The good, the bad and the ugly in books, exhibitions, cinema, TV, dance, music, podcasts and theatre.
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
What I Talk About When I Talk About Running, by Haruki Murakami There’s nothing tremendous, startling, or even revelatory about Haruki Murakami’s latest book. The whole exercise is too pointedly modest for that. But it’s a likeable and often rewarding excursion into the writer’s experiences as a runner. It’s also, perhaps inevitably, about Murakami’s life
Sea of Poppies, by Amitav Ghosh, read by Lyndham Gregory Ever been called a ‘dung-brained gubberhead’ or had your face compared to ‘a bandar’s bunghole’? Welcome aboard the Ibis, a rancid former slaving schooner now transporting migrants, coolies, criminals and opium from Calcutta to China. Here amidst the pounding seas we have the perfect backcloth
All gone, now of course. Bryan Appleyard has more: I was once persuaded, against my better judgment, to write to Samuel Beckett in Paris – I knew him slightly – asking him about his hopes and resolutions for the new year. The telegram arrived – ‘Hopes colon zero stop resolutions colon zero stop.’ Christopher Ricks
There are writers so prolific that one wants to shout, ‘Oh, do give it a rest!’ There are others so costive that one wants to shout, ‘Oh, do get a move on!’ It is into the second of these categories that Francis Wyndham falls. This 403-page volume contains all the fiction, three books in total,
Alasdair Gray: A Secretary’s Biography, by Rodge Glass It would be easier to write a biography of Alasdair Gray if he were Chinese. There would be no need to divide image from word, myth-making from realism, truth from ideology. He would be reverentially portrayed as a master of pictography conveying the struggle for harmony between
Ghost Train to the Eastern Star, by Paul Theroux When Paul Theroux set off from Victoria Station in 1973 his plan was to cross Europe and Asia, taking as many trains as he needed to get him to Tokyo, returning on the Trans-Siberian Express. From the four-month journey came a travel book that was not
Letterati: An Unauthorised Look at Scrabble and the People Who Play it, by Paul McCarthy Make no mistake: Scrabble is a brutal game. Given a chance to foil an opponent, the dearest friend will turn sly and dogmatic. No surprise then to discover that in North America Scrabble is a cut-throat business, in which computer-generated
Eden, the only male British prime minister known to have varnished his fingernails, was easily the best-looking individual, of either sex, to occupy that office in the 20th century. With Our Times, A. N. Wilson concludes the sequence of British history books he started in The Victorians, and the sentence that opens his chapter on
Star of the Morning: The Extraordinary Life of Lady Hester Stanhope, by Kirsten Ellis Unlike her republican-minded father, ‘Citizen Stanhope’, Hester declared ‘I am an aristocrat and I make a boast of it’. After falling out with him (her mother had died when Hester was four) and quarrelling with his heir, her brother, in her
Michael X: A Life in Black and White, by John Williams Poor Michael. His life became a complete mess and in 1975, aged 41, he was hanged for murder in the prison in Port of Spain, Trinidad. One of the victims was his young cousin, Skerritt, a local barber; the other, more sensationally, was an
Ettie: The Intimate Life and Dauntless Spirit of Lady Desborough, by Richard Davenport-Hines There was something not quite right about Lady Desborough. Richard Davenport-Hines, in this intelligent and well-written book, extols her charm, her wit, her courage, her vitality, her infinite capacity to convince any man that he was uniquely talented and the only person
Pompeii, by Mary Beard In the early morning of 25 August AD 79 Mount Vesuvius blew its top. First came a rain of pumice stones; the roofs of Pompeii collapsed under their weight. Worse was to come: a burning lava, flowing at great speed against which no living being could survive. Pompeii was a city
Ruth Rendell, it turns out, as well as being the queen of ‘adventure sex’, is a furious decentraliser. In this small book of 1989 she argues not only for devolution for Scotland and Wales but autonomy for the English regions and a ‘cantonisation’ of the UK along Swiss lines. Undermining the Central Line is nothing
The Guardian, bless it, has a super feature asking a judge from each of the Booker Prize’s 40(!) years to recall their experiences as a member of the panel. It’s a terrific read and well worth your time. (One surprise, to me at least, the amount of love shown JG Farrell’s The Siege of Krishnapur).
Via Clive Davis, the Washington Post offers a list of five great unfinished novels. As you might expect The Man Without Qualities and The Last Tycoon are among those who make the cut. One that’s missing: the novel that was shaping up to be Robert Louis Stevenson’s masterpiece, Weir of Hermiston. What other novels should
Travelling Heroes: Greeks and Their Myths in the Epic Age of Homer, by Robin Lane Fox In Book II of the Iliad, Homer describes for the first time a Greek advance across the plain of Troy. Various similes are deployed to convey its impact, most of them precise and vivid, as Homer’s similes invariably are.
This strange novel is described as a ghost story, although it reads like a nervous breakdown in which both writer and reader are embedded. So constricted is the narrative that the central figure, Jim Smith, delivers no opinion of his own, although his past life appears to have been full of incident: extensive travel, a
‘The result is a minor masterpiece, so good that one can even forgive the author’s affected forays into demotic English (‘don’t’ and ‘wouldn’t’ for ‘did not’ and ‘would not’, etc.).’ Setting aside the writer’s mistake — ‘don’t’ being the contraction of “do not” rather than ‘did not’ — this sentence brought me up sharp ,
When I first experienced literary life in London it was 1955 and poor Anthony Eden was prime minister. His delightful wife Clarissa was to be seen at literary parties and, amazingly enough, still is. The great panjandrums were Cyril Connolly and Raymond Mortimer on the Sunday Times, Philip Toynbee and Harold Nicolson on the Observer,
True North: Travels in Arctic Europe, by Gavin Francis This is an old-fashioned travel book of the linear variety. Roaming the northern fringes of Europe with a tent and a nose for a story, Scottish doctor Gavin Francis looks beyond the icebergs and the stunted willow seeking ‘a back country of the imagination where myth