The good, the bad and the ugly in books, exhibitions, cinema, TV, dance, music, podcasts and theatre.
One could easily get lost in Jerusalem’s myriad compartments. To begin with there is Preston Pinner, CEO of ‘AuthencityTM’, otherwise known as the ‘hip hub’, a ‘contemporary cultural consulting and production house’ deviously at work to manipulate consumer tastes. Then there is Preston’s father, David, a hard-drinking, skirt-chasing junior minister about to depart to ‘Zambabwia’,
Patrick Oxtoby is 23 when his fiancée tells him she can’t marry him. He leaves home for a boarding house by the sea. He fantasises a bit about breaking his fiancée’s spine, but focuses on the people he meets in his new town. Shaun Flindall and Ian Welkin, the other two men in the boarding
Surviving, by Allan Massie The Death of a Pope, by Piers Paul Read Coward at the Bridge, by James Delingpole Alcoholism, with its lonely inner conflict between escapism and conscience, is an inexhaustible subject for literature. The emotional agony of addiction is fascinating, as long as it is other people’s. Allan Massie, the illustrious Scottish
Frank O’Connor was once stopped on the road west of Kinsale by a man who said to him: ‘I hear you’re a famous writer. I’d like to be a famous writer too, but ’tis bloody hard. The comma and the apostrophe are easy enough, but the semicolon is the very divil.’ The man was wrong,
David Crane’s latest book is much more interesting than its title would lead you to believe. If you buy it hoping for a collection of stories of derring-do and British pluck, you won’t be wholly disappointed: you will indeed learn how Frank Abney Hastings, having got himself sacked from the Royal Navy for behaving like
Lynn Barber’s interviews are one of the main reasons to subscribe to the Observer: on any Sunday when a piece of hers appears, it’s always the first thing to turn to, even — or make that especially — when she’s profiling someone unsympathetic. Not for nothing has she earned the nickname the Demon Barber. On
Attlee’s Great Contemporaries: The Politics of Character, edited by Frank Field This book consists of a 50-page introduction in which Frank Field, shrewdly though large- ly in eulogistic vein, analyses the character and political principles of Clement Attlee, followed by 28 essays, many of them book reviews or articles first published in the Observer, in
Dublin has a special relationship with fiction, which in recent years has inspired some excellent crime novels. Among them is Declan Hughes’s Ed Loy series, which gives a distinctively Irish twist to the flawed private investigator of American pulp fiction. Loy has many of the classic characteristics of the breed, including the tastes for hard
The City & The City, by China Miéville China Miéville’s second book, Perdido Street Station, made his name by reimagining fantasy as thoroughly as had M. John Harrison’s Viriconium or Alasdair Gray’s Lanark. He followed it with two more novels set in the same world, and a children’s fantasy (Un Lun Dun) that was hailed
Political feuds have always been at the heart of politics. The most public of these have occurred when the adversaries were confronting each other across the floor of the House, leaders of different parties bound by their roles to oppose each other on every occasion even when they had scant belief in the superior merits
For 20 years after the war, the Resistance was the presiding myth of French society. No one would say that now. A generation that never experienced occupation and respected no icons, began to ask awkward questions. The claim of the résistants to have made a serious contribution to the military balance was the first thing
Harold Macmillan seemed well prepared when he succeeded a sick and humiliated Anthony Eden as prime minister after the disaster of Suez in 1957. An intellectual who knew about economics, a tough debater, an advocate of closer relations with Europe, Macmillan had been a ministerial success at Housing, the Foreign Office and the Treasury. He
The Peasants’ Revolt of 1381 was a singular event in English history, not merely a food riot, but an organised outbreak of pure class warfare which, leaving aside John Ball’s rabble-rousing, Biblical egalitarianism, was untrammelled by constitutional quarrels or religious disputes. It was fomented by vicious class legislation — the Statute of Labourers of 1351
The Angel’s Game, by Carlos Ruiz Zafón Standing behind the high altar in Prato Cathedral last week, binoculars trained on a fresco some 40 feet above, I found myself puzzling over a barely discernible detail in a scene of the nativity of St Stephen. At the foot of the new mother’s bed a winged figure,
