The good, the bad and the ugly in books, exhibitions, cinema, TV, dance, music, podcasts and theatre.
The most startling historical fact I have come upon in recent years is on page 62 of this book. In 1882 an attempt was made to evict three crofters on the Isle of Skye. These were humble men pursuing a way of life little changed in recorded time, in a place which to them would
There is something irresistible about forgers, cocking a snook as they do at their target establishments — in this case the formidable intellectual and historical talents of Baroque (hardly Renaissance as the title claims) Rome, a circle which included the towering figure of the polymath Athanasius Kircher. What makes this case even more piquant is
One of the things which drew Nicholas Shakespeare to Tas- mania was that it was one of the few remote places that Bruce Chatwin, whom he’d spent seven years writing a biography about, had never been to. But Shakespeare has written a wonderfully Chatwinesque book about a place, in which individual historical narratives are woven
Rumpole is back with us. In Rumpole and the Penge Bungalow Murders by John Mortimer (Viking, £16.99) Rumpole is writing his memoirs and looks back on his first murder case when, as a pupil in a lazy barristers’ chambers, he takes over the defence of a young man accused of murdering his father and his
Long before she became a finger- lickin’ television star Nigella Lawson’s ability to conjure tastes in vivid prose and her celebration of the pleasures of eating were known to readers of The Spectator as she was this magazine’s first restaurant reviewer. And it was the writing in her first book, How to Eat, with its
A selection of the best and worst books of the year, chosen by some of our regular contributors Jonathan Sumption There is no point in mincing words about the Oxford Dictionary of National Biography (60 volumes, £6,500 until 30 November). It is the one of the greatest feats of scholarly publishing ever. Forget the on-line
So Meby Graham NortonHodder, £18.99, pp. 342, ISBN 0340833483 Frankie Howerd’s career was a series of comebacks. In the early Fifties he was a radio star with listening figures of 16 million; he topped the bill at the Palladium and appeared in a Royal Variety Performance eight times. He flopped on live television, however, and
Pen Hadow goes to the North Pole quite often. For a price he’ll take you there too. When not under- taking one of his private expeditions he acts as a guide for his own travel company. For those with the time and cash and courage he can organise an arduous months-long trek. If you have
A Year at the Races, the title of this extraordinary book by Jane Smiley, is the peg on which to hang the author’s remarkable insights into the horse and all his workings. It is indeed about racing and her experiences with her various horses at the Californian tracks, but that is almost a sideline. This
Although the publishers assure us that this study of three sisters is ‘one of glamour, money and love in equal measure’, Fortune’s Daughters should not be confused with the new novel by The Spectator’s most decorative diarist, Joan Collins, entitled Misfortune’s Daughters. Elisabeth Kehoe’s book is non-fiction and covers, as the sub-title puts it, ‘The
There are eerie parallels between the career of the author of this all too brief masterpiece and that of Nicolai Erdman, whose play The Mandate recently opened at the National Theatre. Novelist and playwright both achieved acclaim for pugnaciously satirical works produced in the mid-Twenties, a period of extravagant experiment in the Soviet Union. Then,
No one wants to write a history of Paris from Caesar to Sarkozy. Histories that are largely political, which tell the story of the city’s expanding boundaries, endless wars and growing importance within France as a whole tend to be tedious. Most authors try to show that the history of Paris is special, involving a
At the moment, a whole room of the Sainsbury wing in the Nation- al Gallery is devoted to Carlo Crivelli (c. 1430-95), but even the author of this monumental, learned, and absorbing monograph would not claim that he is a household name. Perhaps he is too much of a one-off to merit that double-edged accolade,
At the age of 13, William Norton, the son of a police sergeant and a Post Office worker, wrote to John Betjeman warning him of the impending destruction of Lewisham’s Victorian Gothic town hall. In no time Betjeman put William on to the recently founded Victorian Society, urged him to organise a petition, wrote him
What does it take to turn artistic talent into its full creative expression? Then, once you’ve found your authentic artistic voice, how can you stop critics and followers over-defining it until you feel penned-in to the point of paralysis? And if you finally lose your voice altogether, how do you find it again? Bob Dylan’s
Churchill conceded that the ultimate verdict on his conduct of the second world war would have to be left to the judgment of history. But, as a precaution he resolved to write that history himself. The result was the six volumes and nearly two million words of The Second World War published between 1948 and
R. W. Johnson’s book purports to be a history of South Africa, from the emergence of humankind to the last nation (whatever that may mean). The pace is necessarily brisk and only seldom falls over its feet in the process, as in the movement of numerous ethnic entities provided with little more than their names.
