The good, the bad and the ugly in books, exhibitions, cinema, TV, dance, music, podcasts and theatre.
We bring you October’s most scathing book reviews: Phil Baker on Our Lady of Alice Bhatti by Mohammed Hanif (Sunday Times) ‘Too knockabout and buffoonish to be a serious study of violence to women in Pakistani culture, too ugly to be funny, this heavy-handed book might be well intended but it is a bloody mess.’
Robert Douglas-Fairhurst’s Becoming Dickens: The Invention of a Novelist works as a companion piece of sorts to Claire Tomalin’s rival biography Charles Dickens: A Life. The clue is in the subtitle. While Tomalin takes the subject from birth to death, Douglas-Fairhurst’s book focuses on Dickens’s early years. And what early years they were. With
Nicholas is a British lawyer working in Russia. It’s sometime around the start of the last decade. Putin is in the full pomp of his first presidential term and it’s the golden age of the Wild East (the days of ‘tits and Kalashnikovs’ as Nicholas puts it). After meeting two young Russian women on the
Publishing a biography just after its subject’s death is a risky business: if it’s too flattering, it will be labelled as hagiography and not taken seriously; if it’s too unflattering, it seems disrespectful and you alienate his fans. Attempting to vault over these hurdles is Walter Isaacson – the former managing editor of Time magazine
There was an unintentional theme to the weekend’s literary pages: murder, in some shape or form. There are fictions, histories and real life whodunits to choose from, if crime is your guilty pleasure. First up: Death in Perguia, a comprehensive account of the Kercher case written by the Sunday Times’ John Follain, who covered the investigation and
Alice Hoffman’s The Dovekeepers marked something of a departure for the hugely successful American novelist, better known for magical realist holiday fodder like Practical Magic or The Story Sisters. Her latest novel plunges us into 70AD, into the midst of Jewish resistance to the Roman siege of Masala, and into the lives of four women
Amiability can take you a long way in British public life. James Corden is no fool: he co-wrote and co-starred in three series of Gavin and Stacey, and wowed the National Theatre this summer with a barnstorming performance in One Man, Two Guvnors. But there’s no doubt that his Fat Lad Made Good persona, and
When I was a Reuters trainee, long hours were spent in Fleet Street pubs absorbing the folklore of journalism from seasoned veterans. One popular story concerned the hapless correspondent sent to verify that Dag Hammarskjöld, head of the United Nations, had safely landed at Ndola airport in Northern Rhodesia on his way to talks with
The die was miscast from the start, more’s the pity. As we reach the halfway point in this massy four-volume edition of the letters of Samuel Beckett, I cannot stifle a small sigh or whimper, of the type exhaled by one of those Beckett characters buried up to their necks. And there is no one
Some may question whether a review of a columnist’s work in the magazine in which that columnist’s work appears can ever be impartial. It can, and not just because this particular magazine is, as far as I recall, honest about this kind of thing. It’s because it’s in my interests to be hard on Jeremy
Those of us who have spent an embarrassing number of hours immersed in the Regency novels of Georgette Heyer have learned to live dangerously. We have been overturned in high perch phaetons, held up innumerable times by highwaymen, been kidnapped and spirited across the Channel, lost several fortunes at Faro or Bassett and have even
Imran Khan’s Pakistan: A Personal History describes his journey from playboy cricketer through believer and charity worker to politician. His story is interwoven with highlights from Pakistan’s history. At times he seems to conflate his own destiny with that of Pakistan, and at others to be writing a beguilingly honest personal account. Khan describes how
Oh what a tangled web she weaves! Victoria Hislop’s third novel, the appropriately titled The Thread, is pleasingly complex. The story traces several generations of a fictional Greek family called Komninos against the historical backdrop of the rise and fall of Greece’s second city, Thessaloniki, in the 20th century. To make things even knottier, most
Like his contemporary and fellow Yorkshireman, Alan Bennett, whom he slightly resembles physically, David Hockney has been loved and admired throughout his lifetime. He painted one of his greatest works, ‘A Grand Procession of Dignitaries in the Semi-Egyptian Style’ in 1961 while still at the Royal College of Art. He has dazzled, surprised and often
