The good, the bad and the ugly in books, exhibitions, cinema, TV, dance, music, podcasts and theatre.
The sea, the sea. Land-lubbers who write or read England’s history omit it from its heart. At least, we have done so since the aeroplane and electric communications reduced the maritime components of warfare and wealth and travel. The popular imagination banishes piracy, Adrian Tinniswood’s subject, to romance and comic-strips. So we are startled by
The execution for desertion of a young officer during the first world war goes disastrously wrong. What exactly happened? Who was there, and why have some of those involved met untimely deaths? This is the crux of a novel that is a marriage of who-done-it and commentary on the class-ridden attitudes of the early 20th
‘Two things fill the mind with ever new and increasing admiration and awe, the oftener and more steadily we reflect on them: the starry heavens above and the moral law within.’ Oren Harman uses this quote from Immanuel Kant to open one of the chapters of The Price of Altruism, and it’s an observation that
If you wanted to write about Marilyn Monroe, how would you go about it? The pile of biographies, memoirs and novels about poor, sad Marilyn is already teetering. How could you make something new of her life? Clever Andrew O’Hagan has come up with an answer: by writing as her pet dog. How the hound
Ever since Edward II’s deposition and grisly murder in the dungeons of Berkeley Castle in 1327, his reign has always been regarded as a particularly embarrassing interlude in English history. Ever since Edward II’s deposition and grisly murder in the dungeons of Berkeley Castle in 1327, his reign has always been regarded as a particularly
The emperor Augustus was the original god/father. Julius Caesar was often referred to as ‘the divine Julius’, but his nephew (and adopted son) was the first Roman to have temples dedicated to him in his lifetime. If uncle Julius had died a natural death, or in some brave battle, the Roman upper class would never
The 22nd Earl of Erroll, Military Secretary in Kenya in the early part of the second world war, was described by two of his fellow peers of the realm as ‘a stoat — one of the great pouncers of all time’ and ‘a dreadful shit who really needed killing’. The 22nd Earl of Erroll, Military
Unlike most financial writers, who are too serious for their own good, Michael Lewis has a sense of humour and he deploys it deftly. In Liar’s Poker, his semi-autobiographical account of the Salomon Brothers bond desk published 20 years ago, the traders always explain a market move they do not understand by blaming it on
The last time I saw Benazir Bhutto was at Oxford, over champagne outside the Examination Schools, when she inquired piercingly of a subfusc linguist, ‘Racine? What is Racine?’ Older and richer than most undergraduates, and as a Harvard graduate presumably better educated, she was already world famous, and was obviously not at Oxford to learn
It has taken more than half a century, but at last the Anglophone world has woken up to the fact that 20th-century communist history makes a superb backdrop for fiction. So extreme and dramatic were the Russian revolution, the arrests and the purges, Hitler’s invasion of the Soviet Union and the imposition of Stalinism on
For 30 years Alastair Crooke was ostensibly a British diplomat working in Northern Ireland, South Africa, Columbia and Pakistan. Ten years ago he became Middle East adviser to Javier Solana, playing an important role in negotiating ceasefires between Israel and Hamas, as well as helping to end the siege of the Church of the Nativity
One’s past life is, usually, comfortably past. One’s past life is, usually, comfortably past. Susan Morrow’s first husband, Edward, is so firmly in her past that his second wife even sends her Christmas cards, signed ‘love’. Apart from that once-a-year token, she hasn’t heard from Edward in two decades. Their early marriage had been brief,
‘With time,’ writes David Remnick, ‘political campaigns tend to be viewed through the triumphalist prism of the winner.’ Never more so, perhaps, than in Remnick’s idolatrous new biography of Barack Obama, which presents the First Black President’s ascension to the White House as nothing less than a glorious saga. Deeply read — if not rooted
Ian Massey is a writer, artist and lecturer and this is his first book. There have been two previous books on Procktor: a ghosted autobiography and a slim volume to celebrate his 60th birthday. About the second, one reviewer wrote that what was next required was ‘a full retrospective to answer the critical question that
