The good, the bad and the ugly in books, exhibitions, cinema, TV, dance, music, podcasts and theatre.
Homicide, by David Simon; Death Dyed Blonde, by Stanley Reynolds David Simon was a Baltimore Sun reporter who, having spent a Christmas Eve observing the city’s homicide squad, somehow got the department’s permission to spend an entire year with them as a ‘police intern’. The result, in 1991, was this stunning book, now published for
Dostoevsky: Language, Faith and Fiction, by Rowan Williams While the Anglican communion has been disintegrating, its symbolical head, the Archbishop of Canterbury, has been writing an analysis of Dostoevsky’s novels. This in itself presents a need for explanation: Dostoevsky has generally been assessed as an habitué of the territory between agnosticism and atheism, but Rowan
Every new biographer of Shakespeare walks splat into the same old problem. What to say? Since he can’t tell us anything we don’t know, he must either tell us things we do know or things we don’t need to know. Jonathan Bate’s ingot-heavy volume announces, in its lackadaisical title, an intention to take all possible
Masters and Commanders, by Andrew Roberts; Behind Closed Doors, by Laurence Rees Andrew Roberts is one of the liveliest as well as the most considerable of contemporary historians. He is hard-working and exceptionally well-informed, lucid, highly intelligent, pugnacious, occasionally perverse (though much less often than he used to be), combining an impressive grasp of the
The Widows of Eastwick, by John Updike The Witches of Eastwick was published in 1984; it was a retrospective cele- bration of the new sexual liberties and powers available to women in the 1960s. The book aroused interest both by its unexpected boldness of design and by its frankness and it became a successful movie.
Craven House, by Patrick Hamilton Patrick Hamilton (d. 1962) was a supremely odd fish, a kind of case-study in psychological extremism who drank himself to death at the early age of 58. His later novels, written when the drink was cracking him up, offer the curious spectacle of a mind that has travelled too far
Africa: Altered States, Ordinary Miracles, by Richard Dowden Out of Africa always something new in armchair solutions, with the eternal certainty that none will work. Colonialism? Bad. Decolonisation? Disastrous. Neo-colonialism? Wicked. Bob Geldof? Er, no. So, leave the place alone and its bonjour Mugabe, or worse. For well-wishers from the north it has been a
A Whispered Name, by William Brodrick This is the third of William Brodrick’s sensitively wrought novels featuring his contemplative monk, Anselm, an attractive and credible Every- man who has occasionally to leave his monastery to investigate ambiguous problems of evil, forgiveness and, in this case, sacrifice. Brodrick’s hero is aptly named since Saint Anselm, an
More jobs Americans won’t do: write their own novels. Mind you, I wrote this post, so I’m in no position to carp or quibble. Still, this is ingenious: Admit it. Certain things make you desperately unhappy, and you don’t know why–the Sbarro at the mall, the taste of Jolly Ranchers in winter, the woman in
Reviewing Thomas Frank’s new book The Wrecking Crew: How Conservatives Rule, last week, Michael Lind wrote: But “The Wrecking Crew” is a polemic, not a dissertation. With rare exceptions like John Kenneth Galbraith, conservatives — from Juvenal and Alexander Pope to H. L. Mencken, Tom Wolfe and P. J. O’Rourke — have been the best
In times of anxiety, I always turn to Jane Austen’s novels for tranquil distraction. Not that Jane was unfamiliar with financial crises and banking failures. On the contrary: she knew all about them from personal experience. As a young girl she seems to have regarded bankers as rather glamorous figures. In Lady Susan, written when
We’ve just uploaded Lloyd Evans’s Web Exclusive report on the latest Spectator / Intelligence Squared event – Howard Jacobsen discussing his novel ‘The Act of Love’ with Peter Florence. You can read it here.
Gabriel García Márquez, by Gerald Martin In July 1965, or so the story goes, a Colombian writer in early middle age, living in Mexico City, decided to take his wife and two young sons on a short and much needed holiday to Acapulco. He had had some small successes, and was respected in the small
There is a startling passage in this book. It recounts an intimate moment (among many, it should be said) between the President of the United States, George W. Bush, and his Secretary of State and long-time adviser, Condoleezza Rice. They are sitting on the porch of Bush’s Texas ranch. It is December 2006 and, after
Once, when Adam Nicolson was asked the question ‘will you be writing a family memoir?’, he answered, ‘I think my family is the most memoired family in the history of the universe. It’s like a disease. “No” is definitely the answer to that.’ But Sissinghurst: An Unfinished History is at least a quarter family memoir.
