The good, the bad and the ugly in books, exhibitions, cinema, TV, dance, music, podcasts and theatre.
I have a beaten up old copy of a book from the late 19th century that sits among my collection of recipe volumes in my study at home. When I retrieve this particular doorstop of a tome, the back falls off and gnarled pages flutter to the floor. I pick them up and recipe 1,790
There was drama at the Pulitzer Prize last night. No fiction prize was awarded for the first time in 35 years. The judges were unable to reach a decision in the race between David Foster Wallace’s The Pale King, Karen Russel’s Swamplandia! and Denis Johnson’s Train Dreams. Literary bigwigs in America have expressed shock. Jane Smiley
There is already a patron saint of bartenders, St Amand, a seventh-century French monk who acquired credibility by bringing back to life a hanged criminal and parlayed his fame into a life spent founding monasteries. But if ever a replacement figurehead were sought, then the profession could do worse than look to Joe Scialom (above
‘Cherrie-Ripe’ Cherrie-ripe, Ripe, Ripe, I cry, Full and faire ones; come and buy: If so be, you ask me where They doe grow? I answer, There, Where my Julia’s lips doe smile; There’s the Land, or Cherry-Ile: Whose Plantations fully show All the yeere, where Cherries grow. This short poem’s interest comes from its rapid
Belle de Jour has returned for another series. Well, that’s not wholly true. Dr Brooke Magnati, the forensic scientist who worked as a high-class tart during her PhD course, has written a book called The Sex Myth. It blends science and statistical analysis with her intimate knowledge of prostitution to challenge received wisdom about the
A.N. Wilson recalls the worst decade of recent history and the death throes of Old England There was a distressing news story the other day about a man who did not declare his father’s death because he wanted, like a character in Gogol, to go on claiming his late parent’s benefits. The smell eventually alerted
The spy thriller is not the easiest genre for an author to choose. In the first place, it is haunted by the shade of John le Carré, past and present. Secondly, the end of the Cold War destroyed the comfortable framework that has underpinned the majority of espionage fiction for the last 40 years. Undeterred,
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Fifteen years ago Ahmed Rashid wrote an original, groundbreaking and wonderful book about the Taleban, a subject about which few people at the time knew or cared. Then along came 9/11 and Rashid turned overnight from obscure scribbler into global sage. He was courted (as he reminds us from time to time in this book)
In a large upstairs room of the YWCA building behind Tottenham Court Road, a group of actors were nervously waiting for the arrival of the director. There was the powerful whiff of a good cigar, the faint scent of expensive cologne and Orson Welles arrived. He had been in Paris cutting his film of Kafka’s
The date that rebel leaders chose for the final assault on Tripoli was auspicious: 20 August 2011 coincided with the 20th day of Ramadan by the Muslim lunar calendar, the date on which Muslim forces led by the Prophet Muhammad conquered the holy city of Mecca for Islamic rule in AD 680. It was also
Barbara Pym was never just a cosy writer. She could be barbed and sour — and seriously, hilariously funny. Kate Saunders, in her introduction to Pym’s last novel, explains how ‘Rather to my surprise,’ Barbara Pym wrote to her friend Philip Larkin in 1971, ‘I have nearly finished the first draft of another novel about
It must have been hard to settle on a title for this book; but then this is not the book that Richard Cork originally had in mind. In his introduction to The Healing Presence of Art he describes how he was approached to write on the contemporary role of art in hospitals, but in beginning
Ursula Graham Bower belonged to the last generation of those well-bred missy-sahibs who came out to India at the start of the cold-weather season in search of genteel adventure and a husband. But unbeknown both to herself and to those about her, the gawky, ‘well-covered’, Roedean-educated Miss Bower was of that stern stuff upon which
In 1598, a certain Margaret Browne of Houndsditch gave a graphic description to the court of her neighbour Clement Underhill engaged in an adulterous act with her lover, as observed through a hole in the party wall. Some people have always been very interested in what the neighbours are up to; all of us can
