The good, the bad and the ugly in books, exhibitions, cinema, TV, dance, music, podcasts and theatre.
In his new book, Wired for Culture, Mark Pagel — a professor of evolutionary biology at the University of Reading — argues that social structures and culture are vital components in human evolution. Human beings are altruistic, helpful, and cooperative in ways that other mammals are not. Pagel says our facility for culture is the
Voldemort was second division as an adversary; Amazon was Harry Potter’s most implacable foe. But the bespectacled wizard has seen off the virtual giant. The major books story this week is the arrival of official eBook editions of the Harry Potter novels. But these books are not for sale through Amazon’s e-commerce system (or Barnes
There are now thought to be about six million people interested in having an allotment, with waiting lists as long as 40 years in one London borough. There have also been huge numbers of words written trying to explain their revival. Perhaps the real question is why they ever went away, given the success
Lately, I have been giving rather a lot of thought to the humble paperback. I say humble, for this is a format with no pretensions of grandeur, no fancy binding, no place-keeping ribbon, no dust-protecting jacket that can be slipped on and off as you will. I have always been told that modesty is a
Perhaps one of the best things to come out of Birmingham, Mike Skinner, mastermind behind The Streets, lets us know what he’s reading in this week’s Shelf Life. He reveals an interest in 20th Century history, what he once managed to get 10,000 people to do and a fondness for Philip Marlowe’s bon mots. His
Dr Gregory L Reece’s fascinating book, Creatures of the Night, is an enjoyably macabre stroll through the misty swamps of folklore where myth and religion are intertwined. Why do we create monsters and why is there such a desire and appetite for the darker side of the human soul? Whereas one reader may dismiss the
The march of David Mitchell continues. The author of Cloud Atlas and other acclaimed novels has won the American Academy of Arts and Letters’s E.M. Forster Award, worth a princely $20,000. The prize is intended to assist a ‘young writer from the United Kingdom or Ireland for a stay in the United States.’ Every little
Everywhere one goes these days, people are talking about John Updike. Death, it seems, concentrates the mind. Updike died more than 2 years ago, but he is the talk of the town. His name crops up at book launches and at literary events around London, usually accompanied by words like ‘genius’ or ‘under-appreciated’. That last
There are concentration camps in North Korea. We can see them clearly, via high-resolution satellite images on Google Earth. There are six of them, according to South Korean intelligence, and the largest is bigger than the city of Los Angeles. Of the six, four camps are ‘complete control districts’ where ‘irredeemable’ prisoners are worked to
As we approach the thirtieth anniversary of the Falklands War, Britain’s victory is justly recalled. That the war came near to disaster is conveniently forgotten. How well-placed are we to hold the islands today? When the 127 ships of the Task Force — a number that could not be assembled now — returned in triumph
Guardian HQ visited the future this weekend. The newspaper group hosted its inaugural ‘Open Weekend’ — a ‘festival of debates, workshops, music, comedy, poetry, food and fun’, according to the blurb. There was live music (banjos and interpretative dance, naturally). A farmers’ market ran along the adjacent canal and a selection of seedlings for sale from
Keith Lowe’s horrifying book is a survey of the physical and moral breakdown of Europe in the closing months of the second world war and its immediate aftermath. It is a complex story and he tells it, on the whole, very well. Though the first world war took the lives of more uniformed young men,
‘The World of Interiors’ might have been a better title for this novel. Its two chief protagonists, Catherine Gehrig and Henry Brandling, live a century and a half apart, but both are beset by circumstances that make them physically isolated and emotionally stunted. They rail in furious misery, and are sunk in interior communing. Commodities
In the summer of 1961 I was in my second year at Magdalen College, Oxford with rooms in the 18th-century New Buildings. One of my neighbours there was a quiet man called Jonathan Green-Armytage. Sitting out on the steps of the building’s colonnade, in the sun, we became friends. He was already a distinguished photographer.
