The good, the bad and the ugly in books, exhibitions, cinema, TV, dance, music, podcasts and theatre.
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
Even brilliantly accurate satirists can become boring unless they have something to say. That is the triumph of CrickiLeaks. Purporting to be a series of spoof Ashes diaries that reveal the innermost thoughts of famous English and Australian cricketers, CrickiLeaks doesn’t just superbly capture the players’ voices and vocabularies, it also makes them say surprising,
I received a call from the Irish writer Paul Howard, who, as Ross O’Carro-Kelly (‘Rock’) has written a number of popular satires about Ross and the Celtic Tiger, a series now necessarily discontinued. Howard is presently embarked on a new project — a biography of Tara Browne, who famously ‘blew his mind out in a
Stieg Larsson was a rather unsuccessful left-wing Swedish journalist who lived off coffee, cigarettes, junk food and booze, and died aged 50 after climbing seven flights of stairs, having recently sold to a publisher the series of crime novels now called The Millennium Trilogy. It was originally called The Men Who Hate Women, and in
Marcus Berkmann has written the Bookends column in this week’s issue of the magazine. Here it is for readers of this blog: 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 by insisting that
1.) Colin Dexter’s famous creation, Inspector Endeavour Morse, is due to fill our screens once more. ITV has announced that a new Morse film will be on the box next year. However, it comes with a twist. The film will be set in 1965 and feature a younger version of Morse, who will be played
A Day in the Life of a Smiling Woman is a rare example of a dying breed: the collected short stories. Spanning from 1966 to 2000, the singularly spindly tales document the heady social change of the period in question. But more than that, they demonstrate the delightfully tricksy nature of the short story as
The communications revolution has gone viral in Britain this summer. The recent riots and looting appear to have been co-ordinated by smart phones and social networking sites. Gone, it seems, are the days when hoodlums fomented insurrection with a combination of furtive messages and indiosyncratic tic-tac. I doubt that facilitating mass disorder was quite how Steve
This morning’s Bookseller observes that, with one or two exceptions, bookshops have escaped from being looted during the recent London riots. Independent shops and high street retailers alike remain largely unscathed; even those situated in Croydon and Hackney, where criminality was particularly acute yesterday. Electrical shops and sports clothing vendors have, of course, fared less
Margaret Drabble has enjoyed a long and distinguished career as a novelist and biographer. But do her short stories match the standard of her other work? Stevie Davies, in the Independent, certainly thinks so. He confesses to having been ‘desperately moved’ by the collection. In it, she argues, ‘Drabble exposes and anatomises the tissue
Kate Petty Recently, I read Behind the Scenes at the Museum by Kate Atkinson. It was a set book for school and I sat down reluctantly to begin reading it in the morning; five hours later I was still sitting in exactly the same place, completely engrossed in the story. The voice of the protagonist,