The good, the bad and the ugly in books, exhibitions, cinema, TV, dance, music, podcasts and theatre.
‘You must write it all down’ is the age-old plea to elderly relatives about their childhood memories. ‘You must write it all down’ is the age-old plea to elderly relatives about their childhood memories. Fortunately P. Y. Betts, briefly a novelist in the 1930s, was 50 years later persuaded to do just that. Even more
Philip Hensher’s King of the Badgers is set in Hanmouth, a small English coastal town described so thickly that it is established from the outset as effectively a character in itself. Philip Hensher’s King of the Badgers is set in Hanmouth, a small English coastal town described so thickly that it is established from the
Will it ever end? The romantic interest in the architecture, history and life lived in the country house is as alive today as it was in 1978, when Mark Girouard wrote his seminal Life in the English Country House. There are now some three million members of the National Trust — guardians of the flame
Frederic Raphael was the first man to use a four-letter word in The Spectator: the work of his fellow playwright Stephen King-Hall, he wrote in 1957, made him ‘puke’. Frederic Raphael was the first man to use a four-letter word in The Spectator: the work of his fellow playwright Stephen King-Hall, he wrote in 1957,
Time was, or perhaps still is, though my friends long ago learned to behave, that a cutesy gift to musical acquaintances was a long, narrow notepad with the words ‘Chopin Liszt’ printed at the top and decorated with clefs and notes, free-floating and unplayable without a stave to anchor them. Stories from a Book of
Rocco LaGrassa was ‘stout around the middle . . . wee at the ankles, and girlish at his tiny feet, a man in the shape of a lightbulb’. In Salvatore Scibona’s first novel we join this lightbulb of a man on perhaps his darkest day: the day on which the police arrive at his door
Melanie McDonagh has written the Bookend column in this week’s issue of the Spectator. Here it is for readers of this blog. In July, the world’s most famous restaurant, elBulli, closes, to reopen in 2014 as a ‘creative centre’. Rough luck on the million-odd people who try for one of 8,000 reservations a year. It’s
Montaigne has acquired new followers, thanks to Sarah Bakewell’s award winning biography. This has inspired a breath of enthusiasm in the form; the essay is back in vogue. Writing in the FT, Carl Wilkinson reviews recent efforts from Hanif Kureishi and Alaa Al Aswany. He also mentions the foundation of Notting Hill Editions, an imprint
Jonathan Coe is surprised by his eminence. ‘I’m just a comic Agatha Christie,’ he says. Coe was at the Guardian last night in King’s Cross – the newspaper’s book club has been reading What A Carve Up, Coe’s satire of the Thatcher years. Coe understands the book’s continued popularity and relevance. ‘The political mood has
Tessa Hadley’s The London Train is the dark horse in the race for the Orange prize for women fiction writers. And it is this month’s Spectator book of the month. The novel has an understated, almost kitchen sink quality to it. Austen Saunders reviewed the book for this blog, and wrote: ‘The London Train is
Tessa Hadley’s The London Train will feel very much at home in the Paddington branch of W.H. Smith. For like almost all of Dickens’ novels, The London Train involves a series of journeys to and from London. Unlike Dickens, however, Tessa Hadley chooses to subject her characters to repeated trips to South Wales – a
The Arts Council (ACE) has not one ounce of sentiment. Faced with a tight spending settlement, ACE has withdrawn £111,000 funding from the Poetry Book Society (PBS), founded by T.S. Eliot to promote poetry. In consequence, the PBS is threatened with closure, along with the prestigious T.S. Eliot prize. This has inspired a furious reaction
Philip Larkin is not the best poet in HMP Norwich, but could console himself by licking a colouring book. The effects of high-speed rail would be familiar to Dickens. Martin Amis’s complaints would be familiar to Proust. John Fowles’s desk is emigrating to Texas. Ebooks are indeed the wild frontier; and Google might not be
Though not strictly a weekend literary supplement, the Flavorwire has 19 pictures of achingly sharp authors working at their typewriters. They include Tennessee Williams, John Cheevor, Slyvia Plath, Francoise Sagan and William Faulkner. A.C. Grayling was on the Today programme this morning, debating his secular Bible, The Good Book, with the Canon Chancellor of
When the Observer critic Philip French started writing on the cinema in the early 1960s, he once explained in an interview, books about film were a rarity. ‘Now I have three book-lined rooms dedicated just to the cinema, including 50 books on Hitchcock and 30 on film noir.’ I Found it at the Movies (Carcanet,