‘Poets don’t count well,’ says Ian Duhig in his contribution to Jubilee Lines — an assertion unexpectedly confirmed by Carol Ann Duffy’s preface. Admittedly, if the book did contain one poem for every year since 1952, there’d be an annoyingly untidy 61. Even so, Duffy’s declaration that the Queen was crowned ‘on 2 June 1953,
Hard on the heels of the ecstatically received London revival of Michael Frayn’s Noises Off (currently playing at the Novello Theatre) comes this hilarious novel. It’s not easy to pull off farce on the printed page when so many of the laughs of the genre generally depend upon physical comedy. In Noises Off, for example,
At first glance, Be the Worst You Can Be (Booth-Clibborn Editions, £9.99) by Charles Saatchi (pictured above with his wife, Nigella Lawson) seems a rather distinguished book, with its gilt pages bound in what feels like genuine Gnomitex, and this impression persists until one begins to read it. The title page explains the format —
In June 1991 while working as a reporter in Rome, Ed Vulliamy received a phone call from his editor at the Guardian asking him to the travel to the neighbouring Balkan states to check out something strange that was happening in the region. Vulliamy spent the next few years immersed in the Bosnian War, the
Bond is back. William Boyd has agreed to don the garb of Ian Fleming and write the latest tale in 007’s story. Boyd will not be aping Fleming’s style. The recent franchise revivals by Sebastian Faulks and Jeffrey Deaver are singularly different to each other and the original canon, while remaining faithful to the (anti-)hero
William Boyd is to write the next book in the James Bond franchise. The as yet untitled novel will be published next autumn. To mark the announcement, Daisy Dunn casts her mind back to a recent encounter with Boyd, where he spoke about the art of imagining and writing a thriller. It’s an ambitious eight
Chances are you’ve read, seen, or at least heard about The Hunger Games, the young-adult book and film sensation by Suzanne Collins. The crux of the story centres on The Hunger Games itself, an annual event in a dystopia in which twenty-four teenagers are forced to fight each other to the death – the winner
Nigel Havers is in the hotseat this week. He tells us about his intimacy with the Racing Post and his dreams of playing Casanova. You can catch him tonight in Corrie. 1) What are you reading at the moment? Fifty Shades of Grey – EL James 2) As a child, what did you read under the
The Arab Awakening, Tariq Ramadan’s contribution to the fast-growing body of literature on the Arab uprisings, begins with a request for the Arab world to ‘stop blaming the West for the colonialism and imperialism of the past…and jettison their historic posture as victims.’ This is an encouraging start, and hopes for a refreshing change of
We all know the names Auschwitz, Treblinka, Belsen, and Dachau. But what about Pechora, Vorkuta, Kolyma and Norilsk? Why are the camps to which Nazism’s victims were deported household words, while the Gulag archipelago – the far flung network of Soviet labour camps and penal colonies where the victims of Stalin and Communism suffered and
‘A Drizzling Easter Morning’ And he is risen? Well, be it so. . . .And still the pensive lands complain,And dead men wait as long ago,As if, much doubting, they would knowWhat they are ransomed from, beforeThey pass again their sheltering door. I stand amid them in the rain,While blusters vex the yew and vane;And
Posterity has always embellished Thomas Becket. After his death in Canterbury Cathedral in December 1170 the Church idealised and canonised him; his tomb inspired miracles and became the most famous shrine in Christendom; the local monks grew rich and fat on the tourist trade that would attract Chaucer’s pilgrims. The 18th century invented Henry II’s
The late squarson, Henry Thorold, was fond of pointing out that his Shell Guide to Lincolnshire was the bestselling of the series, not because of any intrinsic merit but because no guide to the county had been produced since the early 19th century. The same might turn out to be true of the latest volume
I used to read NME when I was young. Of course I did. I was obsessed by pop music in its every colour and my youth happened to coincide with the old inky’s heyday, or certainly one of them. In the late 1970s and early 1980s, the New Musical Express was one of four weekly