The good, the bad and the ugly in books, exhibitions, cinema, TV, dance, music, podcasts and theatre.
Many among you, I know, have been fretting that thanks to a combination of political correctness, New Labour educational policy and the European Union’s usurpation of everything the free-born Englishman holds dear, big-picture narrative history is on the point of vanishing from the earth. All that our children’s children will know of British history, you
A few weeks ago it looked like this column might have to be rechristened Feather Duster Jobs of the Month. The High Court judgment that The Telegraph pay £65,000 in damages over a “spiteful” book review would, we panicked, lead to a climate of fear on Grub Street, with literary editors terrified to publish anything
The US president’s summer reading list has recently been at the centre of a media furore. The White House released a statement that Barack Obama had bought two books at Martha’s Vineyard bookstore to add to the three he had brought with him from Washington. Other sources say that Obama actually bought five books at Bunch
The Oxford English Dictionary and the Collins Dictionary have both published their new shorter versions. A crop of words has been defined and introduced, replacing those words that are now deemed to be obsolete. This is the age of the social network. ‘Re-tweet’ has been officially recognised by both dictionaries as a noun and a
Hilary Spurling and Tatjana Soli have won the James Tait Black prize. The award is prestigious, for being decided by scholars and students of literature. Soli won for her debut novel, The Lotus Eaters, which is set during the dying moments of the Vietnam War as a group of western journalists survey the decline. The
In chess, the king is never taken. When defeat is inevitable, the losing player resigns. And so it is in war. Defeated leaders sue for terms. Or they are toppled and replaced by fresh leaders who sue for terms, like Napoleon in 1814 and 1815, Reynaud in 1940 and Mussolini in 1943. ‘Wars are finally
Since I began to watch films on video and not so much in cinemas, I have found that I sometimes get the itch to rewind reality itself, in order to check on what I have seen. There must be many oddities in my way of seeing of which I am less aware. Julian Rothenstein,
E. L. Doctorow became an American household name with the publication of Ragtime in 1975. It was a jaunty book (later a successful movie) which lightened an American mood darkened by the lingering war in Vietnam. It benefited from having authentic historical figures — Harry Houdini and J. P. Morgan among them — interspersed with
Bees are news. The advent of a sinister condition dubbed Colony Collapse Disorder has concentrated many minds on the future of the honey bee, not least in the US where the disorder is prevalent and pollination by bees accounts for billions of dollars’ worth of agricultural produce. Bees are news. The advent of a sinister
It is 60 years since Nikolaus Pevsner published Middlesex, the first in ‘The Buildings of England’ series. It is 60 years since Nikolaus Pevsner published Middlesex, the first in ‘The Buildings of England’ series. The small, southern county was chosen for the prosaic reason that it didn’t need much rationed fuel for research. His achievement
The looming centenary of the world’s most notorious shipping calamity, when the Titanic ruptured its starboard flank as it scraped the side of an iceberg on its maiden voyage in April 1912, presents publishers with a tactical challenge. The looming centenary of the world’s most notorious shipping calamity, when the Titanic ruptured its starboard flank
What grabbed me about Newman and His Contemporaries was a puff from an Australian writer quoted on the back. This book, it said, ‘is like a Victorian Dance to the Music of Time’. Sounded like my kind of thing, especially since the central figure interlocking the characters is in this case not Widmerpool but that
‘The two great gifts of the Greeks to humanity, said the poet Hölderlin, were Orpheus-Love and Homer-Song.’ ‘The two great gifts of the Greeks to humanity, said the poet Hölderlin, were Orpheus-Love and Homer-Song.’ The great German poet’s statement shows him as belonging to our own phase of Western civilisation. For us Orpheus — born
This novel frightened me several times. Here is how Chan Koonchung, brought up in Hong Kong but now living in Beijing, does it. He sets the story in a very near future, 2013, that closely resembles China today, but with two creepy additional elements: an entire month, during 2011, has vanished from most written records,