Sam Leith explores H. G. Wells’s addiction to free love, as revealed in David Lodge’s latest biographical novel In the history of seduction, there can have been few scenes quite like this one: ‘Am I dreaming?’, she said when she opened her eyes. ‘No,’ he said, and kissed her again. ‘But what about Jane?’ she
In 1988 Katherine Swift took a lease on the Dower House at Morville Hall, a National Trust property in Shropshire, and created a one-and-a-half acre garden in what had been a field. In The Morville Hours (2008), she placed that garden in its landscape and wrote one of the finest books about the history, philosophy
For centuries, the history of the far North was a tapestry of controversies and mis- understandings, misspellings, dubious arrivals and equally dubious departures. Pytheas the Greek sailed north from Britain in the 4th century BC, found a place where the sea, land and sky seemed to merge, and was trounced by later scholars as a
Aimez-vous Heidegger? According to his admirers, he was the most significant and influential philosopher of the 20th century. For Hannah Arendt, despite her claims eventually to have found the perfect husband in Heinrich Blucher, Heidegger was the love of her life. She was his precocious teenage pupil when he lectured on Plato’s Sophist at Marburg
Twenty years ago, in 1991, I was shown round the National Palace in the Haitian capital of Port-au-Prince. A government official led me through long rococo halls crammed with oriental rugs, gilded boule clocks and vases of deep pink roses. Little had changed since Jean-Claude ‘Baby Doc’ Duvalier had fled Haiti in 1986. The Hall
This book, written by someone whose husband was for three years prime minister of Britain, is impossible to review. Yes, it is dull, but it is so triumphantly, so ineffably, dull it enters a breezy little monochrome world of its own. There is no characterisation, for no value judgments are passed, except those on Mrs
Edward King has written the bookend column in this week’s issue of the Spectator. Here it is for readers of this blog. When the Observer critic Philip French started writing on the cinema in the early 1960s, he once explained in an interview, books about film were a rarity. ‘Now I have three book-lined rooms
There is much howling and gnashing of teeth in India at the moment. Pulitzer Prize winning journalist and author Joseph Lelyveld has written a book about Gandhi, which, it is alleged, portrays Gandhi as having homosexual and racist tendencies. When in South Africa, Gandhi lodged with a German body-builder and architect, Hermann Kallenbach. Lelyland quotes
The weather for the weekend looks bad, so usually a jaunt to Oxford, the dankest place on earth, would be ill advised. But this weekend is different. The undergraduates are long gone for Easter and the Sunday Times’ literary festival is in town from Saturday 2 April until Sunday 10th April. The headline speakers are
By day five without shampoo, I didn’t dare take off my hat for fear of frightening children with horrible hair. Despite its awfulness, my itchy week on a Tudor personal hygiene regime was as good an argument as any for experimental archaeology, or ‘trying things out’. It was all part of the research for my
Martin Amis is tired of London. He is emigrating to America again – this time for good, probably. In an interview with Ginny Dougary in last Saturday’s Times, Amis explained that his reasons are personal. There was a mournful tone to his answers, a sighing resignation that contrasts with the verve of those he gave
The renowned Indian economist Amartya Sen probably isn’t used to hearing his writing described as ‘the logic of the clever school boy’ but, in India:A Portrait, this is Patrick French’s response to academic notions that don’t ring true. In his new book about the evolution of India since Independence, French amalgamates history, biography and reportage
If you want to read the kind of tribute properly owing to the great children’s author Diana Wynne Jones, who died on Saturday, you should probably go elsewhere. (You might start with Jenny Davidson, an American blogger, academic and children’s writer who has a Wynne-Jonesian sensibility and a gift for conveying enthusiasm in print; Neil
Martin Amis is emigrating to America, according to a wide-ranging interview in the Times (£) at the weekend. The reasons are primarily personal (being near his mother-in-law primarily among them, as well as best-bud Christopher Hitchens). But the interview reads more like a farewell piece. The forty-year battle of Amis vs the British establishment is