The good, the bad and the ugly in books, exhibitions, cinema, TV, dance, music, podcasts and theatre.
Asked to review this book, which I was told was about encounters between unlikely pairs of people, I assumed it would be on the lines of Walter Savage Landor’s Imaginary Conversations. Craig Brown is our premier parodist, the best since the incomparable Max. Might his chatting twosomes include Cleopatra and Janet Street-Porter? The Marquis de
‘The candle is burning out and I must stop. Darling I wish you the best I can — that your anxiety will be at an end before you get this — with the best news, which will also be the quickest. It is 50-to-1 against us but we’ll have a whack yet and do ourselves
Jeremy Paxman has written an excellent book, but it is not the book that he set out to write. His central argument is that, since the empire had a formative influence on modern India, it must also have had a formative influence on modern Britain. If it influenced the colonised, it must have influenced the
A book about a campaign to rid the world of malaria may not sound like a riveting read and Lifeblood is an unlikely page-turner. But you are soon caught up in the challenges of the campaign and, along the way, you learn a great deal about the labyrinthine world of aid, Africa, business and politics.
What’s not to like about Candida Lycett Green’s Seaside Resorts (Oldie Publications, £14.99)? Lovely colour photographs of over 100 of England’s prettiest seaside towns, accompanied by spry, architecturally informed little essays that give the reader the gist of each place: if there’s a better book to give for Christmas published this autumn, I’d like to
In The Fear Index, the latest thriller by Robert Harris, now heading for the Christmas bestseller lists, a brainbox hedge fund manager with little in the way of interpersonal skills discovers that his computer-driven trading system has flown out of control and threatens to send the world’s stock markets into a tailspin. Anyone familiar with
Calm reigned outside Kensal Rise Library this afternoon, following the dramas of the morning. Contractors arrived at 6am to board up the building after a court decided that Labour controlled Brent Council could close six libraries as part of its austerity drive. They discovered two people standing guard at the front door, who immediately stood-to and
It is Guildford’s turn to pick up the literary baton and kick off its 10-day Book Festival. Here is the first of our dispatches from Surrey. At the summit of the sprawling city of Guildford, with its cobbled streets and quaint hideaways, looms the Cathedral famed for featuring in The Omen. Last night its bells
It’s easy to blame the Americans, but sometimes — as the courts ruled in Perugia last week — they’re innocent. The case brought to mind another instance of injustice meted out to our transatlantic cousins, all in the name of that most exacting of mistresses: grammar. Of the many linguistic crimes we’ve accused them of
The prognosis is grave for the Booker Prize, say more than a few literary commentators in response to the news that a cabal of publishers, authors and agents plan to establish a “well-funded prize” that would have a “different set of priorities” to the Booker. For different “set of priorities”, read “high-brow”; the prize may
What’s it about? The Great Crash of 2008 inspired a glut of books aiming to demystify the credit crunch for the financially illiterate. Michael Lewis’ Boomerang attempts to do the same for this new Eurozone crisis. Based on articles he wrote for Vanity Fair, the book is a whistlestop tour through Iceland, Greece, Ireland, Germany
What’s the future for the footnote? Seems a strange question to ask about such an antiquated device. But modern technology, I think, could see a renaissance for that tricky little beast lurking at the bottom of the page. The thought has occurred because I’m currently reading one of those books (a real one, that is,
Over at Guardian Books, Irish playwright Belinda McKeon has picked her top 10 farming novels. Here’s her list: 1. Stoner by John Williams 2. Tarry Flynn by Patrick Kavanagh 3. O Pioneers! by Willa Cather 4. Let Us Now Praise Famous Men by James Agee and Walker Evans 5. That They May Face The Rising
Muslim, Hindu or Sikh, cricket is India’s first faith – or so the cliché says. Wisden, the cricket Bible, announced earlier this week that is to launch an Indian edition. I’m surprised that Wisden does not already have a sub-continent edition, given that money-spinning cricket innovations such as the Indian Premier League have accompanied the region’s boisterous economic expansion. You
