Culture

Culture

The good, the bad and the ugly in books, exhibitions, cinema, TV, dance, music, podcasts and theatre.

Before Sontag became a parody

When an unpublished diary or book of letters from a celebrated writer comes to the attention of the reading public nowadays, there is often a sense that a game is being played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

Birthday present from the Bard

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

Across the literary pages: Facing death

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

The American way of justice

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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

A law unto itself

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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

Ultimate issues

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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

Cry freedom

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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

One that got away | 21 April 2012

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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

The calls of the wild

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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

Road to ruins

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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

Nowhere to go but down

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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

Bookends: Tilling tales

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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

Every writer’s nightmare

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

Pakistan’s descent into chaos

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

Shelf Life: Perdita Weeks

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 tablet wars

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.

What Mrs Beeton did to us

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

Prize puzzles

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

St Joe’s parish

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

Discovering poetry: Robert Herrick’s guide to girls

‘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

Across the literary pages: Grey and dirty

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

Rotten, vicious times

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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

Dangerous territory | 14 April 2012

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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)

An elusive father

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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