Love All, by Elizabeth Jane Howard Love All is a dreadful title — sounds like the memoirs of a lesbian tennis player — for an elegantly old-fashioned novel. It is set in the late 1960s; but there is little to anchor it to this period: the occasional references to the Beatles, or to Mary Quant,
Florence Nightingale, by Mark Bostridge No eminent Victorian has shaped our daily lives in more ways than Florence Nightingale. Her influence continued far beyond her 20 months of bloodsoaked toil in Scutari and the Crimea. Her vision of a public health-care system was the foundation of the National Health Service. Disassociating nursing from religious vocation
Journal, by Hélène Berr, translated from the French by David Bellos ‘What must be rescued,’ wrote Hélène Berr in her diary on 27 October 1943, ‘is the soul and the memory it contains.’ The need to see and understand and later to remember is the theme that runs through Berr’s remarkable diary of Jewish persecution
A hundred chorus girls sashaying through a Busby Berkeley musical. Bugs Bunny munching nonchalantly on a carrot. Errol Flynn and Basil Rathbone in Hollywood’s greatest swordfight (‘The Adventures of Robin Hood’ or ‘Captain Blood’ — take your pick). Bette Davis pulling the trigger in ‘Deception’. James Cagney smashing a grapefruit into a moll’s face. Alex
Allan Massies dips into Brideshead Revisited Having just read something about the new film of Brideshead Revisited, I picked up the novel, opened it at random, and then, some two hours later, a good part of my working evening was gone. I suppose it is now Waugh’s most popular novel — his Pride and Prejudice
The Age of Wonder, by Richard Holmes Just what some- one who studied science should be called was mooted at the 1833 meeting of the British Association for the Advancement of Science. ‘Formerly the “learned” embraced in their wide grasp all the branches of the tree of knowledge, mathematicians as well as philologers, physical as
Origins: A Memoir, by Amin Maalouf, translated by Catherine Temerson The Lebanese Amin Maalouf is best known as a writer of historical novels in French, such as Le Rocher de Tanios, which won the Prix Goncourt in 1993. Yet before moving to Paris during the Lebanese civil war of the mid-1970s, Maalouf was a newspaper
Searching for Schindler, by Thomas Keneally Which would you rather read, The Great Gatsby or F. Scott Fitzgerald’s day-by-day account of the whisky he drank and the cigarettes he smoked while writing it? La Comédie humaine or a list of the cups of coffee Balzac downed, between midnight and sunrise, while putting all of those
A Strange, Eventful History: The Dramatic Lives of Ellen Terry, Henry Irving and Their Remarkable Families, by Michael Holroyd It is rare today to come across a non-fiction book that does not include in its title or subtitle the assertion that the tale it tells is ‘remarkable’, ‘extraordinary’, or ‘fas- cinating’, publishers presumably having decided
We’ve just posted up Lloyd Evans’s review of Thomas Friedman’s talk at Intelligence Squared last night on his new book, Hot, Flat and Crowded. Why the world needs a green revolution and how we can renew our global future. It is well worth reading.
In 1956 I joined other new kids on the block at Punch magazine: Quentin Blake, Ed McLachlan, Mike Williams, Honeysett, Ray Lowry, Ken Pyne, Bill Tidy, Pav, Petty, plus Gerald Scarfe and Ralph Steadman who were going to blow the world apart with their blood-and-guts drawings. While Punch’s pages were curling at the edges, up
Henry: Virtuous Prince, by David Starkey Among the glories of Flanders and Swann is a long, erudite and silly shaggy-dog story about the Tudor theatre. It culminates in the appearance as from nowhere of a score for the tune known as ‘Greensleeves’ — or ‘Greenfleeves’ as Flanders and Swann have it. Someone wonders aloud who
Alan Furst, The Spies of Warsaw George Pelecanos, The Turnaround Ian Rankin, Doors Open Alan Furst’s espionage novels have a melancholic tinge, depending, as they so often do, on the debacles of recent history and, on a personal level, on the mechanics of betrayal. His tenth, The Spies of Warsaw (Weidenfeld, £16.99), is set in
The Horsey Life, by Simon Barnes Dolly Dolores was a big-bottomed mare with a white star on her forehead who loved to jump. Simon Barnes experienced an instant connection with her on his first ride. He had never owned a horse before, but his wife persuaded him to buy her. He spent a royalty cheque