How a timid, subdued, frustrated man from Buenos Aires, with failing eyesight and blind for the last part of his creative years, turned out to be one of the major, if not the major writer of the 20th century, is the central mystery this book preserves, untouched, at its centre. Edwin Williamson’s biography of Borges
What a welcome change from the energetic staccato style of many modern thrillers is this, Rennie Airth’s second book. No short thudding sentences for him, no relentless brutality and spattered swear-words, more a leisurely, gentlemanly unfurling of a story which yet is as bloody and grim as any. The rape and murder of a Surrey
The fashion for novelty is scarcely, well, novel. In the 18th century Dr Johnson warned that the frenzy for the new had reached such a pitch that men would even look to ‘be hanged in a new way’. New fashions, new fabrics, new furniture, new decorations and ornaments, all cascaded out of workshops and factories.
I thought at first that this was going to be a truly marvellous book, and in many ways it is, but I soon found that, in common with most modern biographies, it is too long, too detailed and there is too much talk about sex. It is hard to believe that non-professionals want quite so
Old Filth is a barrister, a QC and unlike Trollope’s great Old Bailey cross-examiner Mr Chaffenbrass, nobody could ever say of him ‘What a dirty little man!’ In spite of his appearance on this book’s jacket wearing a gown without a coat, Old Filth was always scrupulously neat and tidy. Halfway through an unremarkable career,
Sad to report, but this book is a gem. Why sad? Because Michael Winner, a sensitive, witty and extremely gifted artist, has made such a cock-up of his personal PR that to praise him in public is like applauding the Holocaust. There are nasty silences. Faces go white. Plates drop. The man is not well
Nobody could accuse Pankaj Mishra of lacking ambition. A mixture of memoir, history, political and philosophical treatise, An End to Suffering sets out to tell the historical story of the Buddha and to contextualise his teachings in the development of the Western philosophical tradition. Hindu by birth and rationalist by disposition, Mishra leads us on
It has been Sue Townsend’s misfortune to live on into a time of events more fantastic and of public figures wackier than any of her own comic creations. Her method, like that of the authors of The Diary of a Nobody, was to take a credulous nerd, strip him of any sense of the ridiculous,
Billed on the cover as ‘The True Story of America’s Greatest Crime Wave’, this blockbuster movie of a volume shoots through the months between 1934 and 1936 when a star was born: the Federal Bureau of Investigation. Enter J. Edgar Hoover, vain and dapper. At first he presides over a ‘group of gentlemen’, unarmed because
The really talented observers are not like travellers or journalists reporting colourfully on the unknown (‘Anyone here been raped and speaks English?’), nor even like the real insiders, who risk taking for granted what strikes us as strange, but somewhere in between. They have to mix perception, curiosity and information. Roy Kerridge demonstrates their ambiguous
Here is yet another attempt to interest a wider public in classical music, in the form of a book ‘as told to’ Tim Lihoreau by Stephen Fry, based on a show the latter hosted on Classic FM. Falling concert attendances and CD sales, as well as the general downward slide of the culture, means that
Christopher Hibbert is a publishing phenomenon. Now 80 or thereabouts, he has published at least 37 books, mainly on British history. You name it, Hibbert has written a book on it — from Charles I to the Marlboroughs, from Napoleon and his Women to Queen Victoria. Hibbert is rarely interviewed, but his books are always