The good, the bad and the ugly in books, exhibitions, cinema, TV, dance, music, podcasts and theatre.
Spy fiction, or ‘spy-fi’, has its specialist practitioners, but big literary names have also turned to the genre for their own varied purposes. Graham Greene’s The Quiet American springs to mind, as does Norman Mailer’s Harlot’s Ghost, a fictionalised study of the CIA. But where these two literary spy thrillers struggle to shed the suspicion
The Silence of the Grave, Indridason’s previous novel, won the three international crime-writing awards, including Britain’s Gold Dagger. It featured his Icelandic series detective, the lugubrious policeman Erlendur, who returns in Voices to investigate the murder of a doorman at one of Reykjavik’s smartest hotels. It’s just before Christmas, and the hotel management is less
A personal note, but relevant: I first picked up this large book at about two o’clock in the afternoon, and began to dip into it, a preliminary reconnaissance. I had an appointment at six with an impatient man, the sort who leaves if you are ten minutes late. When I next looked at my watch,
Thirteen years ago, I was driving with a German friend through the Russian city of Kaliningrad (until 1945 the east Prussian city of Königsberg) when my friend said, ‘There’s the old German army barracks.’ As we stared glumly at the bleak building, darkness settled on me, brought on by three words, each — on its
‘To follow the Silk Road is to follow a ghost,’ writes Colin Thubron at the start of this magnificent book, ‘it flows through the heart of Asia, but it has officially vanished, leaving behind it the pattern of its restlessness: counterfeit borders, unmapped peoples.’ This pattern is the ‘shadow’ of his title — the marks
Researching the history of a destroyed Polish shtetl, I met some of its survivors, among them Julius, an assimilated Jew, a fearless horse-rider, who had served in the army. He went home to Konin in 1945, alone and hungry, his sole possession a torn blanket. A council official told him, ‘The Jews wanted the war
In The Master, a fictional portrait of Henry James, Colm Tóibín constructed a convincing and ultimately moving account of a man who craved — albeit ambiguously — emotional distance. His life is shown as balancing between a yearning for and shrinking from personal intimacy; involving what can be seen as a ‘betrayal’ of the world,
With apologies to Antic Hay, if you can have biography and biology, why not biosophy? Or biolatry, biotomy, bionomy and biogamy? The need for these neologisms is prompted by this extraordinary childhood memoir which combines adolescent intensity with a search for salvation, a hot glorification of life with its cold dissection, and the trade and
It’s that time of year again, the last week of August, and people are already jockeying in order to cash in a year from now, the tenth anniversary of Diana’s death. Tina Brown, a lady who would dumb down Big Brother, was first out of the blocks, her book promising to reveal unheard-of-before secrets. Incidentally, Tina Brown never met
When people use the word ‘journalese’, they always do so pejoratively. They are not thinking of James Cameron, Bernard Levin or Walter Winchell. They mean a style that traffics in clichés. The poet B. I. Isherville has derided that kind of writing: Where every heresy is rankAnd every rank is serried;Where every crook is hatchet-faced,And
The Gallery Press, Loughcrew, Oldcastle, Co. Meath, Ireland, www.gallerypress.com ‘August for the people and their favourite islands,’ wrote W. H. Auden in a poem from his early Marxist phase. This holiday season brings from our adjoining island a parcel of poetry better suited to Christmas or some elate private festival, a salvation of riches. Literary
It has often been said that the popularity of J. M. Barrie stands as a warning to those who think they understand the Edwardians and much the same is true of Tom Moore and the Age of Romanticism. With the exceptions of Byron and Scott, Moore was by far the most successful literary figure of
Veiled roman-à-clef novels of this kind are routinely hyped by their publishers as being certain to cause uproar and mayhem. Often they do nothing of the kind and pass almost unnoticed. Rachel Johnson’s acerbic and well-observed bitch-up of life on a Notting Hill communal garden justifies the copious pre-publicity, and I can report that early
We are still living with the images and legends of the crusades. Were they, as the 18th-century Scottish philosopher David Hume wrote, ‘the most signal and durable monument of human folly that has yet appeared in any age or nation’? Were they, as muscular Christians and imperialists suggested in the 19th century, a matchless epic
