The good, the bad and the ugly in books, exhibitions, cinema, TV, dance, music, podcasts and theatre.
The craters are all filled in, the ruins replaced, and the last memories retold only in the whispery voices of the old. Apart from celebrating the resilience of our parents and grandparents 70 years ago, why remember the Blitz? It was triggered by the desire to retaliate, either Churchill’s to the random dropping of bombs
The Potteries are one of the strangest regions in the British Isles, and Matthew Rice’s The Lost City of Stoke-on-Trent celebrates their extraordinary oddity. The Potteries are one of the strangest regions in the British Isles, and Matthew Rice’s The Lost City of Stoke-on-Trent celebrates their extraordinary oddity. Much of his text reads more like
There came a moment, very early in my reading of the latest volume of Christopher Isherwood’s Diaries, when a spell was broken. The relevant entry, written at his beach home in Santa Monica, California, was dated 12 November 1960. And the single, throwaway notation which caused me to re-evaluate, I fear definitively, my admiration for
Ecce Homo Erectus. Saul Bellow, John Updike … at 77, Philip Roth is the last of three giants still standing; and he actually does stand to write, at a lectern-like desk — scriptern? This verticality is crucial to his ideas of self and spirit, and is fully evident in his fiction, which is nothing if
The three knights of British cinema have taken disparate routes in their twilight years. Roger Moore jettisoned a hokum career for more worthwhile pursuits as a Unicef ambassador, while Sean Connery settled into his Bahamian golf-resort to champion Scotland’s independence. Michael Caine, however, has added a further veneer to a great body of work. The
In the 15th century men cross-examined and tormented a man because he preached some immoral attitude; in the 19th century we feted and flattered Oscar Wilde because he preached such an attitude, and then broke his heart in penal servitude because he carried it out. It is the most sincere compliment to an author to
Never eat at restaurants where they picture the food on the menu. Steer clear of books which explain the characters in a glossary. If you have to give your customers an idea in advance of what to expect, then it follows that your cooking/narrative may not be up to scratch. Never eat at restaurants where they picture the food on
Kafka was right: ‘Strange how make-believe, if engaged in systematically enough, can change into reality.’ But Barry Humphries, at the age of 76, manages much of the time to control his vacillating schizoid tendencies in nice equipoise. In his autobiography More Please, he stated that Edna Everage was a figment of his imagination. In this
Ferdinand Mount recalls the crisis years of the early 1970s, when Britain was pronounced ‘ungovernable’ The residents of Flitwick, Bedfordshire, were enjoying a wine-and-cheese party in the village hall when the invasion happened. Five hundred Tottenham Hotspur fans had run amok on the special train bringing them back from Derby, where they had been beaten
Governments in early modern England, having no standing army nor a civil service to speak of, required the consent of the governed. Authority had to be ‘culturally constructed’. That is the starting-point for Kevin Sharpe’s monumental investigation into royal branding in the age of the Tudors and Stuarts. In the first volume of a projected
This is the fifth in C. J. Sansom’s engrossing series of Tudor crime novels. This is the fifth in C. J. Sansom’s engrossing series of Tudor crime novels. His hero is Matthew Shardlake, a middle-aged, hunchbacked property lawyer who lives on the fringe of Henry VIII’s dangerously magnetic court. In his youth a zealous Protestant,
A saint of self-deprecation, Chris Mullin closed the first volume of his diaries A View from the Foothills ‘contemplating oblivion’ after his dismissal from ministerial office. A saint of self-deprecation, Chris Mullin closed the first volume of his diaries A View from the Foothills ‘contemplating oblivion’ after his dismissal from ministerial office. This was plainly
Some travel writers, in an attempt to simulate the hardship of Victorian journeys, like to impose artificial difficulties on themselves. A glut of memorably foolish yarns with titles like Hang-Gliding to Borneo or To Bognor on a Rhinoceros discredited the genre in the 1980s. In every case it would have been quicker for the authors
Will Self loves to go a-wandering; this much we know. For the past few years, he has followed the lead of authors such as Iain Sinclair, and undertaken huge, looping walks around city and country, before writing about the experience afterwards — in his case, in a column for the Independent. This ‘psychogeography’ (for such
