The good, the bad and the ugly in books, exhibitions, cinema, TV, dance, music, podcasts and theatre.
Driving past several long abandoned second- world-war airfields in East Anglia last year I was struck by how spooky they seemed, just like the decommissioned army base that used to exist near me. Places where people have not only lived and worked but which form the background of wartime drama, and from which men went
The name of Savonarola slides off the tongue as if concocted for an orator’s climax. But when it came to names, whether by melody or reputation, the Florence he knew offered aggressive competition. Pico della Mirandola, Lorenzo ‘il Magnifico’ de’ Medici, Botticelli, Michelangelo and Machiavelli all shared his era. In an unexpected and sympathetic conclusion
At a funeral in New Orleans in 1901, Joe ‘King’ Oliver played a blues-drenched dirge on the trumpet. This was the new music they would soon call jazz. A century on, from the hothouse stomps of Duke Ellington to the angular doodlings of Thelonious Monk, jazz survives in the vocal inflections of rap. To its
The problem with Nick Cohen’s very readable You Can’t Read This Book is the way that you can, glaringly, read this book. This isn’t quite as glib an observation as it sounds. Cohen’s central point is that the censors’ pens did not fall down with the Berlin Wall. And yet here he is, very obviously
Barack Obama is not up to the job. That is Ron Suskind’s oft-repeated contention. The President, he states, compromised with, rather than curbed, failing American financial institutions, and has surrounded himself with warring staffers who are either no more competent than he is or, if expert, disregard his wishes. Following a picture caption that reads
The film When Harry Met Sally may be infamous for the scene in which the heroine mimics orgasm in a crowded café, but the real point of the story is a question: can a man and a woman ever be true friends, or must sex always get in the way? Jack Holmes and His Friend
It came as a bit of a shock to learn from Philip Hensher’s review of Body of Work: 40 Years of Creative Writing at UEA (31 December) that there are now nearly 100 institutions of higher education in Britain offering a degree in Creative Writing. I suppose for many it’s a merry-go-round. You get the
When I read an article in the Telegraph recently, which pointed out that Oxfam is the third biggest retailer of books in the UK, I got a shock similar to when I learnt, last year, that The Bookseller had named Sainsbury’s chain bookseller of the year. It feels peculiar to think of brands like Oxfam
It is Holocaust Memorial Day. Fictionalising the Holocaust has become something of a fashion in recent years — The Reader, The Boy in the Striped Pyjamas and The Kindly Ones (Les Bienveillantes in the orginal French) to name but three. The first two have been adapted for film, the third has not. Its author, Jonathan Littell, has refused
‘We don’t want to get our morals from our holy books,’ said Richard Dawkins at the annual Jaipur Literature Festival (JLF) earlier this week. Some among his audience might have taken offence if they were listening, but they were too busy persecuting India’s most simultaneously celebrated and vilified writer-in-exile, Salman Rushdie. When I spoke to
Last November, Rajni George reported on how Indian authors were becoming increasingly commercialised. Literary festivals, book signings, TV appearances and society parties — these are the staples of writers at the heart of India’s publishing boom. Rajni worried that writers might be exploited or distracted in their glamorous new surroundings. Popular British writers have travelled
Women, I am sometimes forced to conclude, just don’t get it. A cold, sunny day in early January, and I am following a footpath across some fields. This is because I have finally got round to a biography of Captain Lawrence Oates which has been sitting in my ‘to read’ pile for at least four
It’s Burns Night. A literary blog has to mark the occasion. There was no consoling scotch to hand, so here’s Robert Burns’ ‘Address to a Haggis’ with a translation below for the uninitiated. A good evening to all, especially if you can’t stand Burns’s doggerel. Fair is your honest happy face Great chieftain of the pudding race Above
Here is Costa Award winner Andrew Miller discussing his victory and talking about his book, Pure.