Once upon a time, an untrustworthy story- teller seemed rather an enterprising creation — and some great books were written this way, like Lolita and The Good Soldier (from which Blake Morrison takes an epigraph). But nowadays having a fibber as compère seems painfully predictable. Only if our dodgy raconteur is strikingly engaging or funny
It was the neon lit windowless corridor in the surgery in Dumfries that did it. It was June 1993 when Maggie Keswick and her husband Charles Jencks heard the prognosis that she had two to three months to live as the breast cancer had spread to her liver and her bones. In fact Maggie was
If stupidity is defined by the inability to connect an oft-repeated policy with the failure that it always produces, then Irish republicanism is easily the stupidest political movement in Europe. The claim of Irish republicanism is that it unites Catholic, Protestant and dissenter under the common title, Irishman. This is mountebank bluster. In fact, Irish
Ignore the title, with its subliminal echoes of Mills & Boon. Aminatta Forna’s magnificent second novel is not really about love. Its themes are far grittier, and all the more compelling for it: war, loss, and how a society emerging from civil strife must reinvent its own history, fabricating a tolerable narrative in order to
Contrary to the Romantic image of him as a solitary scribbler in a garret, William Shakespeare was a deeply collaborative artist. He wrote his plays for a particular theatre company, tailoring each part to the actor he knew would perform it. He began his career patching up old plays in the existing repertoire and ended
Long before the Allies landed in Normandy in June 1944 and began their advance across France, preparations were underway for what to do about the civilians who had been displaced by the German occupiers. What everyone feared was a repeat of the chaos that followed the first world war, when refugees and returning prisoners of
On the first page of this book there is a sentence so extraordinary that I had to read it several times to make sure my eyes weren’t playing up. On the first page of this book there is a sentence so extraordinary that I had to read it several times to make sure my eyes
‘My wife doesn’t understand me,’ the man said to his Jewish psychoanalyst. ‘I should be so lucky!’ was the reply. It’s a common complaint, not being understood. Yet surely only the most shameless would like others to know us exactly as we are or as we know ourselves. This is one reason some writers shrink
David Mitchell’s fifth novel, an exotically situated romance of astounding vulgarity, has some things to be said for it. David Mitchell’s fifth novel, an exotically situated romance of astounding vulgarity, has some things to be said for it. It will certainly entertain the simpler reader that lurks within all of us, the one that hungers
After 14 months working as an inter-dealer bond broker, posh totty Thompson was fired in February 2008 for gross misconduct. Her crime? Writing a warts-and-all article of the broking industry which was published in The Spectator. Enjoy- ment of this memoir (basically an extension of that original piece) will, I suspect, depend on either an
Final Demands is the third volume in Frederic Raphael’s trilogy, which began with the publication of The Glittering Prizes in 1976. Final Demands is the third volume in Frederic Raphael’s trilogy, which began with the publication of The Glittering Prizes in 1976. The second in the series, Fame and Fortune, did not follow until 2007;
When I became a cub reporter on the Times in 1963 (the front page was still covered with small-ads), an old sweat in the newsroom gave me two pieces of advice. The first was: Don’t get too proficient at shorthand. If you do, you’ll find yourself in a stuffy courtroom, recording the proceedings verbatim. The
For the impartial reader, this book is doubly disagreeable. An account of National Socialist short-wave radio broadcasts to the Arab world in the second world war, it prints pages of anti-Jewish propaganda as monotonous as it is vile. The author then shows no sympathy at all for Arab grievances, which makes the brew no more
One morning in 1979 a six-year-old American boy, Etan Patz, set off on foot to catch the bus to school — the first time he had been allowed to walk to the bus stop by himself. One morning in 1979 a six-year-old American boy, Etan Patz, set off on foot to catch the bus to
Ninety years after the ill-fated European peace settlement dictated by the victorious Allies at Versailles, it is fitting that a publisher should commission a series of 32 monographs devoted to the men and consequences of the Peace entitled ‘Makers of the Modern World’. Ninety years after the ill-fated European peace settlement dictated by the victorious