I read this novel while convalescing from pneumonia. It proved admirably fit for purpose. A light diet, mildly entertaining and with enough twists and turns of plot to serve as a tonic. John O’Farrell is a man of many parts — comedy scriptwriter (Spitting Image, Alas Smith and Jones), political satirist (An Utterly Exasperating History
The mirrored sunglasses worn by Putin on the cover of Angus Roxburgh’s The Strongman give the Russian president the look of a crude mafia boss, while the half-face photo on the cover of Masha Gessen’s book makes him appear both more ordinary and more sinister. This hints at the difference of the authors’ approach. Gessen
Charlotte Rogan’s The Lifeboat (Virago, £12.99) comes garlanded with praise from the likes of J. M. Coetzee and Hilary Mantel. Rogan, who has only taken up writing after a career in architecture and engineering, tells the story of Grace Winter, a young woman on trial for murder as the novel opens. She and her husband
In an age when the merely mildly curious believe they can get all they really need to know from Wikipedia for free, A. N. Wilson’s fellow literary professionals must take heart from his expectation that there is still possibl to charge for a work of such succinctness that it is essentially an extended Wikipedia entry
Colm Tóibín began his writing career as a journalist. Although he wrote his first novel, The South, in 1986, it took him a further four years to find a publisher. Since that seminal moment, Tóibín has delivered five other novels; two books of short stories; two plays, as well as several works of non-fiction. He
On 13th March 1938, judgment was passed in the political show trial of Nikolai Bukharin, former head of the Soviet Politburo. He was sentenced to death. Bukharin was taken in silence from the dock to the exit to the cells. He paused at the door and cast his eyes up to the gallery that contained
What, if any, are the similarities between the great novels of past wars, such as Somerset Maugham’s The Hero (the Boer War), Ford Madox Ford’s Parade’s End (WWI), and Evelyn Waugh’s The Sword of Honor Trilogy (WWII)? And is there a connection between these wartime experiences and our current conflicts in Iraq and Afghanistan? As
Every time I do a ‘CTRL F’ search, allowing my computer to achieve in milliseconds what it took the schoolboy me hours to do (find a particular word among pages and pages of text), I think of a small business centre in Sheffield, and imagine its occupants to be shaking in fear at the onward
A new world flavour to Shelf Life this week, as the novelist Sean Thomas Russell joins us from Vancouver. He has been getting to grips with Shakespeare — an attempt, perhaps, to escape the pervasive influence of Bill O’Reilly. His latest novel, A Ship of War, is published in Britain next week. 1) What are
There’s a cracking story in the Bookseller this morning. The Publisher’s Association is calling on the government to cut VAT on eBooks to the zero rate enjoyed by print books. eBooks currently attract 20 per cent VAT, whereas print books are exempt on the grounds that they promote education. The Publishers’ Association complains that eBooks
Don’t be ashamed if you can’t understand the Budget. Economics is a notoriously tricky business. Even chancellors of the exchequer find themselves flailing about in the dark, dependent on the guidance of others. Winston Churchill explained his disastrous policy of returning sterling to the Gold Standard in 1925, by writing: ‘I had no special comprehension
Attention all those who commute through King’s Cross. A new bookshop has opened on the concourse near platforms 9-11, next to the shrine for Platform 9¾ of Harry Potter fame. This is the first Watermark store to open in Europe. Watermark is an Australian firm that specialises in filling small spaces in major travel hubs.
‘Zines and self-publishing are a bone of contention in my house. “I don’t have much time for self-publishing,” says my flatmate who works for Bloomsbury, “if it was any good it would have been published properly.” I, however, am in love with the idea that if anybody wanted to make a book or zine themselves,
Isn’t Paxo’s series on the British Empire brilliant TV? Gone is the weary contempt that he wears on Newsnight. Instead, he is visibly enthused by talking to ordinary people in far flung lands. Paxman isn’t telling a new story, but he’s a gifted spinner of old yarns. Pottering around a spice market in Calcutta, going to the races in Hong
Easter – Rise heart: thy Lord is risen. Sing his praise Without delayes, Who takes thee by the hand, that thou likewise With him mayst rise: That, as his death calcined thee to dust, His life may make thee gold, and much more just. Awake, my lute, and struggle for thy part With all thy