The good, the bad and the ugly in books, exhibitions, cinema, TV, dance, music, podcasts and theatre.
Why would anyone want to buy this dreadful book? The frightful Simon Cowell appears to have co-operated with the author, and it is littered with repellent photographs — chiefly of a smirking Simon surrounded by beautiful ‘ex-girlfriends’. (Cowell is keen to inform us that he has had lots of girlfriends. He is not gay. Not.
The London Underground is methadone for people with nerd habits. Were it not for its twisty, multi-coloured map, its place in the capital’s history, its tendency to throw up facts such as ‘the QE2 would fit inside North Greenwich station’, we’d be on the hard stuff. The smack of nerd-dom. We’d be on the platform
In the early 1990s, when Boris Johnson was making his name as the Daily Telegraph’s Brussels correspondent, Sonia Purnell was his deputy, and last year she published a biography of him — the second, and surely not the last — entitled Just Boris: A Tale of Blond Ambition. Now follows Pedal Power: How Boris Failed
Nigeria is called ‘God’s own country’, and well it might be because no one else is on its side. Eliza Griswold, who has spent several years exploring religious divisions in the country’s interior, tells me that billions of oil dollars are embezzled each year, leaving the vast majority of the population to fend for themselves
‘Oh yes, Dracula,’ said a colleague. ‘Two splendid bits at either end, and 200 boring pages in the middle.’ It was exaggeration, but only slight. Dracula sags in the middle, but that is a reflection of the knockout opening and conclusion. Film adaptations have the luxury of cutting out the fat to concentrate on Jonathan
Classics were predicted to be one of the first things to fall at the feet of eBooks. Traditional booksellers — like me — have been in a perpetual cold sweat, wondering how to make up the lost revenue for around a third of our sales. Classics publishers must have been positively feverish with worry. The
Penguin has launched a new design for the Penguin English Library. The press blurb says, ‘Each cover is a crafted gem, they’ll look and feel lovely in your hands.’ And they do. Steal into a bookshop in the next couple of days and hold one. The covers are individual and relevant to the book —
Editor-in-chief of The Lady, judge of the inaugural Hatchet Job of the Year Award, author of Shire Hell and a keen skier, Rachel Johnson is this week’s Shelf Lifer. She has eminently sensible suggestions for the English curriculum, reveals the guilty literary secrets of the Johnson dynasty and tells us about the downside of having
It is fitting that Bram Stoker is more celebrated in death than life. This week marks the centenary of his death. Numerous events have been held in his honour. It’s a typical jamboree. Horror writer Stewart King has explained how Stoker’s legacy is being sustained by a new wave of vampire fiction, which, for those
An elderly woman receives a phone call from a once eminent publishing house. The nice man on the phone tells her that his company is going to reprint her deceased father’s books. Wonderful news, she says — delighted that her old man is not quite dead and buried yet. Hope for us, she thinks. The
When an unpublished diary or book of letters from a celebrated writer comes to the attention of the reading public nowadays, there is often a sense that a game is being played between two parties. Writers — being the megalomaniacs they invariably are — dream of grandiosity and world domination, therefore these documents are predominately
St. George’s Day, 23rd April, is Shakespeare’s birthday. You may get a present, if you are in the right place at the right time. World Book Night, the event where enthusiasts give a book to passers-by, will take place this evening. The organisers hope that 2.5 million copies of 25 books will be given away by 78,000 volunteers in
Man has conquered his inhibitions to talk about everything other than his own demise. Death is, famously, the last taboo — and, judging by many of the reviews of Philip Gould’s When I Die: Lessons from the Death Zone, we are no closer to breaking it. The novelist Justin Cartwright describes himself as ‘racked with doubt’ about
Conrad Black sympathises with the NatWest Three — victims of British cowardice and a corrupt US legal system It was the misfortune of David Bermingham and his co-defendants to be very peripherally connected to the Enron debacle. Enron was the ultimate hot financial client for a merchant banker and designer of sophisticated financial vehicles, the
