The good, the bad and the ugly in books, exhibitions, cinema, TV, dance, music, podcasts and theatre.
A new character emerged in popular fiction in the 1890s. He was intelligent, a master of disguise, accompanied by a faithful assistant and unorthodox in every way. But it wasn’t Sherlock Holmes. It was the cricketer — and amateur cracksman — A.J. Raffles. Indeed, Raffles could be seen as a dashing alter-ego to the sober consulting detective. The connection
John Steinbeck was born 110 years ago today. To mark the occasion, here, courtesy of the always intriguing Letters of Note, is a letter Steinbeck wrote to his son Thom, then a teenager. It speaks for itself. New York November 10, 1958 Dear Thom: We had your letter this morning. I will answer it from
Sometimes a usually toxic stereotype can play out harmlessly, charmingly even, before your eyes. It happened to me at Jewish Book Week (JBW) yesterday. I was in a queue at the bookshop, minding my own business as the couple ahead moved to the check-out. They were an odd pair at first glance. He was tall and dishevelled, his kippah
The first thing to tell you about Lars Iyer’s Dogma is that it is very funny. It didn’t make me laugh out loud on the tube, which seems to be the reviewer’s traditional stamp of approval for successfully comic novels, but this is partly because I didn’t read it on the tube. Had I read
It is 30 years since the Falklands war, and a flush of anniversary memoirs is being published. The best of the bunch is Down South, by former navy man Chris Parry. We’ll have an interview with Parry later this week; but, in the meantime, here’s Max Hastings (£), who made his name reporting on the
How can we help the talented writer Rachel Cusk to overcome the extraordinary hurt she has suffered as a consequence of losing her family and, far more importantly, her feminist identity? Mrs Cusk has been explaining, at some length, and repeatedly, to like-minded souls at the Guardian the anguish occasioned by the apparent disappearance of
Sam Leith explores the effect that certain writers’ relatives have had on their published works This book’s sort-of preface is a lecture on aunts and absent mothers in Jane Austen — an odd diversion, given that nowhere else in its pages are aunts, or female writers for that matter, given much of an outing. Colm
With each passing year it becomes clearer that the cure for global warming is worse than the disease. While wind power and biofuels devastate ecosystems and economies, temperatures and sea levels rise ever more slowly, just as the greenhouse theory— minus feedbacks — predicts. As James Delingpole acutely observes, the true believers are left with
When I saw the title of this book, then read that it only covered the period 1600-1800 I hoped this would be a riot of comedy, something along the lines of the most wonderful sentence in the English language. This is in Havelock Ellis’s Psychology of Sex and concerns a discovery made by the doctor
Philip Oltermann has set himself an almost impossibly ambitious task. In 1996, when he was 15 years old, he moved from Hamburg to London, so he has close experience of both England and Germany. In due course it occurred to him, as a man of wide cultural sympathies, that he ought to be in a
Did you know the external ‘shell’ of the ear is the pinna? That a woman’s oestrogen level alters the way she hears the male voice, making it richer, and thus may affect her choice of mate? That Pride and Prejudice was published the year (1813) that Europeans discovered the kiwil? That Leonardo da Vinci ‘was
When totting up the positives from the British Raj, people often put the railways first, followed by the Indian Civil Service or the Indian Army. The Empire was won by the sword and held by the sword. It was racially exclusive, its taxes were often predatory, and its punishments savage. But at least it left
It can be odd to read a biography of a major political figure for whom, every day while one reads it, the story continues. Everything we hear in the news now about Mitt Romney seems to have been the case in 2008, when he first ran for president; or 2002, when after leading the Olympic
Just in case Private Eye smells a rat, let me put my cards on the table. Not once, but twice, I have sent the galley proofs of my novels to William Boyd and, not once, but twice, he has responded with generous ‘blurbs’, which my publishers have gratefully emblazoned on the covers. Believe me, in
