The good, the bad and the ugly in books, exhibitions, cinema, TV, dance, music, podcasts and theatre.
As I read this big, enthralling book I often wrote the words ‘muddle,’ ‘misunderstanding,’ and ‘the brink’ in the margins. From 1955, when Nikita Khrushchev came to power in the Soviet Union, until his dismissal, sudden, unexpected and brutal (but not violent) by his comrades and ex-protégés in 1964, the world teetered several times on
How should the lives of business tycoons be judged — by their personal wealth, by the size of the companies they created, or by how long their business survives after their death? If the last of these criteria is chosen, then the record of recent British business leaders is not impressive. A good many of
Who, in the end, defeated Napoleon Bonaparte? This is the question that Robert Harvey, journalist and former MP, asks at the end of his most comprehensive account of the revolutionary and Napoleonic wars. It is pertinent, as he points out, since all the coalition members at one time or another lay claim to the honours:
Born in 1947, Jeremy Norman belongs to the first generation of homosexual Englishmen able to express their sexuality openly and without fear of prosecution, courtesy of the Sexual Offences Act of 1967. As his entertaining memoir attests, Norman has certainly made the most of his freedom. Not only has his life been ‘a frenzied dance
Action Cook Book (1965) by Len Deighton The fact that the cover of this book by Len Deighton shows a chap cooking spaghetti while wearing a gun lends itself to many interpretations. Was spaghetti so expensive in 1965 that it needed an armed guard? Will someone be paying the ultimate price for overcooking it? Is
C. K. Stead was Professor of English literature in the University of Auckland and is a highly esteemed literary critic and author. He is not, to my knowledge, a theologian but was urged to write this novel about the life of Judas Iscariot by the professor of religious studies at Victoria University because, ‘These are
Rupert Christiansen Recently I’ve had the good fortune to review three works of magisterial scholarship in these pages — John Haffenden’s William Empson: Among the Mandarins (OUP, £30), Philip Gossett’s Divas and Scholars: Performing Italian Opera (Chicago University Press, £22.50) and Patrick Carnegy’s Wagner and the Art of the Theatre (Yale, £29.95). Because they run
He was visited only by his children and grandchildren and one or two very old friends, complained Tommy Lascelles a few years before he died; apart from that, ‘I only see some of the young scribes, who, poor boys, think my opinion of their writing is worth getting, e.g. Philip Ziegler and C. Douglas-Home.’ Lascelles
Simon Barnes, the brilliant writer about sport and nature, would never claim he has had much influence. No, he would say with a journalistic shrug, influence? Me? Of course not: I merely describe, amuse and draw attention to significant events. But his sportswriting, some of it for The Spectator, has been so original and insightful
It is curious that despite Spain’s immense services to the Roman Church — expelling Islam from Western Europe over half a millennium of hard fighting, then opening up the Western hemisphere to Catholicism — only two Spaniards have become pope, and both were Borgias (Alfonso de Borja, who reigned as Pope Calixtus III, 1455-8, spelt
On paper, Adam LeBor boasts excellent credentials for writing about what is at best the spine- chilling failure of the United Nations to prevent modern genocide and at worst its active complicity with evil. He reported on the Yugoslav wars for both the Times and the Independent, his empathy with the victims of slaughter leaps
Were you to look up the word ‘peripolitan’ in the Oxford English Dictionary, you would not find it. Though the thing weighs three tons and preens itself on containing every word jotted in English since the language first dragged itself out of the primordial alphabet soup, peripolitan is not there. This irritates me no end,
Two summers ago at La Rondinaia, during one of those last evenings before he flew from his sky-high eyrie for the last time, Gore Vidal advised me to read the 19th-century memoirist Augustus Hare’s The Story of my Life, an author with whom he felt great affinity. ‘And read all six volumes, too’, he added.
