The good, the bad and the ugly in books, exhibitions, cinema, TV, dance, music, podcasts and theatre.
Biographers, in their desperate search for a suitable subject hitherto undiscovered by their professional colleagues, sometimes light on a figure once well known, but who has fallen into disrepute. Such was the fate of Leigh Hunt, now resurrected in these two books. Anthony Holden is a professional biographer whose subjects have ranged from Olivier and
When Paul Foot died last July, he was more widely and deeply mourned than any other journalist for years past, apart perhaps from his great friend Auberon Waugh. Born in 1937, he was a contemporary of the gang who founded Private Eye (and whose mortality rate has been frightening: few of the original group made
John Harris, the mop-topped commentator from Manchester, better known as a music journalist (and a very fine one) than a political correspondent, is in a pickle. Having voted Labour his entire adult life, he now finds himself horrified by the New Labour project, and by Blair and Blairism in particular, and wonders whether it isn’t
As asylum looks like being a key election issue, Caroline Moore- head reminds us of one simple truth. No one wants to be a refugee. No one wants to leave their home. They do so out of desperation, tortured, raped, witnessing terrifying abuse, or in terrible, straitened circumstances. Of course not all would-be immigrants are
Is there a more charming literary companion than Al Alvarez? In this extended series of lectures he examines the writer’s creative method, or ‘voice’, as he metaphorically terms it. His own voice comes through loud and clear, a seasoned, colloquial, authoritative and highly polished channel for his telling insights and throwaway erudition. He flits with
A book with a title like Epileptic does not raise high expectations: will it be an account of suffering nobly borne, or a worthy medical treatise perhaps? Not a bit of it, this memoir is a graphics extravaganza spread over 361 pages, bursting with energy and wild imaginings, a comic tour de force that is
Tim Madden, the narrator of Norman Mailer’s Tough Guys Don’t Dance (1984), offers a perceptive instance of literary criticism when he recalls that ‘the best description of a pussy I ever came across was in a short piece by John Updike’. However, even that is not enough for him: what he would really like, he
We are continually told that biography is the dominant literary expression of the age, that Britain, in particular, is a nation of biographers, and that the new Oxford Dictionary of National Biography is the massive climax of this protracted love affair. Even our fiction suppurates with real-life figures both past and present, from Mrs Thrale
The Australian Robert Dessaix, a Russian scholar, chooses to regard himself, in relation to Western civilisation, as an ancient Greek might have considered a Phrygian or a Scythian — a barbarian outsider. This, he believes, brings him even closer to his beloved and Russian Turgenev, who spent most of his adult life outside Russia, but
The flavour of Stephen Graubard’s account of the American presidency in the 20th century may be quickly grasped from his comparison of the only two presidents to follow their fathers into the White House, John Quincy Adams (1825-29) and George W. Bush (2001-?): Adams, fluent in seven languages, accomplished in both science and mathematics, took
Geoffrey Hill publishes books in verse rather than collections of poems. This is admirable but presents a reviewer with problems. You want to recommend him more or less unconditionally as England’s best hope for the Nobel Prize. At the same time, there is the risk that new readers, acquainted with the easy-going chattiness of Betjeman,
Among the unexpected pieces of information in this enjoyable ramble among the picturesque ruins of the Latin language is the name of a good restaurant if you should find yourself at Larroque in Tarn. The advice comes under B, for Bonum vinum laetificat cor hominis, ‘good wine cheers the heart of man’, an adage written
At the centre of Michael Chabon’s earlier novel, The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay, was a comic book hero known as the Escapist. That book weighed in at a portly 656 pages. The Final Solution revolves around Sherlock Holmes and is a mere stripling by comparison, scarcely more than a novella illustrated with stiff
The subtitle of this large history, ‘How the British Navy Shaped the Modern World’, is a generous tribute from the American professor who wrote it. Based on very wide reading of secondary sources, the author has little new to say in a book which opens with Drake and closes with the Falklands campaign. He has,