Is there room for yet another book on Dickens? Probably not, but we’ll have it anyway. The Dickens Dictionary (Icon, £9.99) is John Sutherland’s contribution to the great birthday festival — and possibly not his last, for since his retirement from academe, Sutherland has been nearly as industrious as the great man himself. This brief
Editorial conferences are fraught affairs. There is a rush of facts, opinions and suggestions. It’s a brave man who trusts his memory to retain all the information. ‘S’, a young Russian journalist who lived between the wars, was one such brave man. He could recall perfectly each name, number and hint that his editor had
This column is supposed to be about fiction, but it ought to be about good writing in general. Paul Lay, editor of History Today, has picked out his top five narrative histories, mixing ancient and modern classics. I can’t dissent from his judgment that Edward Gibbon is the master of the genre. Nor can I
Not so long ago narrative history was on the way out. Academic historians, ever more specialised, looked set for a solipsistic future writing only for colleagues ploughing the same narrow field. Yet the commercial and critical success of the likes of Antony Beevor, Simon Sebag Montefiore and Amanda Foreman (none of whom is a member
Are you awed by an autograph? Swayed by a signature? As you peruse the shelves and tables of a bookshop, is your eye drawn more readily to a cover if it bears one of those little stickers announcing that the copy in question has been signed by the author? Plenty of people’s eyes are, apparently.
More bad news for people who like their reading matter to come with a spine: January sales for printed books were down 16 per cent on last year’s. There are lots of reasons for this — ebooks, better telly, a global pandemic of attention deficit disorder — but what’s often overlooked is modern publishing’s tendency
Cult US site Flavorwire recently produced a photo-feature on 20 beautiful bookshops from around the world, and it has since compiled a list of 20 beautiful private libraries. The sense of barely contained disorder contrasts with rooms that seem to have been arranged for a lifestyle magazine, such as the design by Sally Sirkin Lewis above. It
As well as being a keen pianist (she practices daily for 90 minutes), Tara Palmer-Tompkinson can also read. In this week’s Shelf Life, T P-T tells us exactly what she’d do if she didn’t find Sidney Sheldon on someone’s bookshelf and why Santa Sebag Montefiore is a godsend for most men. Tara’s latest novel Infidelity
The Leveson inquiry was convened to ‘examine the culture, practices and ethics of the media’. Most of the inquiry’s time has been devoted to newspapers, particularly tabloid newspapers. To date, no publishers have been called to give evidence, although they may yet be. I very much hope that they are, because a new book published
The early years of the twentieth century hold an irresistible draw for the modern imagination. The Lifeboat by Charlotte Rogan takes us back to 1914, the world poised on the precipice of the modern age, with a plot and characters that are of the pre-modern era. A ship is stricken and, in a rescue bid,
In between feeds, I read to my babies. I like to read. It is the thing I do — I like to read more than I like to write or eat or sleep. Reading has been my go to method for getting through every-day life since I was bout three. My cutting-edge English teacher mother
There are two notable diamond jubilees this year: the obvious one and Jewish Book Week (JWB). The festival opened last weekend and will run at Kings Place in London until Sunday evening, when David Aaronovitch and Umberto Eco will end proceedings with a discussion about the latter’s novel, The Prague Cemetery. JBW is a celebration of
If cat-eyed, then a Pallas is their love; If freckled, she’s a party-coloured dove; If little, then she’s life and soul all o’er; An Amazon, the large two-handed whore. She stammers; oh, what grace in lisping lies! If she says nothing, to be sure she’s wise. If shrill, and with a voice to drown a
Colm Tóibín has a new book out this Thursday, New Ways to Kill Your Mother — a collection of essays examining how writers and their families relate to each other. Tóibín introduced the essays in Saturday’s Guardian, and was interviewed by the Times’ Erica Wagner (£): ‘As with his memoir, in which what is left out is as
Why in 1737 did Dr Johnson choose to leave his home in Lichfield in the Midlands and travel to London to make a fresh start as a writer, asks Jerry White in his encyclopaedic portrait of the 18th-century capital. It’s a good question. London was dangerous, it was dirty, you could die of ague in
