The good, the bad and the ugly in books, exhibitions, cinema, TV, dance, music, podcasts and theatre.
Fire in the Blood is the second recently discovered and hitherto unpublished novel by the author of Suite Française, the two-volume work that was written shortly before French police arrested Irène Némirovsky in July 1942 and deported her to Auschwitz. The story of the discovery of Suite Française, the child running from the gendarmes who
As Zimbabwe celebrated its independence in April 1980 President Nyerere of Tanzania had a piece of advice for Robert Mugabe: ‘You have inherited a jewel. Keep it that way.’ At first, it seemed that Mugabe would take his fellow socialist’s advice. His address to the nation on the eve of independence gave all Zimbabweans hope
Having been a monarchist all my life, it was a bit embarrassing the other day to have to admit to a television interviewer that I could not remember the reasons why I had become one in the first place. In truth, of course — as I explained — I became a monarchist as a matter
It is not given to many for their surname to be turned into an adjective immediately recognisable by a section of society. ‘Fowlerised’ meant a house transformed by John Fowler to his (and the owners’) taste. In spite of having known John for many years, I had little idea of the extent of his work
When I announced, in London in 1962, that I was going to publish The Carpetbaggers, Harold Robbins replied, ‘Everyone here has already read it.’ ‘Here’ was the Carlton Hotel, Cannes, and The Carpetbaggers had hit the international jet set before the book arrived in England. But of course there were hundreds of thousands who hadn’t
Who is Cleo Birdwell?’ begins the flyleaf text of this book. ‘The simple answer is that she’s a New York Ranger, a schoolteacher’s daughter from Badger, Ohio, who becomes the hottest thing in hockey.’ Well, not quite. The simplest answer is that she’s Don DeLillo, author of White Noise, Underworld and Falling Man, publishing pseudonymously
More Paddington Bear blogging: Paddington, the bear from Peru, will be arrested and interrogated over his immigration status in a book marking his 50th birthday.Paddington Here and Now, due to be published in June 2008, is set around the bear’s home at 32 Windsor Gardens, Notting Hill, west London. It will mark the 50th anniversary
The other day I came across a clever book on the movie actor John Wayne. I forget the name of the author but it may have been Simon Louvish, who writes better than anyone else on the film-star world. This suggested that the secret of Wayne’s immense physical appeal was his instinctive contrapposto. When filmed
Sargent’s portrait of Balfour, shown below — an elegant figure, languid, etiolated, arrogant — illustrates brilliantly the popular conception of this complex statesman. Like most popular conceptions it tells only part of the story; like most popular conceptions it is substantially correct. To say that Balfour lacked the common touch is an understatement: he lacked
Let’s start in the garden. This year cookery writers are as happy digging and planting as slicing and braising. Sarah Raven is a great gardener and, on the evidence of her latest book, Sarah Raven’s Garden Cookbook (Chatto & Windus, £35), she’s a good cook too. This is a book for a lifetime of cooking:
In England by Don McCullin (Cape, £35) is, as might be expected, more gritty than pretty. Yet it is approachably humane compared with his famous war photography, where from Vietnam to Beirut the horrors are as terrible as Goya’s. McCullin escaped the London gangland of Finsbury Park by means of the photograph that forms the
In 1989, when David Gill and I celebrated the Chaplin centenary with a week-long run of City Lights at the Dominion Theatre, several critics declared than no one under 40 found Chaplin funny. That ruined our advance box office and not even the presence of Princess Diana on the opening night revived it. Yet those
What marks out the Napoleonic wars from what had gone before, the great dynastic clashes of the two earlier centuries? It is by no means the only, or even the predominant, question that Charles Esdaile poses in this sweeping study, but in many ways it is the most challenging. Professor Esdaile’s The Peninsular War demonstrated
With its quartos, rectos and folio, the language of book-binding lends itself to the novelist’s palette. It’s a terminology rich in tactile pleasures and potential metaphor for a writer. So it’s a joy to find Belinda Starling doing it justice in The Journal of Dora Damage, not least by situating this idiosyncratic profession in the
