The good, the bad and the ugly in books, exhibitions, cinema, TV, dance, music, podcasts and theatre.
Warfare was the fact of life in Britain from the reign of Henry VII to that of George II. Nobody who lived on these islands could escape it. It is estimated that, between the battles of Bosworth Field in 1485 and Culloden in 1746, 1.2 million people died as a direct result of warfare in Britain
Earlier this week, Steven McGregor wrote a touching memorial to Gilbert Adair, the late novelist and critic. Adair self-deprecatingly described himself as ‘one of the great unread writers’, but two of his books were made into films. He adapted The Holy Innocents with the director Bernado Bertolucci; the ensuing film was called The Dreamers, and
Publishers’ eyes have been on the Guggenheim Museum in New York today, where Apple has just launched its plan to revolutionise the education publishing market. The company announced that it would produce new digital textbooks, across all disciplines, and make them available to users of apple computers and tablets through the iBooks store. The products are already availbale. The textbooks come
Did you survive without Wikipedia yesterday? English Wikipedia, and perhaps as many as 7,000 other websites, was blacked out for 24 hours in protest at the passage of two internet piracy bills through the US Congress. Simple souls merely dusted off their battered encyclopaedia, but the technically astute lifted the blackout with a host of
The dowdy Queen Anne is back in fashion. Anne Somerset’s new biography of Queen Anne, that most enigmatic of monarchs, is published today. It is nearly 300 years since Anne’s death, and a popular account of her life is well overdue. She assumed the throne of a frankly second-rate power and left it a dominant
Fresh from sixty radio and TV appearances in 2011 alone, the popular historian and constitutional expert, Kate Williams, is on Shelf Life this week. She tells us about her religious fervours under the covers and what’s worse than finding Mein Kampf on someone’s bookshelf. Her first novel, The Pleasures of Men, is out tomorrow. 1) What
Gilbert Adair was a mentor to me, even in the year following his stroke, which was when we became closest, and I knew him best. I had just left the US Army and moved to London when I met Gilbert at a cocktail party at a friend’s flat in Maida Vale. Though it was an
The Guardian reports on a fascinating story from across the Atlantic, where an imprint of Penguin USA has reprinted Thomas Jefferson’s Bible. The book is a based on a copy of the Gospels kept by the third President of the United States between 1803 and 1820, from which he expunged those passages which he could
The Cold War produced some of the great classics of British spy fiction. From the gadgets and babes with exotic Eastern European accents of the James Bond books, to the non-stop action of Alistair MacLean or the dark treachery of John Le Carré and the intricate office politics of Len Deighton, it served as the
John Burnside’s Black Cat Bone has won this year’s T.S. Eliot prize, the most controversial in years. Nominees Alice Oswald and John Kinsella withdrew from the prize on discovering that it was to be sponsored by a hedge fund, Aurum. Oswald’s objection was that “poetry should be challenging such institutions”, although she appeared to make
What a shame the Christmas literary recommends season is over: otherwise I would have loved to draw this to your attention as quite the funniest book of the year. In The Reactionary Mind political author Corey Robin pretends to analyse the psychopathology which drives conservatives to think and act the way they do. I say
A cacophony of opinion broke out across the weekend’s literary pages, all of it eloquent and entertaining. On Thursday, Nick Cohen will publish his anticipated account of England’s pernicious libel law, You Can’t Read this Book: Censorship in an Age of Freedom. Cohen condemns the legal establishment that values deference to the mighty above freedom
There is nothing quite like a good centenary to remind us how surprising it is that anyone got out of the 20th century in one piece. In the space of a few weeks this spring will be the 100th anniversaries of the Titanic and Captain Scott’s death, and from then on it’s going to be
There is something rather odd about the current state of science. The funding for its prestigious institutions and mega projects now routinely runs to hundreds of millions, even billions, of pounds. And it is certainly productive, generating a tidal wave of papers every year published in its 25,000 academic journals. But ask what it all
Britain has the worst obesity rates in Europe, with one in four adults now clinically obese. A friend who works in orthopaedic surgery tells me that at least 80 per cent of knee replacements are, effectively, self-induced: caused by patients being overweight. Same with hips. Another friend, a consultant, had a complaint lodged against him
Does anyone do derring-do anymore? Here’s the real thing. On Christmas Day 1941, despite Churchill’s call to fight to the last man, Hong Kong fell to the Japanese, the first British possession to surrender since the American War of Independence. Within a few hours, Chiang Kai-shek’s main official in the colony, the one-legged Admiral Chan
This absorbing book is — in both format and content — a much expanded follow-up to the same author’s very successful pictorial anthology Lost London of 2010. It replicates some of the photographs that appeared there and contains many new ones, all in captivating detail. The photographs are ones of record. There is little sense
The death of a great author often causes interminable displays of corrosive envy. Heirs, acolytes, interpreters and academics resent one another’s claims on the literary estate or cultural heritage. They try to engross the dead talent for their own. They claim privileges, and make spiteful stabs at people with whom they have the closest affinities.
