The good, the bad and the ugly in books, exhibitions, cinema, TV, dance, music, podcasts and theatre.
Well, at least Ed’s won something. The Oxford English Dictionary has chosen Ed Miliband’s ‘squeezed middle’ as the word of the year. It beat off competition from the hopeful ‘Arab Spring’, the dully functional ‘phonehacking’ and the abominable ‘Hacktivism’. It is a remarkably political list, no doubt reflecting the interesting times in which we live.
Today is the 20th anniversary of the death of Freddie Mercury. A couple of thoughts about him, one related to reading, the other to writing. Reading first. I’ve just finished Lesley-Ann Jones’s brilliant biography of the singer (Freddie Mercury, The Definitive Biography), and have been thinking that it’s exactly the sort of tribute Mercury himself
The Guardian currently seems to be embarking on more crusades to save literature than Salman Rushdie’s Twitter account. Last week’s post by blogger Sam Jordison was no exception. He asked whether book reviews are “bland, boring and formulaic”. Fresh from judging Not the Booker (a Guardian online award designed to champion independent publishers and celebrate the vox
Amanda Craig tells us what she would title her memoirs, which book reduces her to tears and the 19th century literary heart throb her husband most looks like. 1) What are you reading at the moment? I always read several books at once, so it’s Richard Bradford’s Martin Amis biography (review), Julia Jones’s A Ravelled Flag
As part of our book of the month coverage, here is Nicholas Lezard’s review of Anthony Horowitz’s The House of Silk, taken from the current issue of the Spectator. You can read other posts on the book here. So: does Moriarty exist, or not? Well no, not really, and not just in the literal sense
The Centre for Policy Studies hosted a party for Robin Harris earlier this evening, in honour of the publication of his one volume history of the Conservatives. Andrew Gimson reviewed the book in a recent issue of the Spectator and described it as ‘a marvel of concision, lucidity and scholarship’, plenty of eminent Tories agree.
It’s that time of the year again: prepare for bad sex, courtesy of the Literary Review. The Bad Sex Awards will be held, wait for it, at the In and Out Club on 6 December. The list is still open, and readers can still nominate worthy candidate by contacting the Literary Review. At present, though,
Christopher Reid’s Selected Poems moves through a neat thirty-year stretch from his first collection Arcadia (1979) to his acclaimed Costa-winning volume A Scattering (2009). We travel from Reid’s early period of inventiveness to the later years of solemnity. More importantly, however, it fleshes out a career many will only know through Reid’s recent work.
Jeannette Winterson’s timely intervention in the Booker prize debate last month reminded us that ‘novels that last are language-based’. On that basis, Houellebecq’s 2010 Prix Goncourt-winning novel, The Map and the Territory, might have been a worthy candidate for the Booker 2011, had it been written in English. In this latest offering by French
If product placement makes you bad tempered then yesterday’s papers won’t have done much good for your blood pressure. Whatever were Lurpak thinking, letting their spreadable butter be featured on the Number 10 breakfast table in Cameron’s Sunday Times photoshoot? How sad that this revolutionary foodstuff, probably the best invention since the internet, will now
The second part of our critical roundup of the ten most-talked-about literary biographies. Read part 1 here. Georgette Heyer: Biography of a Bestseller by Jennifer Kloester This admirable attempt to resurrect the queen of regency romance doesn’t really meet its objective. When publishers are looking for quotes for the paperback, Daisy Goodwin’s ‘solid and well-researched’ (Sunday
The Times has invited (£) everyone aged 16 and under to enter its Young Poet of the Year competition. The winning entry will be published in the newspaper. The Times also suggests (£) that competitors record YouTube videos of themselves declaiming their poems; selected entries will then be posted on the Times’ website. Inspiration is
You can always find a thief in financial markets. That is where the money is. Most frauds are quite dull affairs, and some are never uncovered. A few, however, are spectacular. The scale of loss, or the glamour of the perpetrator, or the failure of the ‘system’ to spot and prevent the crookery, may contribute
If you want to see what an ambivalent attitude we have towards rhetoric, you have only to look at the speeches of Barack Obama. Before Obama became President, when he was out on the stump, there was no holding him back rhetorically: he soared, he swooped, he lifted his eyes to the hills and found
So: does Moriarty exist, or not? Well no, not really, and not just in the literal sense of being a fictional character. He’s hardly even that. We have no evidence beyond Sherlock Holmes’s word, and if you look at Holmes’s behaviour in ‘The Final Problem’ you can see an almost classic case of paranoia —
In 1930 Evelyn Waugh, already at 27 a famous novelist, spent two days in Barcelona. He came upon one of the art nouveau houses designed by Antonio Gaudí, who had died four years earlier. Waugh was captivated by the swooshing ‘whiplash’ lines of the building. He hired a taxi and asked the driver to take
The horror of love: Nancy Mitford’s first fiancé was gay; her husband, Peter Rodd, was feckless, spendthrift and unsympathetic, and her great amour, Gaston Palewski, was endlessly unfaithful. She met him during the war in London and was in love with him for the rest of her life. Palewski was Charles de Gaulle’s right-hand man.