The pilots called it ‘the Spit’, ‘my personal swallow’, ‘a real lady’, or, simply, ‘the fabulous Spitfire’. It was not a perfect machine. Due to its long nose, forward visibility during take-off was poor; it was freezing cold in the cockpit, and so small that the pilot did not have room to wear a bulky
A Kipling novel that still defies comprehension ‘Listen, Bill,’ wrote P. G. Wodehouse (in a letter published in Performing Flea), ‘something really must be done about Kip’s “Mrs Bathurst”. I read it years ago and didn’t understand a word of it. I thought to myself, “Ah, youthful ignorance!” A week ago I re-read it. Result:
Britain has had few public intellectuals. The one undeniable example was John Stuart Mill who lived from 1806 to 1873 and whose utterances dominated the more intelligent public debates of the mid-19th century — predictably he was keenly studied by Gladstone and mocked by Disraeli. In the last year of his life he was persuaded
Reading reviews of new books of poetry, I am staggered at how seldom the critics quote from poems they are assessing. Describing what a poet is like, without quoting him, is like trying to describe a smell. In the latter exercise, you can get somewhere by using such adjectives as ‘fragrant’, ‘acrid’ or ‘foul’; but
With an estimated one surveillance camera in Britain for every 14 Britons, reality television has never been more invasive. The reason Big Brother has been allowed to watch its citizens so comprehensively in this way rests with the claim that CCTV is a protection rather than an intrusion. Only the guilty should fear the all-seeing
Alan Brownjohn Ludbrooke: His Multiculturalism Shows in the delicate way he rests his head — Despite every fear that she will remove it — On the shoulder of Miss Chiang to watch Duck Soup, The video, from his reproduction sofa. The alarm clock rings beside the bed of the man Made President with the aid
This is an academic monograph on Saki’s literary work, which does not pretend to add much to the work of his biographers, but summarises and quotes lavishly from the evidence available about his short and rather secret life. It begins with the miserable childhood and the odious aunts and ends with his death aged 44
Gordon Brown has a number of key political challenges to satisfy simultaneously if he is to lead his party to a fourth consecutive election victory. As Lee’s outstanding book makes plain, the Prime Minister’s immediate political task is to distance himself from the unpopular aspects of the Blair legacy without falling into the hole Al
Nick Hornby has often written perceptively about male adolescence, but Slam is the first of his books to be aimed at an adolescent male readership. Teenage boys will read music magazines, sports reports, pornography and cereal packets, but they are notoriously averse to reading — or rather, finishing — books. Can Hornby break the habit,
Jean Sibelius was an epic figure: an orignal who never strove for originality. Not for him the frippery of a Stravinsky (‘with his stillborn affectations’) or the artificial contrivances of Arnold Schönberg. Sibelius was his own man, and a deeply human one, moved and moulded by the harsh Finnish landscape. This gave his music a
As an an outstanding English painter and a delectable personality, Edward Burra deserves this entertaining biography. It should be admitted, however, that because Burra was a letter writer of great verve and individuality, half Jane Stevenson’s battle is won: the quotations flare up from the page. Luckily, they do not destroy the surrounding narrative, for
There is none of the lugubriousness of Angela’s Ashes in this memoir of an Irish childhood in the dim days of old, before the advent of the Celtic Tiger, but Patricia Craig had her problems. In 1959, because of the ‘corrupting influence’ of her misbehaviour, the Dominican nuns expelled her at the age of 16
Children who have seen an electronic dinosaur wheel across the sky are not much amazed when a man with his sleeves rolled up takes the rabbit out of the hat. Manual illusions have been overtaken by the digital kind, and traditional conjuring is mostly for the nostalgia market. But it finds its niches; Michael Bailey,
Anthony Thwaite is among the last surviving links to the Movement of the mid-1950s. That group (which was named by J. D. Scott, a former literary editor of this magazine) was ideologically diffuse — largely because it wasn’t a movement in the formal sense — and short-lived, but its members’ early work marked the transitional
A. E. van Vogt was a doyen of the Astounding generation of mid-20th-century science-fiction writers, a group whose senior members included Asimov, Clarke and Heinlein. Among van Vogt’s novels are The Voyage of the Space Beagle, Slan and The World of Null-A. He also produced this little book, published in 1992 but conceived much earlier,