The Saville Report into the events of Bloody Sunday is ten volumes or 5,000 pages long and was five years in the writing. The inquiry lasted 12 years, including those five years, and cost the taxpayer £200 million. Some 2,500 people gave evidence, nearly 1,000 of whom gave oral witness. It was set up under
Simon Goldhill introduces his new book by recalling a lunch with his editor, who suggested he make a pilgrimage and write about it. Pilgrimages, he reflected, tend to be made alone, but he is gregarious, so decided that he needed to make up, with his wife and another couple, ‘a party of four Jews’, to
Most people who recall 1976 do so for its appallingly hot summer, when parks turned brown and roads melted. Some will also remember that the celebrity culture throve then as now and that none was more celebrated than James Hunt, Formula One world champion. He was even more celebrated than that most famous soap opera,
Sir Salman Rushdie has been in the news this week, after his proposed appearance at the Jaipur Literary Festival elicited criticism from what the Guardian described as an ‘influential conservative Indian Muslim cleric’, called Maulana Abul Qasim Nomani. A little over a year ago, Rushdie appeared on American TV (above) and said that the world
When it comes to national stereotypes, the modern mind remains thoroughly medieval. The Death of King Arthur, which Simon Armitage has translated from Middle English, contains two insults that sound down the centuries. An enraged Frenchman says, ‘These Britons were always blusterers and braggarts. Lo, how he swaggers in his shining suit/ As if to
There has been much furore this afternoon about the bookshop formerly known as Waterstone’s. The company has decided to drop the apostrophe from its name to make it more ‘versatile and practical’ according to its managing director, James Daunt. The company is also restoring its old branding. The suspicion is that apostrophes are not digital friendly.
It was an abiding moment of the Arab Spring. As Colonel Gaddafi’s mauled corpse was paraded through the streets of Sirte, al-Jazeera cut to what it described as ‘wild street celebrations in Tripoli’. The screen showed a dusty compound, with three blokes lolling around a burned-out car, diffidently firing pistols into the air; a stray
Opening presents is tough: hiding greed, masking disappointment and feigning gratitude. You’re also probably being filmed for the family time capsule and you’ll be on YouTube within hours. That’s what happened to a poor American woman called Emily this Christmas. She’s starting 2012 as the latest social media sensation. The video has been removed, but
‘Open the book to page ninety-nine and the quality of the whole will be revealed to you.’ So said Ford Madox Ford. Whether that applies to any of his own books I don’t know (my shelves seem to be a Ford-free zone — anyone?). But at least one blog applies the test to various tomes,
A flurry of new reviews of Stephen Kelman’s Pigeon English has landed in recent days, coinciding with a new edition of the book. Kelman’s debut divides opinion. Lewis Jones thinks it ‘miraculous’. Catherine Nixey thinks (£) that it’s ‘exuberant’ but ‘miss-steps’ occasionally. And I found that a pigeon is a less than engaging narrator, even if
I have a review of Pity the Billionaire by Thomas Frank, one of the few left-wing writers I believe conservatives can read with pleasure. He is old fashioned, so old-fashioned indeed that most American leftists would not call him left-wing. He has no time for the culture wars, which still stir the passions of so many on