The good, the bad and the ugly in books, exhibitions, cinema, TV, dance, music, podcasts and theatre.
For Professor Overy Britain between the two world wars was, as his title proclaims, a morbid age. There was a general view among intellectuals that civilisation — itself a creation of intellectuals — was in crisis, and society in danger of collapse. There was an ‘institutionalised pessimism’ that became ‘an overriding intellectual fashion’ that spread
Given the nature of his own work there was something delightfully, shall we say, mischievous about David Brooks’ review of Simon Schama’s (absurdly titled) The American Future: A History. The into was especially good: Some people collect stamps, and others butterflies, but I have a thing for Brilliant Books. The Brilliant Book is the sort
D-Day: The Battle for Normandy, by Anthony Beevor The Forgotten Voices of D-Day, by Roderick Bailey, in association with the Imperial War Museum Sixty-five years ago the largest seaborne assault force in history was put ashore on the beaches of Normandy. Memory of the day is now confined to a diminishing number of great-grandfathers, but
Please, someone give me a pound for every PR floozy who’s told me over breakfast that she’s ‘writing a novel’ about the dirty world of, er, PR. One minute you’re sucking up a nice creamy plate of scrambled eggs at the Wolseley, the next you’re trying to control your acid reflux. (But control it you
Stranger to History: A Son’s Journey Through Islamic Lands, by Aatish Taseer The publication of Stranger to History is likely to be turned into a fiery political event in Pakistan. The author is the half-Indian son of Salman Taseer, the glamorous and controversial Governor of the Punjab and one of Pakistan’s most important newspaper proprietors.The
Chaplin’s Girl, by Miranda Seymour Love Child, by Allegra Huston Virginia Cherrill was an exceptionally pretty young woman when she turned up in Los Angeles in the late 1920s, looking for fun and adventure. Here Charlie Chap- lin spotted her, in the front row at a boxing match, and invited her to star in his
‘Book for book,’ John Banville is quoted as saying on the cover of this one, ‘[Graham] Swift is surely one of England’s finest novelists.’ This may be Irish for ‘but of course he hasn’t written all that much’, though eight novels and a collection of short stories isn’t bad going and it would be odd
At a time in modern, secular Britain when religion is seen not as the saviour but as the cause of many of society’s problems, we have become skilled not so much at turning the other cheek as turning a blind eye. Thank God (maybe literally) for writers like Michael Arditti, whose invigorating novels dare to
What is inspiration and how does it work? Music and literature have a long record of mutual nourishment: Beethoven inspired Tolstoy who inspired Janacek, and each Kreutzer Sonata was different; miraculously rich and strange. Jeanette Winterson, inspired by Glyndebourne’s 75th anniversary, has asked some distinguished fellow-writers each to produce a work inspired by an opera.
Home to Roost and Other Peckings by Deborah Devonshire, edited by Charlotte Mosley As Alan Bennett says in his introduction, ‘Deborah Devonshire is not someone to whom one can say “Joking apart . . .” Jok- ing never is apart: with her it’s of the essence, even at the most serious and indeed saddest moments.’
A passage in that most insidiously influential of histories, 1066 And All That, tries to explain who the Scots, Irish and Picts really were: The Scots (originally Irish, but by now Scotch) were at this time inhabiting Ireland, having driven the Irish (Picts) out of Scotland; while the Picts (originally Scots) were now Irish (living
With her brilliant new book, Hilary Mantel has not just written a rich, absorbingly readable historical novel; she has made a significant shift in the way any of her readers interested in English history will henceforward think about Thomas Cromwell, the man at the heart of what the historian Geoffrey Elton, who first put him
The title story of this exceptional collection is the only one directly concerned with the presiding figure of K. K. Harouni, a wealthy Pakistani patriarch. In each of the others, a drama quietly unfolds among his extended family and dependents. In ‘Nawabdin Electrician’, Harouni’s Mr Fixit is attacked by a robber while driving his new
Every so often one reads in the Times or the Daily Telegraph an obituary of an old warrior that simply leaps from the page. A heroic rescue mission in the second world war, an escape by tunnelling, Burma, Kenya, Aden, a secret journey to Lhasa disguised as a yak-herder, and that’s just the military stuff.