Philip Hensher salutes ‘Freedom’, Jonathan Franzen’s latest great American novel Family is the engine that drives the novel. Relationships which are both fixed and constantly negotiated are what the novel, as a form, is about. We don’t choose our siblings, our parents, our children, but from day to day we choose, with the full volition
The only thing I can remember about a Tesco advertisement on the television the other night is the line: ‘No rest for the wicked.’ It was meant ironically, of course. The only thing I can remember about a Tesco advertisement on the television the other night is the line: ‘No rest for the wicked.’ It
You don’t have to accept the definition of how to do things, and you don’t have to follow other people’s choices and paths, OK? It is about your choices and your path. It is a measure of people’s continuing admiration for Chairman Mao that last year the White House communications director, Anita Dunn, unashamedly described
The cover of On Snooker shows the Queen Mother sizing up a shot, making a passable bridge but rather failing to get behind the cue. The book is by Mordecai Richler, the great Canadian novelist and essayist, author of The Apprenticeship of Duddy Kravitz and Barney’s Version, who died in 2001. On Snooker takes in
The best book so far about Bob Dylan, the only one worthy of his oeuvre, is his own astonishing Chronicles, Volume One (2004), but while we wait for the next fix, Bob Dylan in America will keep the withdrawal symptoms at bay. Sean Wilentz is a history professor at Princeton, and author of books about
Thoughtful Gardening, twice as long as the first two, beautifully produced in Germany, is a summation of the Lane Fox gardening doctrine, this time mixing more or less practical advice on particular plants — Later Clematis, Sociable Deutzias, Desirable Dahlias, the Etna Broom — with more discursive essays, recalling great gardeners, visiting gardens from Texas
There’s the pretty-much-mandatory South American setting, the gloomy reflections on the nature of reality and unreality, along with a clutch of wildly unreliable narrators. There’s the pretty-much-mandatory South American setting, the gloomy reflections on the nature of reality and unreality, along with a clutch of wildly unreliable narrators. It even has the added cachet of
Benjamin Franklin had this ambition for his body: that after his death it should be reissued ‘in a new and more beautiful edition, corrected and amended by the author’. Benjamin Franklin had this ambition for his body: that after his death it should be reissued ‘in a new and more beautiful edition, corrected and amended
My dread was that someone would ask me my opinion of Lermontov or Superstring Theory or the Categorical Imperatives of Kant. I would be exposed as a dull-witted fake. Having left the year before he came up, I could have reassured him there was little danger. Everyone, as he puts it, was in the same
Nigella Lawson is not sexy. She is the sort of woman who women think men think is sexy. No doubt some do: men who watch Top Gear and like all their pleasures to be equally obvious. But more men than you’d credit take one look at Nigella and hit an immediate problem: in spite of
Bob Woodward is the best (and perhaps nastiest) blackmailer in Washington. Sure, you don’t have to co-operate with him but you know what will happen if you don’t. Those who talk to Woodward are always treated kindly by the great stenographer; those who decline his advances invariably become the villains. Each time this happens it
Paul Johnson reviews Roy Hattersley’s life of David Lloyd George No politician’s life is so difficult to write as Lloyd George’s. All who have tried have failed, and wise heavyweight historians have steered clear. I applaud Roy Hattersley’s courage in tackling this rebarbative subject and congratulate him on his success in making sense of Lloyd
There are turbulent marriages. And then there are turbulent marriages in which the husband ends up getting beheaded on a stage. This book describes the latter. One doesn’t normally need to encourage publishers to hyperbole, but in the case of Katie Whitaker’s subtitle, there might have been a case for giving it a bit more
Within the past month I have been to an 80th and a 90th birthday lunch, both of them highly festive occasions. And now here is an entertaining, erudite and thought-provoking meditation on the matter of age by Jane Miller (aged 78). The so-called twilight years are no longer quite that, for some of us. This
Among the most famous of all living poets, Nobel Laureate, highly educated, revered for his lectures and ideas as well as for his poetry, Seamus Heaney has a daunting reputation. He remains, however, enjoyed by a broad spectrum of readers, accessible, song-like, direct, concerned with everyday details and human relationships. Essentially, Heaney’s poetry strikes to