This week’s Shelf Life features Alain de Botton, who is currently stoking controversy with his latest book, Religion for Atheists. De Botton, who tweets @alaindebotton, tells us which book he’d give a lover and why exactly he’d like to meet Madame Bovary. 1) What are you reading at the moment? Some porn: Modern Architecture since
Literary biography is supposed to be dead. Time was when ‘big literary biographies were the goal of every serious editor,’ Faber’s Neil Belton recalls. ‘The bigger they were the better, and they often came in many volumes,’ he says. But these monumental works ‘cost publishers a fortune’, and literary historians were forced to lower their horizons. But Belton
… Pure, by Andrew Miller. Miller’s novel was not even longlisted by the Booker Prize panel, so perhaps this is another example of the Costas righting literary wrongs: a tradition for which it is growing famous. Miller saw off tough competition from the Poet Laureate, Carol Ann Duffy, and from Matthew Hollis’s atypical and brilliant
While the V&A is ever the place to move with the times, it values its traditions and knows what it does best. The museum’s major forthcoming Autumn exhibition, Hollywood Costume, promises to be a crowd pleaser. In many ways it will hark back to the groundbreaking 1979 V&A exhibition, The Art of Hollywood, which focused
Luxurious Man, to bring his Vice in use, Did after him the World seduce: And from the fields the Flow’rs and Plants allure, Where Nature was most plain and pure. He first enclos’d within the Gardens square A dead and standing pool of Air: And a more luscious Earth for them did knead, Which stupifi’d
Jodi Kantor is unrepentant: Michelle Obama knew what she was letting herself in for. At a lunch held in Kantor’s honour at St. Stephen’s Club in London this afternoon, the New York Times political correspondent said that she had been given access to the First Lady’s staff in the East Wing, and had rendered a fair and accurate
It’s a strange experience, to stand before the checked pinafore dress that Judy Garland wore in The Wizard of Oz. It is very plain, and its technicoloured blue has faded into a pallid grey. Yet it is instantly arresting, instantly fantastic. The word ‘iconic’ is as well-worn as an old jumper, but it’s an apt
Jaipur — It was a sad weekend here for freedom of speech, as the Rushdie controversy took one strange turn after another. Having read from the banned The Satanic Verses on Friday night, in protest of Rushdie’s absence at the festival, writers Hari Kunzru, Amitava Kumar, Ruchir Joshi and Jeet Thayil were advised by lawyers
Sam Leith on Tony Judt’s rigorous, posthumously published examination of the great intellectual debates of the last century When the historian and essayist Tony Judt died in 2010 of motor neurone disease, among the books he had planned was an intellectual history of 20th-century social thought. As the disease robbed him of the ability to
There are two ways of viewing the changes sweeping through the Arab world in general and Cairo in particular. There is the significance of individual events, such as the moment that the Tunisian street trader Mohamed Bouazizi set himself alight and lit the fuse on protests that brought down the government of President Ben Ali.
She was the ill-educated younger child of the Duke of York; a mere female, she was sickly and not expected to survive, let alone become Queen. But, as this monumental and long overdue reappraisal shows, it was a mistake to underestimate Anne Stuart. She had always been ambitious and had great tenacity. She had no
Over 125 of the 320 pages in this book are either blank, or taken up with black-and-white illustrations, of subjects as various as Madonna and her former husband Guy Ritchie, slates arranged by Richard Long, Buddhist truth-seekers going for a walk in a wood, and a little boy having his Bar Mitzvah in a New
I think it was a Frenchman — it usually is — who observed that the English love their animals more than their children. At first glance, General Jack Seely’s Warrior: The Amazing Story of a Real War Horse — originally published as My Horse Warrior in 1934 — is striking proof of this. In an
In the autumn of 1347, the Black Death arrived in Egypt. In the 18 months that followed, mosques turned into mortuaries across North Africa and the Levant. By the time the pestilence had subsided, up to a third of the Muslim world lay dead. Theologians delved into their books and found a comforting spin: infection
Jaipur – In a dramatic end to the first day of the Jaipur Literature Festival, four writers rallied in support of Salman Rushdie by reading from The Satanic Verses. The book has been banned in India since 1988. As a result, a warrant was issued for the festival organizers; arrests which, at time of writing,