Enlightening: Letters 1946-1960, by Isaiah Berlin, edited by Henry Hardy and Jennifer Homes The Book of Isaiah: Personal Impressions of Isaiah Berlin, edited by Henry Hardy Isaiah Berlin was the most popular don of his time. While Maurice Bowra boomed, and David Cecil giggled and Trevor-Roper intrigued, Berlin talked his way into the hearts of
Ruth Maier’s Diary, edited by Jan Erik Vold, translated by Jamie Bulloch ‘Why shouldn’t we suffer when there is so much suffering?’ wrote Ruth Maier to her friend the Norwegian poet Gunvor Hofmo in a letter smuggled from the ship deporting her from Oslo to Auschwitz in the autumn of 1942. Ruth was then 21,
‘Ajuxtaposition of incompatible elements.’ So Chris Fujiwara describes one of Otto Preminger’s more obscure films in his critical biography of the Hollywood director. But the phrase so encapsulates what I had come to think about Preminger’s entire output that I underlined it, underlined it again, and made a mental note to quote it at the
Leith: Scotland’s Independent Art School, by George Ramsden Founded in 1988 in a former church for Norwegian seamen by the inspirational teachers Mark and Lottie Cheverton, Leith Art School comes of age this year. This book tells the story of its founders and recounts how the school survived their tragic early deaths (aged 39 and
As any fool knows the freedom of the press is, in the end, the freedom of the chap who owns the press. Much the same may be said of blogs. Which is why I won’t waste time by recommending that you could buy my father’s latest novel and skip straight to suggesting that you damn
Pendulum, eh? Well, there’s certainly something swing- ing back and forth here. Pendulum, eh? Well, there’s certainly something swing- ing back and forth here. Two years ago, lest we forget, Cultural Amnesia came out — all 900-odd pages of it. Now here’s Clive with another fat wedge of ‘essays’, some of which are essays, and
I normally make it my policy when writing book reviews never to read anyone else’s. I normally make it my policy when writing book reviews never to read anyone else’s. It clogs up your mind with someone else’s prejudices and wrong opinions,where- as in fact you are being paid to bang on about your own.
‘Pauline was as beautiful as it was possible to be’, the Austrian statesman Metternich once observed. ‘Pauline was as beautiful as it was possible to be’, the Austrian statesman Metternich once observed. ‘She was in love with herself alone, and her sole occupation was pleasure’. Metternich was not quite fair. Pauline, as sculpted in Canova’s
Here’s a tricky question for your next pub quiz. What do the following people have in common? Here’s a tricky question for your next pub quiz. What do the following people have in common? The protagonist of Christopher Nolan’s film Memento, Scott Bakula’s character in Star Trek: Enterprise and Steve Wozniak, one of the co-founders
Eleven years after Jean Rhys’s death in 1979, Carole Angier published a monumental biography, a model of its kind, with 70 pages of notes and seven of bibliography. Lilian Pizzichini’s ‘portrait’ of Rhys is a book of a wholly different kind. The best way to describe it is that it bears the same relationship to
There are more lesbians in fiction than you could shake a stick at, of course. Graham Robb, writing about late 19th-century fict- ional lesbians, has observed that the fin-de-siècle lesbian was educated at a boarding school or a convent. She was frighteningly self-possessed, wore dark colours, read novels, smoked cigars, injected morphine or inhaled ether,
‘Jamaican history’, wrote Karl Marx, ‘is characteristic of the beastliness of a true Englishman’. In The Dead Yard, Ian Thomson laments the consequences, with the grim conclusion that the British planters cast Jamaica aside like a sucked orange once they had exploited their estates. Having shaped Jamaica’s past for good or ill, Britain has not
Rennie Airth’s first John Madden mystery, River of Darkness, published ten years ago, was set in 1921. His second, The Blood-Dimmed Tide, was set in 1932 and this, the third and reputedly the last, takes place in the closing months of 1944. The series spans, therefore, more than 20 years. In the first, Inspector Madden
Gillian Tindall has had the ingenious and sympathetic idea of combining biography and topography in an overview of British visitors to Paris from 1814 to the present day — an enterprise of formidable research and enviable lightness of touch. Selecting various members of her own extended family, she traces their temporary residence in Paris and
A couple of years ago, Adam Zamoyski — who is, yes, a friend — told me that he was revising The Polish Way, a history of Poland he had published back in 1987. At first he had thought merely to shorten a few over-long paragraphs and check facts. But as he re-read his work, he