The good, the bad and the ugly in books, exhibitions, cinema, TV, dance, music, podcasts and theatre.
‘It’s the revenge of Dreyfus,’ came the cry from the dock. The speaker was the veteran right-wing ideologue, Charles Maurras, found guilty of treason in 1945 for his support of the collaborationist Vichy regime. It wasn’t of course that, and yet there is a sense in which Maurras spoke the truth. The Dreyfus case had
In 2009, Alone in Berlin, Hans Fallada’s masterpiece about civilian resistance to Nazism, appeared in English for the first time. Now A Small Circus, Fallada’s literary breakthrough, makes its English debut. Both novels are admirably translated by Michael Hofmann. The earlier novel will be of deep interest to the many admirers of Alone in Berlin.
In the summer of 1520, Michelangelo Buonarotti wrote a letter of recommendation on behalf of his protégé, the painter Sebastiano del Piombo, to Cardinal Bibbiena, an influential figure at the court of Pope Leo X. The testimonial carried some weight, for Michelangelo was by now Italy’s most admired sculptor, with what are nowadays called ‘signature
Hermitic, oneiric withdrawal from responsibilities and threats is the most effective way of alleviating the pangs of middle age, suggests Marcus Berkmann. In his fifties, he is a frank and eloquent expert on ageing, by turns indignantly curmudgeonly and philosophically resigned. He is observant and witty, but there were moments when he reminded me of
Solomon Kugel is morbidly obsessed with death: his own, and that of those he loves, including his wife Bree and his only son Jonah. He spends his idle hours writing down possible last words in a notebook, and contemplating the undignified and senseless extinctions that await him around every corner. His outlook is not helped
Before texts and Twitter there were postcards. Less hi-tech, but they kept people in touch. Angela Carter (pictured above) and Susannah Clapp were friends, and over the years, postcards from Carter arrived from wherever her travels took her. They could be quirky, surreal — from America a huge chicken swallowing a truck; the Statue of
Of all the pieces celebrating the life and legacy of ‘the Inimitable’ Dickens, Toby Young has, for my money, written the most important. In the latest issue of the Spectator, Toby reveals that numerous state secondary schools have dropped Dickens from their GCSE curriculums on the grounds that ‘ordinary children’ cannot cope with the books. Private
‘How we perceive the past, what we see in it and what we ignore, depends on our current perspective’, writes Faramerz Dabhoiwala at the end of his hotly-anticipated The Origins of Sex. Well, quite. In seeking words to describe Dabhoiwala’s history of sex, though, none could be more appropriate. The book resounds with sundry modern
Here’s one quote by Charles Dickens that I bet you haven’t read this week. As far as the male sex was concerned, he told a foreign visitor in 1848, promiscuity ‘is so much the rule in England that if any son of his were particularly chaste, he should be alarmed on his account, as if
The latest publishing trade figures make for alarming reading. Tuesday’s edition of the Bookseller reported that this January was the second worst on record for retail. The print business is wasting away at the rate that gangrene spreads. Hachette UK’s revenue in the 4th quarter of 2011 was down by 4.5 per cent on the
The era immediately preceding the French Revolution presents such rich pickings for the historical novelist that the relative scarcity of English-language fiction set in the period comes as a surprise. We might charitably suggest that our authors are intimidated by the long shadow of A Tale of Two Cities, or less generously remark that they
I’ve spotted a subtle side-effect of the fact that e-Books don’t actually exist. The ‘not being able to lend a book to your husband/friend/etc when you’ve finished it’ problem is well-known. But less obvious is the fact that when you read a book on a Kindle or an iPad, you can’t accidentally leave things between
On this week’s Shelf Life, the genial John Simpson confesses which classics he’s never finished, and gives a very thorough account of which literary characters he would most like to bed. 1) As a child, what did you read under the covers? Nothing dodgy, I’m afraid. I remember being caught reading The Coral Island under the sheets at the
How does fiction mix with biography? Is all biography fiction, or all fiction merely finessed biography? These questions were considered last night, at the Oxford Centre for Life Writing, by two literary grandees from opposing sides of the issue: Hermione Lee, biographer of Virginia Woolf and Edith Wharton, and Alan Hollinghurst, whose recent novel, The
