The good, the bad and the ugly in books, exhibitions, cinema, TV, dance, music, podcasts and theatre.
Alexander McCall Smith is best known for his No. 1 Ladies’ Detective Agency series of novels (Tears of the Giraffe, Morality for Beautiful Girls, The Kalahari Typing School for Men etc.) as well as the Isabel Dalhousie mysteries and the 44 Scotland Street series. But McCall Smith has a number of other strings to his
Of the four Prime siblings of the Beacon farm, Frank, the second boy, was, throughout their early lives, ‘almost invisible’. He did everything late, spent most of his time alone, and was a dunce at school, where he bemused teachers and children alike. They never knew what to make of Frank, they said; what went
One of the most interesting books from the last year has been Revisiting Keynes: Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren (MIT Press, £20) — a reprint of a 1931 essay by J.M. One of the most interesting books from the last year has been Revisiting Keynes: Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren (MIT Press, £20) — a
A review of another biography of that tiresome poser, Lady Hester Stanhope, sent me back to Kinglake’s Eothen and the account of the visit he paid the Queen of the Desert, who dwelt in tents (as he found she didn’t) and reigned over wandering Arabs (which wasn’t the case either). A review of another biography
‘The Half’ is how actors refer to the half hour before their play begins, when they ready themselves, steady themselves, for their performance. For 25 years Simon Annand has been allowed to catch these vulnerable moments and the result is a series of intimate, revealing and beautiful portraits. Many of the subjects are famous, a
In 1972 Tim Robinson — a Yorkshireman by birth, a Cambridge mathematician by training, and an artist by vocation — moved to live on Inis Mor, the largest of the three Aran Islands that lie off the Galway coast. His first winter there was hard and ominous: long nights, big storms, and a series of
‘The Half’ is how actors refer to the half hour before their play begins, when they ready themselves, steady themselves, for their performance. It seems a bit early to be discussing how to survive the 21st century. After all, there are 92 years left in which to do it, years in which we can expect
Gardens: An Essay on the Human Condition, by Robert Pogue Harrison When I was a student, my Cambridge supervisor said, in the Olympian tone characteristic of his kind, that the only living literary critics for whom he would sell his shirt were William Empson and G. Wilson Knight. Having spent the subsequent 30 years in
Cartoons and Coronets: The Genius of Osbert Lancaster, introduced and selected by James Knox It is a cliché of book-reviewing to write, of a humorous book, ‘I began reading it on a train. It made me laugh out loud several times, to my embarrassment in the crowded carriage.’ Well, it happened to me recently with
A Most Wanted Man, by John le Carré Location, location, location is as much the mantra of espionage fiction as it is of another profession’s literature celebrated for making things seem what they are not. And location, not just in the sense of topographical reality, but of mood, atmosphere and the specifics of time and
A Political Suicide: The Conservatives’ Voyage into the Wilderness, by Norman Fowler To write a political memoir is difficult. Too bland, too afraid to be rude about former colleagues, you risk boring the general reader while disappointing your publisher. Too critical, you lose the few friends among your former colleagues you have left, while appearing
One Fifth Avenue, by Candace Bushnell One of life’s intriguing mysteries was how Carrie Bradshaw managed to fund a rapacious Manolo Blahnik habit whilst spending her entire working life sitting in her knickers and vest in front of a laptop in her bedroom typing drivel about men. This was skilfully glossed over, and my enjoyment
If as a child you found your parents embarrassing then this hiss-and-tell memoir will make you feel a lot better, as Cosmo Landesman had parents who were off the Richter scale of embarrassment. Jay and Fran were two wacky, middle-aged American egotists who arrived in ‘the land of the stiff upper lip’ and caused mayhem.