As a foreword to this excellent novel Ian McEwan quotes a passage from Saul Bellow’s Herzog, in which the bedevilled protagonist launches a passionate indictment of the moral disorders of his time, extracting from them a small nugget of hope, or rather of value, to set against his justified despair. Bellow or Herzog is explicit:
Welshmen will know what Le Goff’s name means. To mediaevalists it conveys not only Smith, but all that is gracious, gilt-edged, and grandfatherly among French historians. Or, as one of the blurbs puts it, rather unkindly, ‘He is among France’s “great” historians.’ That means great in the special sense of an institutionally sanctified professor doomed
‘I am beginning to see that brain counts for little but that character counts for everything,’ wrote Harold Nicolson, in one of those flashes of self-perception which from time to time brilliantly illuminated his life. ‘It is not a pleasant thought as my character is weak and easily influenced.’ He was only just 17 when
About Grace is about David Winkler, a man crippled and made fearful by the accuracy of his dreamed premonitions — a man who foresees future events and who is then constrained to watch them unfold. He dreams of a man killed in an accident and then witnesses that accident. He dreams of meeting his future
The writer William Mayne has said, ‘I don’t know why there are supposed to be only two sexes. I can think of at least eight, even before you get to women.’ Mary Wollstonecraft, though no wit, would have been pleased with this. She saw herself as neither male nor female but ‘a new genus’, one
This book illuminates Brown and his circle: they appear paranoid and anyone who challenges them has to be done in. Robert Peston acknowledges some of this, and is occasionally critical of Brown but more often laudatory. It is typical of the Brown camp to co-operate on the book and then dismiss its contents as tittle-tattle.
The biographers, like eager heirs round a deathbed, were amassing by Robert Louis Stevenson’s side while he was still breathing. The story, they could tell, was going to be just too good. The age loved a youthful demise, and anyone could see that Stevenson was not going to make old bones. They were quite right,
In this week’s Cease and Desist Department, it’s Grange Hill. For many tens of thousands of grown men and women worldwide, the names Tucker, Zammo and Mrs McCluskey are enough to induce an instant rapture of nostalgia: the mind’s ear fills with the sardonic, boingy guitar of the theme tune; the mind’s eye with the
Seeing from my window the other day a Eurofighter manoeuvring at low level over the Moray glens, I was reminded once more of the Royal Air Force’s certainty when it comes to knowing what it wants. For here is an aircraft superbly optimised for its role: air-to-air combat against the best the Soviet air force
George Orwell painted an unappetising picture of the typical book reviewer: He is bald, has varicose veins and wears spectacles, or would wear them if his only pair were not chronically lost. If things are normal with him he will be suffering from malnutrition, but if he has recently had a lucky streak he will
Mary Robinson: actress, poet, novelist, playwright, feminist and London bus. One could wait over a century for a biography of her and then three come along at once. Had London buses existed in Robinson’s lifetime, contemporary satirists would have leapt at the analogy, as it was widely believed that anyone who could afford the fare
This is a distinguished addition to the select company of books that succeed in adding significantly to our understanding of Jean Monnet’s and Jacques Delors’ European project. Each author has adopted a different framework. Larry Siedentop, in Democracy in Europe, a self-conscious re-enactment of de Tocqueville, approached the EU’s problems of structure and democratic legitimacy
With a little genealogical effort over three million people in this country can trace their ancestry back to a 15th- century hero called Sir Baldwin Fulford, and his luscious wife, Elizabeth Bozom, daughter of Sir John Bozom of Bozom-zeal. According to our old books of blazons Sir Baldwin was ‘a great soldier and a traveller
‘Ah,’ Robert Sullivan exclaims in this artful book, ‘the excitement, the nail-biting and palpably semi-wild thrill of ratting in the city!’ An otherwise apparently sane American writer and journalist, Sullivan chose to spend four seasons observing the rats in New York’s Eden’s Alley, five blocks from Broadway. Settling down with night-vision binoculars, a folding chair
A test for you. Viz, the comic now an improbable quarter of a century old, once ran a strip called ‘Harold and Fred’. It was the sort of thing you will remember from the days of Dandy and Beano, little characters running around and falling over, all with the three expressions of thoughtfulness, joy and