The good, the bad and the ugly in books, exhibitions, cinema, TV, dance, music, podcasts and theatre.
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
Jonathan Franzen has made the news this week, by berating digital media and corporate capitalism. Those were themes of his most recent novel, Freedom. His previous book, The Corrections, played with the fashionable phrase ‘dysfunctional family’, and exposed how the term has been bastardised by misuse. He re-emphasises that final point in the clip above. The
Every summer when the exam results come out, besides the obligatory photos of bouncing schoolgirls, there’s a story about a five-year-old who’s become the youngest person ever to pass a GCSE. Little Liam, his parents boast, has been doing sums since before he could talk and is now raking in the dosh from his million-selling
The cover of Granta’s latest issue is, without putting too fine a point on it, abominable. See for yourself. It’s a mess of blood orange, purples, pinks, reds and puce. There is no coherence. A picture of what looks like a bullfight competes for prominence with some fleshy swimmers and the front and rear ends
Video killed the radio star, sang the Buggles in 1979 — assuming the synth-pop Buggles actually sang. In the same year, Mark Amory was putting the finishing touches to a collection of Evelyn Waugh’s letters. He noted in his introduction that letters were an antique curiosity; no one writes them anymore, he wrote. That grave prognosis was
In the musty old bookworld, prizes are terribly exciting. Yes, book awards will never reach the world-televised-designer-frock-paraded-on-red-carpet level of the Oscars, but any keen bookish person was waiting with baited breath for the announcement of the Costa Book of the Year last Tuesday night. The Costa Prize was the acme of literary excitement of the
Mark Mason, author of Walk the Lines, is in the hot seat this week. He tells us that no woman is truly attractive unless you can imagine going to the pub with her, and admits to a fear that he may be one of Holden Caulfield’s ‘phonies’. 1) What are you reading at the moment?
What a lot of new books there are about the queen. I count 24 biographies, photograph collections and retrospectives all produced to mark the Diamond Jubilee. There is only so much to say about Her Majesty before writers begin to repeat each other. Either that or a biographer is left to record the inane and
The reviewer of Alain de Botton’s books runs a grave risk. For behold what happened to the New York Times critic Caleb Crain in 2009 when he suggested that AdB’s 2009 book The Pleasures and Sorrows of Work ‘succeeds as entertainment, if not as analysis’. The philosopher replied: ‘I will hate you till the day
Much ado about Jonathan Franzen’s appearance at the Hay Festival in Cartegna, where he sounded-off against eBooks, technology and corporate capitalism. The Guardian reports that Franzen said: ‘Maybe nobody will care about printed books 50 years from now, but I do. When I read a book, I’m handling a specific object in a specific time
How did Apple gain such a hold on everyday life? Whether it’s checking overnight emails on the iPhone, reading a morning paper on the iPad, walking to the tune of the iPod or beavering away on a MacBook, Apple gadgetry is a companion from dawn till dusk. Inside Apple by Adam Lashinsky attempts to explain
I hadn’t given my coffin much thought until last Saturday, when I attended the South Bank Centre’s ‘Festival for the Living’. The main exhibit was a selection of coffins from Ghana. They were bizarre: a skip, a mini Mercedes and a giant cream cake. It was an absurd sight. I found myself playing Loyd Grossman
A cold wind is blowing from the Middle East. It may have been caused by the re-emergence of Gaddafi loyalists in Libya, or the continued bloodshed in Syria, or the Rushdie mania at the Jaipur Literary Festival. But whatever the source, many Westerners are having second thoughts about the Arab Spring, and their scepticism is
2012 is a year of Dickens anniversaries — a major one for him, and what’s turned out to be quite a significant one for me. It’s his bicentenary, of course, but it will also be 30 years since I first read Bleak House. I know that because I wrote an essay on it in my
My You Can’t Read This Book: Censorship in an Age of Freedom is out this week. As the title says, it’s about freedom of speech, a subject that has come to mean more and more to me as I have watched religious zealots intimidate liberals into silence, and the libel laws and omerta of City
Britain’s links with the Continent were once deeper and more extensive than those of any other European country. Paris, Rome and German universities played as vital a role in British culture as many native cities. Mediterranean connections were especially strong. Most cities on its shores contain an English church and cemetery. From Minorca to Cyprus,
If Gregor von Rezzori is known to English language readers, it is likely to be through his tense, disturbing novel Memoirs of an Anti-Semite (partly written in English), and/or his ravishing memoir Snows of Yesteryear. Rezzori was born in 1914 in Czernowitz in Bukovina, when it belonged to the Austro-Hungarian Empire. After the first world