Alexis de Tocqueville is a prophet for all seasons, continually reinterpreted as the zeitgeist shifts. He sailed to Jacksonian America to compile a report on the prison system, and ended up writing a meditation on the nature of democracy that remains in print after 160 years. In this latest addition to the fertile field of
She was born Kathleen Annie Pannonica Rothschild. Her father, Nathaniel Charles Rothschild, an ardent lepidopterist, named her Pannonica, Nica for short, as a tribute to the region in Hungary where he met her mother and captured a particularly interesting moth. Nica married a French aristocrat and became the Baroness de Koenigswarter. When he divorced her
Patrick Skene Catling has written the Bookends column in this week’s issue of the magazine. Here it is for readers of this blog: She was born Kathleen Annie Pannonica Rothschild. Her father, Nathaniel Charles Rothschild, an ardent lepidopterist, named her Pannonica, Nica for short, as a tribute to the region in Hungary where he met
I entered the Harbour Bookshop in Dartmouth in search of warmth. I had been camped on Dartmoor for a couple of nights, taking part in a cadet weekend, back in the days when I believed the army might be my vocation. Dartmouth is several miles from the Dartmoor National Park and a section of 13
Behind fashion as usual, I’ve finally read One Day, the runaway success by David Nicholls. To be honest, I was slightly underwhelmed by the time I finished it. The combination of too much hype and the excruciating plot contrivance in the closing pages left me unsatisfied – irritated even. But, I’m largely nit-picking. It’s an extraordinary
1) The Edinburgh Book Festival has begun in earnest this week. The festival is one of the lengthiest in the country, running from 13-29 of August. The festival was originally launched in 1983 and staged every two years before becoming a yearly feature in 1997. The Book festival links in with the other festivals in
It was 70 years ago yesterday that Winston Churchill and Franklin D. Roosevelt, floating perilously across a sea of U-boats, signed the declaration of wartime aims that came to be known as the Atlantic Charter. The maps preserved at the Churchill War Rooms (CWR), Churchill’s former Westminster bunker, are heavily speckled by pinholes, not least
Tristram Hunt reviews his parliamentary colleague Kwasi Kwarteng’s book, Ghosts of Empire. ‘Ghosts of Empire marks a return to traditional, Tory scepticism shorn of ideology and purpose. There is little rhyme or rhythm to this history; it is a tale of chaps doings things and then other things happening, mostly to foreigners. Which is both
Comedy is a serious business. The number of young people who seek to make a living making other people laugh seems to grow every year. Jonathan Lynn starts Comedy Rules (Faber & Faber, £14.99) by insisting that it is not a primer for would-be writers, but of course it is, and much more. Lynn was
In the early 20th century, explorers were goaded and galvanised by the blanks on the maps — the North and South Poles, and the mist-draped floes and glaciers around them. Ernest Shackleton, Robert Scott, Robert Peary and Roald Amundsen set off with one prevailing purpose: to reach the extremities of the earth. Hardy, maniacal, even
At about 5.15 p.m. on 9 April 1953, Wilma Montesi, a 21-year-old woman of no account, leaves the three-room apartment in a northern suburb of Rome that she shares with her father, a carpenter, and five other members of the family and never returns. Thirty-six hours later her body is found by the edge of
Autobiography provides a sound foundation for a work mainly of fiction. A voyage in an ocean liner provides a sound framework of time and place. Michael Ondaatje was born in Ceylon in 1943 and migrated to Canada at the age of 19. The Cat’s Table is an entirely believable, warmly empathetic novel about an 11-year-old
Karl Miller wrote a book called Doubles, exploring the duality of human nature, Jekyll and Hyde, and such like. Duality fascinates him. Another book was Cockburn’s Millennium, a study of the Scottish judge and autobiographer, an Edinburgh Reviewer, a figure so prominent in Edinburgh’s Golden Age that the society which sets out, not always successfully,
In 1977, Roy Kerridge was a lavatory cleaner; in 1979 he was a well-known contributor to The Spectator. Yet this was no rags-to-riches discovery of a literary talent. Apart from anything else Kerridge had perfected a line in second-hand clothes — a short sheepskin coat, a brown Dunn’s suit, pastel shirts — that fitted his
The first two volumes of Mervyn Peake’s Gormenghast trilogy were published in 1946 and 1950, but by 1954, when I was first alerted to them by a school-friend, Peake had entered what his first biographer John Watney called ‘a doldrum period’. Overtaken by a wave of younger writers — Kingsley Amis, John Osborne et al