The Sixties are there in the first sentence of the first chapter of this social, political and cultural history of the decade: On the first day of October 1963, as the earliest whispers of dawn were edging across the cliff tops of the Yorkshire resort of Scarborough, the new leader of the Labour party nervously
‘No thanks. Too much sex.’ Thus an elderly friend dismissed my offer to lend him John Stubbs’s compendious biography of John Donne. His fears are groundless. Stubbs tells us virtually nothing about the paramours who inspired Donne’s youthful poems, partly because no new information is available and partly because the poet’s exquisite testimony on the
Waiting for the second volume of a good biography is a painful process. I feel very sorry for anyone who read Brian McGuinness’s excellent Young Ludwig (part one of the life of Wittgenstein) when it was published in 1988. The philosopher’s exciting story broke off in 1921 and fans have been left dangling ever since
Only if you have spent the last few months living in a remote corner of Chad will you not have noticed that this year marks the centenary of Sir John Betjeman’s birth. We have already seen telly programmes, church restoration appeals, commemorative CDs of his readings, Cornish cliff walks and special outings on West Country
‘I am entirely against the promotion of a sense of humour as a philosophy of life,’ wrote Kate O’Brien, with just that chilling aloofness that marks out her two heroines in The Land of Spices. Mère Marie-Hélène, Reverend Mother of the convent school of La Compagnie de la Sainte Famille in Mellick (a fictionalised Limerick),
I wonder how much my enthusiasm for Alexander McCall Smith’s stories about Precious Ramotswe, the founder of The Ladies No. 1 Detective Agency, came from reading them while in a French hospital recovering from an emergency operation? Grateful to be transported from my hospital bed to Botswana and find myself in her company I wouldn’t have
The front cover shows a mature English beauty in an Oriental doorway, elegant in a turban, with twinset and pearls. On the back is a Country Life portrait of a radiant English rose. Both are Ann Allestree, who for 30 years supped at the high table of grand society, travelled, and set down her impressions.
Professor Kennedy is a decent liberal who hopes for the victory of the brotherhood of man. He begins this study of the UN, its history, successes, failings and prospects for reform by quoting Tennyson’s ‘Locksley Hall’: Till the war-drum throbb’d no longer, and the battle-flags were furl’dIn the Parliament of man, the Federation of the
In 1961, when he was 62, Ernest Hemingway shot himself. Almost half a century later, this bombastic, vainglorious, paranoid man, whose writing captured the minds not only of his own generation but of all subsequent ones, still exercises a powerful attraction for biographers. Though no one has yet written a better account of Hemingway’s unhappy
The premise of John Sutherland’s new book is that many people wrongly think of reading as an all-or-nothing ability, like, say, tying one’s shoes: either you can do it or you can’t. Such people would no doubt consider a book about how to read a novel as irrelevant as one titled How to Eat Crisps
The arc and light and breadth and nothing kempt,Flat shining fields of sand, the shallow-carvingTigris and Euphrates of the beach streamsWhere individual flying grains are seen,The wet compactions out of which grew keepsI slopped moat water on at the end of the day,Playing decay and knowing I was loved,Coves where my face would drop past
Sir John Soane is London’s lost architect. You can visit his museum in Lincoln’s Inn Fields, and the picture gallery he designed at Dulwich. But since his death in 1837 his greatest masterpieces have gone. The Victorians demolished the law courts at Westminster, and the glittering royal entrance to the House of Lords. The RAC
Cry Shame (1950) by Katherine Everard Cry Shame! is the torrid tale of a 13-year- old girl who leaves home to become a dancer: in her brief career she learns things she is too young to know, runs off with a man four times her age, assiduously breaks the seventh commandment, has an affair with
Anyone interested in the history of Germany, of nationalism or of dynasties will be gripped by this book. Born at the start of the 20th century, heirs of an ancient German dynasty, Princes Philipp and Christopher of Hesse-Kassel were good-looking, modern young men. English was their second language, Queen Victoria’s liberal daughter the Empress Frederick
On an autumn Saturday in 1944 Private Robert Prentice, an 18-year-old rifleman trainee, makes a long journey from his camp in Virginia to New York City, to see his mother. He is soon to be sent abroad, France most likely, and there he’ll see action, which will at least be a change from tedious, thankless