Sarah Raven comes of a botanising family. Her father John, a Cambridge classics don, travelled all over the British Isles studying wildflowers. Like his own father, Charles Raven, he was a gifted watercolourist, and between them they drew almost every plant in the British flora. Sarah still possesses 18 volumes of their watercolours. Nevertheless, to
It is noticeable that the kind of young woman that a clever public man most likes talking to is intelligent but totally unchallenging. This is pleasant for both. She gets to pick up useful knowledge, while he can hold forth, happy that she doesn’t have the inclination or firepower to disagree, argue or interrupt.
Mussolini’s brutal sex-addiction makes for dispiriting reading, but provides material for a fine psychological study, says David Gilmour Bunga bunga may be a recent fashion, but adultery for Italian prime ministers has a long history. The first of such statesmen, Count Cavour, had affairs with married women because he was too nervous of being cuckolded
Is the world in need of a yet another Sherlock Holmes story? Well, with the successful publication of Anthony Horowitz’s The House of Silk it seems it is. Riding on the crest of the wave created by BBC’s ingenious series Sherlock, which brings the brilliant detective into the 21st century, and the Robert Downey Jnr
If you’re the sort of person who can’t get enough of literary biography then you’re spoilt for choice this autumn. Our bookshops – what’s left of them – are bursting with writerly lives and letters. Here’s what the critics made of the ten most-talked-about titles: Martin Amis: The Biography by Richard Bradford This sympathetic biography
The Charlie Rose show is a cultural treasure, provided you ignore the host. In this instance, the late John Updike talks about the art of fiction from the perspective of the character he is “measured against”, Harry “Rabbit” Angstrom. In two and half minutes of candour, Updike reveals much about his method and how his most famous creation
It took ten attempts, nine rejections, one brave publisher, but ultimately only a handful of revisions before the late Sir William Golding finally saw his debut novel, Lord of the Flies, in print in 1954. To mark the centenary of Golding’s birth the Bodleian Library in Oxford recently unveiled the original manuscript. The book’s text,
This is the second instalment of Emily Rhodes’ Inside Books series. A rose by any other name might smell as sweet, but anyone with even a poor sense of smell and negligible knowledge of botany will have noticed that some roses smell sweeter than others. The same goes for the names of books. As some
An anonymous buyer paid more than £7,000 at Sotheby’s last night for the late Nat Tate’s signature work, Bridge No.114. The money will go to the Artists’ General Benevolent Fund because, of course, Nat Tate never existed — he was the invention of the novelist William Boyd, who also painted the atrocious picture above. Tate was
Charles Moore’s column in tomorrow’s issue of the magazine contains a wickedly funny literary item. Here it is, a day early, for readers of this blog: The Duchess of Cornwall also strikes a blow for cultural subversion this month. For Give A Book, the excellent charity set up in memory of the playwright Simon Gray,
Stephen Vizinczey, whose 1960 classic In Praise of Older Women was re-released last year as a Penguin Classic, is next in the hotseat. 1) What are you reading at the moment? Ian McEwan’s Amsterdam 2) As a child, what did you read under the covers? I was lucky that I never had to read
This is the story of a book which argues that everything in the world is made of matter; that human flourishing should be the goal of any rational society; and that not only is divine intervention in nature or history a myth, but that all religion is a masochistic self-deception the powerful use to control