Half a century ago J.K. Galbraith’s The Affluent Society changed the political consciousness of a generation in the English- speaking world and beyond. It vividly re-established in the minds of civilised men and women the paradox of private affluence in a sea of public neediness — for which, as Matthew Arnold reminds us, Cato reported
Two years before the outbreak of the first world war, a Royal Navy officer, addressing an Admiralty enquiry into the disturbing question of lower-deck commissions, ventured the cautionary opinion that it took three generations to make a gentleman. It is hard to know exactly what he meant by that endlessly morphing concept, but if it
Marcus Berkmann has written the Bookends column in this week’s issue of the Spectator. Here it is for readers of this blog. Amiability can take you a long way in British public life. James Corden is no fool: he co-wrote and co-starred in three series of Gavin and Stacey, and wowed the National Theatre this
Gangs, suicide bombers, paedophiles, Somali pirates: the world is swarming with people who want to hurt us. And yet Steven Pinker, a Harvard psychologist, thinks we’ve never been safer. In The Better Angels of Our Nature, he argues that violence has actually declined from prehistory to today, due to a combination of progressive thinking and
<a href= “http://vimeo.com/30774612” _fcksavedurl= “http://vimeo.com/30774612″>NBCC Reads at Center for Fiction: On the Comic Novel</a> from <a href=”http://vimeo.com/user2300381″>NBCC</a> on <a href=”http://vimeo.com”>Vimeo</a>. America’s National Book Critics Circle discussed the comic novel last week. Here is a video of their discussion, which ranged from Tom Jones to A Visit from the Goon Squad. Interesting to note Beth Gutcheon’s
Picasso once told Roland Penrose, his friend and biographer, that he left Barcelona in 1900 to go to England, the home of his idols Edward Burne-Jones and Aubrey Beardsley. It took Picasso 19 years to get here, when the Ballet Russes took him to London to design its production of Le Tricorne. In honour of
Something truly incredible has happened in a village near me. A new bookshop has opened. I know – staggering, isn’t it? But I promise you, I’ve seen it with my own eyes. Even been inside. It’s called the Open Road Bookshop, in Stoke by Nayland, close to the Suffolk/Essex border. Pretty little place (both the
Last Saturday, Phillip Pullman addressed library campaigners at a convention in London and declared war on the “stupidity” of nationwide library closures. Pullman’s presence brought the Church of England to mind, merely as a counter-point to his often very public atheism. How has the established church responded to the end of community libraries and the
There was no catch because no one wanted out. The late Joseph Heller has been in the news today. The auction of letters he wrote to an American academic in the ‘70s has revealed that he “enjoyed” the war, which may come as a surprise to those who thought Yossarian, the US Army Air Force
“We think we know what the British Empire did to the world. But what did it do to us?” asks Jeremy Paxman in Empire: What Ruling the World did to the British, the tie-in book to his forthcoming TV series. Paxman’s aim is to look at how the empire shaped Britain, tracing its influence in
David Wilson’s The Lost Photographs of Captain Scott opens with a jolting reminder that even on Antarctica, the past’s another country. Captain Scott’s crew on the Terra Nova expedition (1910-13) were susceptible to sailor’s hoary superstitions. They searched for the root of all bad luck on their voyage; the ‘Jonah’. The consensus settled on the
This is one hell of a statistic: In Britain, taxes on all types of alcohol contributed 36 percent of national revenue in 1898-99, but they were also 19 percent in France (1898), 18 percent in Germany (1897-98), and 28 percent in the United States (1897-98). That’s from a new book by James Simpson Creating Wine,
Who’s it to be? Becky Bloomwood, Sophie Kinsella’s blabbering shopaholic? Or Old Big ‘Ead in David Peace’s The Damned Utd? The list of 25 titles that are to be given away on World Book Night (23rd April 2012) was unveiled in Waterstone’s Piccadilly shop last night. They are 25 varied books, with a mixture of established
With one eye on as yet empty Christmas stockings and the other on cold winter’s nights, here is a short list of essential non-fiction titles recently released in paperback. 1) The Emperor of All Maladies by Siddhartha Mukherjee This “biography” of cancer by a New York oncologist whisks readers from the first documented appearance of the
I’m hoping that when Daniel Craig steps out as Mikael Blomkvist in The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo, he will do for journalists what he did for Speedos in Casino Royale: make them (almost) fashionable. Blomkvist, Steig Larrson’s crusading reporter, is already a poster boy for old school journalism and may inspire a new generation