Rosemary Ashton has rather cornered the market in dissecting the lives of the intellectual movers and shakers of early Victorian England. She has already written well about the Carlyles, and about George Eliot and her lover G. H. Lewes. Now, all these and more have walk-on parts (rather more than that in Miss Eliot’s case)
So far as Robert Craft is concerned, Stravinsky represents a mine of limitless resource. Having spent the last 23 years of the composer’s life serving him as fan, friend, conductor, associate and general reviver of spirits, virtually as a member of the family, he remains the most loyal of servants, righting every wrong, fighting every
We were in a Béarnais restaurant in Montmartre and a young Canadian novelist and short story writer, Bill Prendiville, was speaking admiringly about Hemingway. This was pleasing, because you don’t often hear him being praised now. It was also appropriate, because most of the good early Hemingway was written in Paris, and the best of
What is it about fruit? There is no more searing passage in the memoirs of Auberon Waugh than the bit when three bananas reach the Waugh household in the worst days of postwar austerity and Evelyn Waugh places all three on his own plate, then before the anguished eyes of his three children ladles on
This is a huge book. Crikey, it’s a whopper. It’s impossible not to won- der, as you hold it in your hands and try your damnedest not to drop it on your foot, whether its author, for all his fame and eminence, is quite worth all this ink, paper, attention. And this is just the
Grumpy grand-dads do their job best when, behind the façade, they pretend to be really loveable. Michael Bywater, who accepts the irritating label of ‘baby boomer’ (born 1953), makes no pretence of loveability. Instead he is very, very funny. ‘Something has gone wrong,’ he says, and he knows what it is; the nannying that we
The central and the longest part of this all too brief memoir concerns a boarding school in Scotland, the Benedictine Abbey of Fort Augustus. The day-to-day atmosphere of the school was philistine, though the Abbey was not … Most of the boys were Scottish thugs or colonial expatriates, and some of the masters seemed to
A great many unspeakable things happen in the course of Cormac McCarthy’s brilliant, distressing new novel. But the worst, the most unspeakable, has already taken place. We are not told precisely what that thing was. McCarthy is content to leave it ill-defined (‘a dull rose glow in the window-glass’ at 1.17am, when the clocks stopped
‘When you reach your seventies,’ mused a once successful actor, ‘you either don’t work anymore or you’re Leslie Phillips.’ Indeed Phillips’ career has been, and still is, something of a phenomenon, and not only his career in the theatre. His great secret from childhood onwards has been continual self- reinvention. Starting life in extreme poverty
Lee Jackson is the creator of that cornucopia of Victorian delight, the Victorian London website (www.victorianlondon.org). From Mogg’s Strangers’ Guide to London, Exhibiting All The Various Alterations & Improvements Complete to the Present Time, produced in 1834, to mortality rates in various parishes in London in 1894 (26.8 per thousand in the overcrowded slums behind
Tariq Ali, the Johnny Depp of international comment, sails out in this little barque, gaily fitted out by the New Left Review, to assault the top-heavy galleon Washington Consensus, as she labours leaking through the South Seas and the Spanish Main … On the jacket, above three pirate ships anchored off Wall Street and bundles
‘I don’t want to act with you ever again,’ Katharine Hepburn told John Barrymore after appearing with him in A Bill of Divorcement. ‘I didn’t know you had,’ came the smart rejoinder. Hollywood stars divide into those who do and those who are. The divine Kate, with her sawn-off cheekbones, narrow eyes and weird Yankee
How serious a subject is sport? We know it is dramatic and revealing, but beneath the veneer of action and celebrity does sport justify a more considered analytical approach? There is a dual aspect here: does thinking have much to do with winning, and, if so, can the lessons of victory enhance our thinking about
187 Men to Avoid (1995) by Danielle Brown Danielle Brown … Danielle Brown … isn’t there something familiar about this name? Hold on. If you … remove the ‘ielle’ … it’s … No. Yes. 187 Men to Avoid was written by the author of the Da Vinci Code in 1995, before he was famous and
Bob Woodward is famous for persuading people to be indiscreet. This book comprises the collected indiscretions of a large number of people who have been at the heart of American policy-making about Iraq over the past five years. We can guess who some of them are. But we do not know, because most of them
On 8 November 1917 Lieutenant Darcy Jones was trotting across the Negev desert with the Worcestershire and Warwickshire Yeomanry when the order came to charge some Turkish gun positions. Jones and his fellow Worcesters drew their sabres, split into twos and threes and rode at a full gallop under heavy fire towards the 2,000-strong enemy