They educated us from birth so that we were not capable of normal human emotions. Now that I am out, I am learning to be emotional. I feel like I am becoming human.’ You may have heard of Shin Dong-hyuk, the man who feels he is becoming
The late Carlos Fuentes was a fluent English speaker — the product of being the son of a diplomat and his own careers in international academia and diplomacy. Here he is talking with Charlie Rose in February 2011. The interview captures the sense of how important politics was to Fuentes and the other writers of ‘El
I’ve recently been going to bed with Alan Bennett. He’s a very comforting presence as I drift off to sleep, his gentle voice soothing me with tales of what he’s been up to that day, or sometimes anecdotes from his long and successful past. It’s a real treat, the last thing I hear before nodding
What’s happened? Carlos Fuentes died on Tuesday night. Who was he? He was a revered Mexican novelist, a crucial part of the literary movement in Latin America that came to be known as ‘El Boom’. What was ‘El Boom’? It was an artistic movement that emerged in the ‘60s. The writers were mavericks who defied
The latest intellectual maverick to win the 2010 Prix Goncourt du Premier Roman, Laurent Binet certainly isn’t shy, especially when it comes to his literary tastes. A single paragraph in his debut — a postmodern take on Heinrich Himmler’s righthand man Reinhard Heydrich — reveals his position on Camus, Desnos, Flaubert, Hasek, Kafka, Marquez, Rimbaud and
Everyone enjoys making and perusing lists of ‘greatest’ — nineteenth-century novels, Beatles LPs, generals, opening batsmen, and so on. The choices inevitably reflect the compiler’s tastes and prejudices, and are always fun to dispute. I have spent the last few months considering the claims of Britain’s Prime Ministers, a process from which four semi-finalists ultimately
The Observer’s William Skidelsky has taken it upon himself to list ‘The 10 best historical novels’. The usual suspects are present: War and Peace, The Leopard, I Claudius and The Blue Flower. There are a couple of surprising inclusions, too: Eliot’s Romola, for instance. And, of course, there are some glaring omissions — of which,
I met a very interesting chap while doing my weekly video film for the Sunday Times. This was Dr Peter Mullen, Rector of St Michael, Cornhill. He hove into view like a disreputable clergyman from a lateish Graham Greene story, dog collar, strange hat, impish grin. He has just written a book — The Politically
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