Why do I keep hearing about Dickens? This is just the start of it. 7 February 2012 is the bicentennary of Dickens’ birth, and there are all sorts of commemorative shenanigans planned for next year. Expect lots more biographies and documentaries. Who’s Claire Tomalin? An award-winning biographer of Jane Austen, Thomas Hardy, Samuel Pepys, Mary
What is it about George Smiley that makes him translate so well onto the screen? The man doesn’t fight, he doesn’t gamble, and he barely seems to notice women (apart from the wife who continually cuckolds him) — in fact the only hobby that appears to brighten him up a bit is a homely interest
Thank you to all those readers who entered our online poetry competition last week. There were lots of novel, witty and entertaining entries on the ostensibly mundane subject of ‘games’. The winner is ‘hc18’, who should contact dblackburn @ spectator.co.uk to claim their bottle of champagne. Here is the winning entry: ‘The sweat, the fear, the aching limbs, the
Tomas Tranströmer, Nobel laureate, is the toast of the literary world at present. He was a near ubiquitous presence in the weekend’s books pages. Philip Hensher has written a profile in the Telegraph that says anything and everything you need to know about the enigmatic Swedish poet. ‘Tomas Transtromer was by profession a psychologist who
I have been awaiting a definitive biography of Nick Clegg for a while. And while I’m not entirely sure whether Chris Bowers’ Nick Clegg, The Biography quite gets there, don’t let me discourage you. This is an excellent book and a fascinating insight into the man. The trouble is that most of us who enjoy
It is difficult to conceive of a writer more passionately loved by his audience than Dickens was. It went on for a very long time, too. We learn from the historian David Kynaston that, immediately after the second world war, Dickens was one of the five most borrowed authors from public libraries. My grandmother was
At long last Johnson Studies is starting to take off. It had always been my hope, after publishing my own slim volume on Boris Johnson, that the baton could be passed to younger and fitter hands who would place the subject on a proper academic footing. Scholars from Balliol to Bangor would churn out papers
‘Oh no! I’m keeping it for an officer,’ said a girl called Irma when the 17-year-old Alistair Horne made his first determined moves. ‘Oh no! I’m keeping it for an officer,’ said a girl called Irma when the 17-year-old Alistair Horne made his first determined moves. A little later Horne was being trained as a
In the summer of 1780, at the height of the Gordon Riots, a London mob raised a cry of ‘kill the lawyers’ and headed for the Inns of Court. In the summer of 1780, at the height of the Gordon Riots, a London mob raised a cry of ‘kill the lawyers’ and headed for the
This book is about the fate of 230 French women sent to the German concentration camps in January 1943. Arrested as members of the Resistance, they first went to Auschwitz before being transferred to Ravensbrück and Mauthausen as the Allies advanced. In Auschwitz they witnessed some of the most terrible scenes in human history. Only
She was less bitchy than extremely shrewd and sharp-eyed, and didn’t hesitate to say about people exactly what she felt — though she did, I think, sometimes choose frightful people to munch up. . . She was less bitchy than extremely shrewd and sharp-eyed, and didn’t hesitate to say about people exactly what she felt
This is a compelling and somewhat disturbing novel, conducted with Susan Hill’s customary fluency. This is a compelling and somewhat disturbing novel, conducted with Susan Hill’s customary fluency. It features Simon Serailler, the author’s usual protagonist, investigating a cold case of a missing teenager who was last seen waiting at a bus stop some 16
Labels mislead. In the taxonomy of literature, both James Sallis and Agatha Christie are often described as crime writers. True, they have in common the fact that their stories tend to include the occasional murder, but there the resemblance ends. Sallis’s outlook is closer to that of Samuel Beckett, whom he cites as one of
There is an old joke which says that if you are lost in the desert, start making a salad dressing as someone will pop out of a sand dune and tell you that you are making it the wrong way. This, in essence, is what Felicity Cloake does in her recipe book Perfect (Fig Tree,
Sophia Waugh has written the Bookends column in this week’s issue of the magazine. Here it is for readers of this blog. There is an old joke which says that if you are lost in the desert, start making a salad dressing as someone will pop out of a sand dune and tell you that