The good, the bad and the ugly in books, exhibitions, cinema, TV, dance, music, podcasts and theatre.
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
The Telegraph profiles Jennifer Egan, whose A Visit From the Goon Squad is well tipped to win the Orange Prize. ‘A Visit from the Goon Squad is a work of imaginative energy and charm, and it deserves to win Egan many converts this side of the Atlantic. So much the better if those converts went
London has been the subject of more anthologies than Samuel Pepys had hot chambermaids. This is fitting, as an anthology’s appeal — unexpected juxtaposition — matches that of the capital itself. But it does mean that any new contender has to work hard to justify its publication. London has been the subject of more anthologies
The trouble about writing a history of the popes is that there are so many of them. Usually elderly when elected, most of them have only lasted a few years. The longest reign was that of the mid-19th-century pope, Pius IX, Pio Nono, who clung on for 31 years. In our own times, Pius XII
The cautionary slogan ‘less is more’ has never been the American writer Joyce Carol Oates’ watchword. The cautionary slogan ‘less is more’ has never been the American writer Joyce Carol Oates’ watchword. Over the last 40 years she has written a torrent of books — 115 at last count. Her prose is torrential too, and
With its vast areas of barely explored wilderness, and its heady mix of the sublime, the bizarre and the lushly seductive, South America would appear to have all the ingredients to attract the travel writer. Yet the recent travel literature on the continent has been surprisingly scant and taken up by lightweight, gung-ho tales of
How curious that such an outsize man, in physique as well as personality, should be remembered today mainly for giving his name to a small fish. For the 19th century, Bismarck was no herring but a leviathan. Between 1862 and 1890 he created Germany, seeing off first the Austrian empire and then France. He dominated
Other People’s Money — and How the Bankers Use It by Louis D. Brandeis was a collection of articles about the predatory practices of big banks, published in book form in 1914. Nearly a century later, it remains in print. In 1991 Danny de Vito starred as ‘Larry the Liquidator’ in the film Other People’s
Jeremy Treglown finds something for everyone in Penguin’s new Mini Modern series It’s a cool silver-grey in colour, weighs two and a half ounces and fits flexibly into your pocket. It opens easily to reveal words imaginatively chosen and arranged in sequences so absorbing and surprising that they can make you miss your bus stop.
Mark Mason has written this week’s Bookend column in the magazine. Here it is for readers of this blog: London has been the subject of more anthologies than Samuel Pepys had hot chambermaids. This is fitting, as an anthology’s appeal — unexpected juxtaposition — matches that of the capital itself. But it does mean that
There are two prevailing views on Charlie Sheen: he has never fulfilled his potential, and he has never had any to fulfil. Either way, the meltdown of glorified soap star has received disproportionate attention – most of it a mix of faux-sympathy, awkward chuckling and superior disgust. However, Bret Easton Ellis has torn it all
David Philipps’ Lethal Warriors opens with the true story of the discovery of a dead body by the roadside in suburban, white-picket-fenced America. One naturally thinks, given the subject matter, that this dead man is a traumatised soldier who has taken his own life. It is not – it is the body of a traumatised
The bell seems to be tolling for the high street bookshop. The HMV Group, which owns Waterstone’s, has issued its third straight profit warning. Waterstone’s is supposedly on target for this financial year, but 11 of its branches were forced to close across the UK and Ireland in February alone and the company has conceded
Kazuo Ishiguro has written screenplays, but baulks at adapting his own novels. Faber and Faber are publishing Alex Garland’s script for the film, Never Let Me Go, which went on general release last week. Ishiguro has written the introduction to the edition of his friend’s script. It is a quietly evocative meditation on friendship, creativity
Much twittering and blogging occurred yesterday about a new publishing format called the “flipback” – a species of compact paperback. Word first reached me from Canada, and doubtless the conversation spread even further than that. The main talking point was the clever headline that a subeditor on the Guardian had given the story: Could this
The Telegraph has an exclusive extract from Henning Mankel‘s latest book, the last to feature Kurt Wallander. ‘When Wallander arrived at Ystad police station, there was a message waiting for him at the front desk, from Martinsson. Wallander swore under his breath. He was hung-over and felt awful. If Martinsson wanted to speak to him
The book world has been abuzz with the Arabic Booker. High-quality fiction is connecting with political conflict and the convulsions in the Middle East have revealed a literary culture often closed to the West. Boyd Tonkin describes how the ceremony itself was infected by the surrounding political drama: ‘Yet even here, under the obligatory tank-sized
At more than 700 pages including appendices, Guardian writer Dorian Lynskey’s 33 Revolutions Per Minute: A History of Protest Songs (Faber & Faber, £17.99) certainly can’t be accused of skimping on the details. Adherence to the pun of the title has resulted in a thorough if necessarily left-wing history of political dissent since the Thirties,
The collapse of the Soviet Union spawned an entire genre of literature: the Gulag memoir, produced by victims of the USSR’s concentration camps. A few masterpieces were published in the West, or in samizdat, before the 1980s, for example Evgenia Ginzburg’s renowned Into the Whirlwind and the works of Alexander Solzhenitsyn.But as Soviet-style communism fell
The distinguished writer Brian Masters in his handsomely produced book on the actors of the Garrick Club has set himself a formidable task. Not only, until he reaches the mid-20th century, does he have to assess the art of long-dead actors from contemporary accounts; he is also writing a history of the theatrical profession from
The long war between France and the US has its liveliest consequence in the world of film: Hollywood does movies, the French do cinema. In terms of equipment, the Yanks were the pioneers, but France’s Charles Pathé was the first tycoon and — more importantly — George Méliès was the inventor, by accident, of the
The first thing to be said about this remarkable book is that it has nothing to do with animal rights. The title is borrowed from the archaic Greek poet Archilochus, who is known mainly for a single aphorism: ‘The fox knows many things, but the hedgehog knows one big thing.’ Isaiah Berlin borrowed this gnomic
In the late 1960s I grew up in the London borough of Greenwich, which in those days had a shabby, post-industrial edge. Behind our house on Crooms Hill stood a disused London Electricity Board sub-station. Broken glass crunched underfoot and buddleia grew amid the fly-tipped junk. I went there chiefly to shoot at pigeons and