One could meet any day in Society Harold Acton, Tom Driberg or Rowse: May there always, to add their variety, Be some rather Odd Fish at The House. Thus W. H. Auden (something of an odd fish himself) reminiscing at a Christ Church gaudy half a century ago. There have certainly been quite a lot
In his preface to this anthology of brief memoirs, Robert Silvers suggests that its ‘invisible, tragic core’ is to be found in an account by Isaiah Berlin of one of his several meetings with Boris Pasternak. Pasternak told Berlin how Stalin had once telephoned him to ask him two questions: had Pasternak been present when
Scenes From Early Life is a rather dull title for a deeply interesting book. It is a novel; this is stated on the jacket, as if anticipating the possibility that readers may question that definition. Set in Dacca (now Dhaka), it is about the emergence of Bangladesh as a state independent of Pakistan after the
An ebook arrives! The future of publishing on my hard-drive. All the big profits are in cyber-publishing these days, as I discovered last month when I downloaded an ebook for three quid and found it contained just 85 pages. This one, by Alwyn W. Turner, has only 72 pages, but it’s a penny cheaper at
There are six drawings in the back of this book. They’re not very good drawings. In fact they look as if they come from an unusually hamfisted comic strip. However, it’s their crudity that makes them so powerful. One shows a young boy being suspended over a coal fire, a rope round his wrists, a
This is a weird and wonderful book. Bernie Krause, who started out as a popular musician and then in the mid-Sixties began to experiment with synthesisers and electronic mixing, has spent the past 40 years recording natural noises — individual species, but more importantly, perhaps, whole habitats and therefore the relationship of the different sounds
This is a delightful book, nostalgic, slyly witty, perceptive and at times flirting — deliberately — with old fogeyism. Tom Fort, a BBC radio journalist, starts from the assumption that ‘many of us have a road that reaches back into our past’. For him, this is the 92 miles of the A303 — as he
I am just old enough to remember the terrific fuss that was made about the first Scots literary renaissance when it kicked into gear in the early 1980s. Inaugurated by Alasdair Gray’s Lanark (1981), whipped up into a movement by Gray, Agnes Owens and James Kelman’s Lean Tales (1985), and sent on a downward spiral
Several years ago, I listed as my literary heroes Herbert Pocket in Great Expectations and E. F. Benson’s Lucia. The latter was the more damaging admission. Lucia is an egotist of monstrous proportions, ruthlessly selfish and staggering in her snobbery. But she is also a life force and, in her flawed but thrusting glory, profoundly
April showers break the long March drought, and bring pilgrims to Canterbury; to the shrine, or what remains of it, of St Thomas Becket. There are several historic routes to Canterbury: the Pilgrim’s Way, which runs along the Downs escarpment from Winchester through Sussex and Kent. And there are more modern paths, such as the Via
The Unlikely Pilgrimage of Harold Fry by Rachel Joyce starts with a wonderfully simple idea. Harold Fry, resident of 13 Fossebridge Road, gets a letter from an old friend, Queenie Hennessy, saying she is dying of cancer. He drafts a reply and goes out to post it. He reaches the post box and, instead of slotting it
It’s every writer’s nightmare – losing the only existing copy of your current book. Doesn’t happen that often these days, what with the mantra of the modern world being ‘Thou Shalst Back Up’. What’s particularly galling for Francis Wheen is that he had backed up, in the surest way possible, namely printing out a copy
Few countries elicit as much bewilderment as Pakistan — unstable and unreliable, it is simultaneously a friend and foe. Indeed, over the last decade Islamabad has arguably aided the War on Terror as much as it has hindered it. The stakes could barely be higher. A nuclear power in which terrorist groups operate with near
The actress Perdita Weeks has answered our impertinent questions this week. Those who imagine her to be a romantic will be disappointed: she’s very practical when it comes to love and books. She recently starred in Julian Fellowes’ Titanic on ITV. 1) What are you reading at the moment? I am reading The Return of The Native
The London Book Fair (LBF) is not much to write home about, although there is something about the spectacle of Chinese apparatchiks shooting the breeze with what appear to be battalions of enhanced women from Eastern Europe. But, LBF is the latest theatre in the tablet wars. The saga of Waterstones and the Barnes&Noble Nook continues.