The Coach and Horses in Soho, that beery den of iniquity, hosted the Omnivore’s inaugural Hatchet Job of the Year Award earlier this evening. A large showing from literary London saw Adam Mars-Jones win the prize for this quiet demolition of Michael Cunningham’s By Nightfall. Leo Robson was runner-up for his very clever and very
I have never been more chilled, thrilled, shocked and excited — and from a literary point of view, nothing has made me feel more inadequate as a writer — than when reading the opening to Great Expectations, which is one of the finest passages I’ve ever come across. Screen adaptations can’t quite capture the atmosphere because the
There is one scene that I remember reading, and it often crops up in my mind despite never having gone back to it. There is a character in Bleak House called Mr Vholes. And there is a description of him removing his gloves as if they were a layer of skin. It’s such a brilliant
My favourite Dickens passage is, without question, the opening to Bleak House. That astounding description of the fog and mud in the London streets and the possibility of a megalosaurus ‘forty feet long or so, waddling like an elephantine lizard up Holborn Hill’. The manuscript is part of the Dickens exhibition on at the Museum
Finally, after months of fevered preparation, it is Charles Dickens’ bi-centenary. The Prince of Wales will lay a wreath in Westminster Abbey later this morning; and numerous countries from the Commonwealth and the English speaking world have sent wreath-bearing delegations to the abbey. The ceremony is one of hundreds being staged around the world in honour of ‘the
It was National Library Day on Saturday, and the Save Kensal Rise Library campaigners continued their vigil, guarding the library from closure. They have been dealt a blow this morning by the Court of Appeal, which has denied them leave to appeal to the Supreme Court following the defeat of their case last December. The
from ‘Windsor Forest’ See! from the brake the whirring pheasant springs, And mounts exulting on triumphant wings: Short is his joy; he feels the fiery wound, Flutters in blood, and panting beats the ground. Ah! what avail his glossy, varying dyes, His purple crest, and scarlet-circled eyes, The vivid green his shining plumes unfold, His
Tomorrow is the bi-centenary of Charles Dickens’s birth, and Fleet Street’s literary editors devoted much of their weekend pages to man who called himself ‘the Inimitable’. Penguin has run a poll on the nation’s favourite Dickens character; the Guardian reports that the winner is Ebenezer Scrooge, who saw off the likes of Pip, Fagin, Sydney Carton
Some writers’ lives are estimable, some enviable, some exemplary. And some send a shudder of gratitude down the spine that this life happened to somebody else. It isn’t necessarily about success or acclaim — most rational people would very much prefer to have had Rimbaud’s life rather than Somerset Maugham’s. But sometimes it is. In
There was a time when sportsmen fretted about the morality of being paid to play. Now the question is whether you are taking money to win, or taking money to lose. Mervyn Westfield, the Essex fast bowler, was only 20 when he accepted £6,000 to bowl deliberately badly in a county match. Three Pakistani cricketers,
This thoughtful, challenging and deeply depressing book takes as its launch pad the Nuremberg Trials, in which the author’s father played so prominent a part. Churchill would have executed the Nazi leaders out of hand. Eisenhower wanted to exterminate all the German General Staff as well as all of the Gestapo and all Nazi Party
The actor-biographer Simon Callow has played Dickens, and has created Dickensian characters, in monologues and in a solo bravura rendition of A Christmas Carol. Now he suggests that the theatricality of Dickens’s own life is a subject worthy of exploration in book form. So it is, and if Callow had done so, it might have
Given the choice between philosophising in the company of Socrates or fighting in the army of the soldier-monarch Charles XII of Sweden, most men, Dr Johnson observed, would prefer arms to argument. That physical danger should offer a more appealing prospect than logical thought remains one of the Great Cham’s more provocative insights. At one
Mountains of the Moon is narrated by a woman just released after spending ten years in jail. The reason for her sentence and the details of her previous life are pieced together through disjointed fragments, forming a complex jigsaw. Lulu had a shocking childhood, with a violent stepfather and negligent mother. Her only loving relatives
It isn’t true that Joanna Trollope (pictured above) only produces novels about the kind of people who have an Aga in their kitchen: what she writes about are families. Her books have a knack of chiming with current social concerns, of examining how the family is adapting to changing social mores. She is deservedly a