Bernard Donoughue has produced several valuable books, one of them a biography of Herbert Morrison (written with George Jones) and another an account of No. 10 under the Labour governments of the 1970s, which contains the often quoted, though rarely acknowledged, observation of James Callaghan just before the 1970 election, to the effect that there
Mlinaric on Decorating, by Mirabel Cecil and David Mlinaric I wish this book weren’t so heavy. It is full of such good things that I wanted to carry it around so that at every spare moment I could have another wallow in David Mlinaric’s beautiful world. In the end I compromised and spent hours with
Indignation, by Philip Roth Indignation, Philip Roth’s 29th book, is about the sophomore year of its narrator, Marcus Messner, who attends college in 1951, a time when the Korean War hangs in the background, waiting to devour America’s youth. Marcus is a brilliant student, the first of his family to enter university, but he has
Stranger in the House: Women’s Stories of Men Returning from the Second World War, by Julie Summers The second world war is big business. Television, film, novels — whole industries have evolved to bring home to us the images of a ‘just’ war. Then there are the thousands of books, on politics, economics, Hitler and
Just Me, by Sheila Hancock My Word is My Bond, by Roger Moore Me Cheeta, by Cheeta Everyone knows what the Hollywood autobiography is like. It contains the assurance that the author has been made to feel exceptionally ‘humble’ exactly at those points where someone ordinary might expect to feel smug and triumphant — a
Munich, by David Faber David Faber’s account of the Munich crisis has been published to mark the 70th anniversary of the four-power conference that made appeasement a dirty word. But it is timely as well as commemorative. True, the recent comparisons drawn between Hitler and Putin are dangerously misplaced. Nonetheless, Western politicians are finding themselves
The Stepmother’s Diary, by Fay Weldon ‘These modern, all-inclusive families of ours, created by the passing sexual interest of a couple in each other … can give birth to chaos’, observes Emily, a promiscuous north London Freud- ian analyst and mother of Sappho, the stepmother of the title. The novel begins when pregnant Sappho, on
The Act of Love, by Howard Jacobson From ‘Readers’ Wives’ to Molly Bloom, the idea of a man somehow sharing his loved one sexually is a common and complex one. ‘No man has ever loved a woman and not imagined her in the arms of someone else’, asserts Felix Quinn, the pompous narrator of Howard
Italy’s participation in the first world war was so far from being inevitable that it took nearly nine months for the country’s government to decide on which side they should fight. In the first week of August 1914, Italian troops were massed close to the French border, ready to invade, and General Cadorna was drawing
No life of quiet desperation for Ansel Adams (1902-84). He was at his happiest tramping around the sublime countryside of the American West, with a camera and tripod strapped to his back, taking photographs of the mountains, canyons, rivers, forests and clouds he met along the way. And what photographs they are! Their warmth and
Allan Massie on Life & Letters ‘Reviewing two books about Hemingway in The Spectator (19 August 2006) Caroline Moorehead asked: ‘How far is it right for biographers to write about subjects they so patently dislike? Hemingway is portrayed as bullying, narcissistic, foul-tempered, slovenly and miserly.’ No doubt he was all these things, some of the
Leviathan or, The Whale, by Philip Hoare On the beautiful jacket of this book, a whale disappears from view. Its blue flukes are all that are left behind as its body slips away unseen. That tail-only view has become what we know of the whale. It is the picture of our ignorance. We don’t know
Resistance: Memoirs of Occupied France, by Agnès Humbert Paradoxically, wrote Jean Paul Sartre, never had French intellectuals been so free as they were under the German occupation, for having lost all normal rights to speak out, each was forced to question every thought and ask himself: ‘Rather than death…?’ In practice, most of the writers
Chicago, by Alaa al-Aswani Because I spend part of each winter in Egypt, friends from time to time ask me to recommend, not a guide, but a book that will give them the ‘feel’ of that country. Invariably my choice has been The Cairo Trilogy of Naguib Mahfouz, the only Arab writer to have won
The Believers, by Zoë Heller Zoë Heller’s Notes on a Scandal won wide publicity and was deservedly praised for its depiction of female malice and the unhappiness that fosters it. Her present novel is so markedly different that it might have been written by another hand. This is no mean feat, but the effect is
It has been famously written, and often observed, that every unhappy family is unhappy in its own way. Never was this truer than in the case of the Wittgensteins, who were also, some of them, crazy. I take notes in books for review and in this one I wrote ‘nuts’ 23 times. Ludwig, the famous