On this book’s title page its publishers enlarge on Peter Ackroyd’s ‘retelling’: his book, they declare, is at once a translation and — wait for it — an ‘adaptation’ of Chaucer, and from the beginning, you are made aware of what form this adaptation will take. This is how Chaucer introduces his Prioress in the
Dons don’t usually appear to much advantage in fiction. Dons don’t usually appear to much advantage in fiction. Sillery, Samgrass, Cottard, Lucky Jim’s professor, the History Man, all Snow’s Masters: these spring to mind at once. Why are they so disgusting? Perhaps some are false fathers to young people expecting more attention, like the pompous
Amanda Craig recently rebuked her fellow novelists for evading the contemporary scene and setting their novels in the past. We should be more like the Victorians, she said, and have the courage to write about our own times. If the novel is to be relevant to readers, it should address today’s issues. Why, she asked,
It was in The Spectator, in 1954, that the Movement was christened, and its members’ stereotyped image was soon set: white, male (except for Elizabeth Jennings), non-posh poets who rhymed and scanned, hated Abroad, thought T. S. Eliot was arse, Didn’t Come From London, and disconcerted the students at the redbrick universities where they taught
Nocturnes is a collection of five longish short stories, four about musicians and a fifth about friends who once bonded over musical tastes. As the title neatly suggests, the book is filled with characters living in obscurity; the stories are populated by people, often musicians, who have been forced to downgrade their ambitions dramatically. While
Fool’s Gold, by Gillian Tett Millions of words and scores of official reports on the credit crisis have poured out. There has been no shortage of criticism, especially from political leaders eager to deflect responsibility from themselves. The catastrophe is a man-made disaster, and in years to come historians will ask how it could possibly
Say Goodbye to the Cuckoo, by Michael McCarthy Wings and Rings: A History of Bird Migration Studies in Europe, by Richard Vaughan On a May night in 1967, walking home down a Dorset farm track, I counted the song of 13 nightingales. Today in those woods no nightingale is heard. For 40 years I visited
It was probably a mistake for Monica Ali to call the hero of her third novel Gabriel Lightfoot. The reader thinks of Hardy’s bucolic swains and the reddle-man’s cart disappearing over Egdon Heath, whereas instead there lumbers into view a 42-year-old hotel chef with an incipient bald spot and inadequate leisure. On the other hand,
Brooklyn, by Colm Tóibín Colm Tóibín’s Brook- lyn is a simple and utterly exquisite novel. The writing is so transparent, so apparently guileless, that I kept wondering what trickery Tóibín had used to keep me so involved, so attached, so unaccountably warmed. The tale’s simplicity is, in a sense, like life’s: an Irish girl called
From John Banville’s TNR review of The Letters of Samuel Beckett, 1929-40: In London, Beckett considered a number of possible day jobs, toying with the notion of becoming an airline pilot or–wait for it–an advertising copy writer. (There is food for a dinner-party game, devising the jingles that Beckett might have thought up for washing
The Oxford Despoiler, by Gary Dexter Twisted Wing, by Ruth Newman Windows on the Moon, by Alan Brownjohn The Oxford Despoiler is a collection of eight stories introducing Henry St Liver, a Victorian detective, and his biographer and assistant, Olive Salter. Henry is tall and lean, with a lofty bearing but the habits of the
With the economy in recession, the close attentions of the IMF, taxation rising to punitive levels and a general sense of our having lived beyond our means, reminders of the 1970s are all around us at present. Last week, both the death of the union leader Jack Jones and Alistair Darling’s extraordinary budget in their
The Children’s Book, by A. S. Byatt I should declare an interest. Nineteen years ago, I believe that A. S. Byatt saved the lives of my unborn twins. When I went into premature labour at 22 weeks, I was rushed into hospital, put on a drip, and told it was absolutely vital Not to Panic.
To some it might seem unbelievable that a goal scored at a football match at Anfield between Arsenal and Liverpool 20 years ago could be the event around which anyone could write an entire book. But this is exactly what Jason Cowley has done. Despite a childhood spent in the East End, and with a
For years an intimate friend of my mother Rachel Cecil, Frances Partridge inhabits my memory from early childhood. Before she reached 50, her dark, delicate skin was already seamed with a thousand wrinkles like a very old woman’s, although she remained youthful all her prodigiously long life, retaining an acute power of sympathy. She would