Culture

Culture

The good, the bad and the ugly in books, exhibitions, cinema, TV, dance, music, podcasts and theatre.

The enduring pathos of Wound Man

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‘Full of strokes and blows/ broken, pitifully wounded’, the man, naked, or almost so, stands full frontal, legs and arms parted, one limb sometimes slightly bent to signal the beginning of a movement. His body is punctured by lesions and wounds, with small depictions of their material causes attached almost as adornment – knives or

Culture clash: Sympathy Tower Tokyo, by Rie Qudan, reviewed

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Language, it has been said, is the only true democracy – changed by the people that use it. But as with any democracy, there is plenty of disagreement about what alterations are either possible or permissible. Japanese uses three distinct writing systems – kanji, hiragana and katakana – and the relationship between two of them,

Isabel Hardman

The woman I’m not – Nicola Sturgeon

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Nicola Sturgeon has all the usual things she wants to achieve in her memoir: rumours to scotch, a legacy to spell out, and so on. But the most important thing to the former first minister seems to be telling her readers that she is in fact not Nicola Sturgeon. The ‘seemingly confident, combative woman who

Deception by stealth: the scammer’s long game

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We all know that life is full of people who try to con us, often starting with a voice on the phone. ‘I’m speaking from the fraud department of your bank.’ ‘I’m your local BT engineer.’  No, you’re not from either my bank or BT. In all likelihood you are speaking from a scam farm

Campus antics: Seduction Theory, by Emily Adrian, reviewed

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There is a fine tradition of campus novels that stretches from Evelyn Waugh’s Brideshead Revisited (1945) and Kingsley Amis’s Lucky Jim (1954) through Donna Tartt’s The Secret History (1992) and J.M. Coetzee’s Disgrace (1999) to Chad Harbach’s The Art of Fielding (2011) and Kiley Reid’s Come and Get It (2024). Emily Adrian’s Seduction Theory, her

The scourge of the sensitivity reader

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‘Something strange is happening in the world of children’s and YA [young adult] literature,’ writes Adam Szetela, and his horrifyingly compelling book certainly bears that out. It offers a sobering report from the front lines of how identity politics and online pile-ons against anyone who sins against the latest pieties actually play out in the

The spiritual journey of St Augustine

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When I lived in south London, my Algerian barber used to tell me that he came from Souk Ahras, ‘the home town of Augustine’. I found it strange to hear a forbidding doctor of the early church described as a local boy made good, but Catherine Conybeare shows me that I should not have done.

What the Quran has to say about slavery

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Slavery is one of the oldest and most persistent institutions of humankind. It was already well established four millennia ago when it was mentioned in the Epic of Gilgamesh. Today it has been formally abolished almost everywhere, but there are still reckoned to be some 30 million people living in some form of forced labour.

Successful modern design follows no rules

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It is more than 40 years since Tom Wolfe said to me, in a Chinese restaurant on Manhattan’s Lexington Avenue, that ‘Modern’ had become an historical style label. He meant it was not, as the high modernists believed, the inevitable conclusion to all artistic progress, but had a beginning and an end as nearly precise

It was drug addiction that killed Elvis, not his greedy manager

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Colonel Tom Parker (1909-97) was the man who ripped Elvis Presley off and worked him to death. That’s the received wisdom about the person who managed the King from 1955 until his premature death, aged 42, in 1977. Peter Guralnick’s book, written with full access to Parker’s unpublished, witty, clever letters, now owned by the

A precocious protagonist: Vera, or Faith, by Gary Shteyngart, reviewed

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It’s impossible not to love Vera Bradford-Shmulkin, the whip-smart Jewish-Korean- American child narrator of Vera, or Faith, Gary Shteyngart’s sixth novel, which is a masterclass in the author’s sardonicism, set in a frighteningly realistic near future. School is awful and Vera’s world is on the brink of imploding because ‘Daddy and Anne Mom’, her stepmother,

Mossad’s secret allies in Operation Wrath of God

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More than half a century ago Palestinian terrorists stormed the 1972 Munich Olympics, murdering two of the Israeli team and taking another nine hostage. The West German authorities, ill-equipped to deal with such incidents, agreed to fly the terrorists and their hostages to Egypt. Mossad, the Israeli intelligence service, offered to mount a rescue operation.

The boundless enthusiasm of Asa Briggs

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It’s doubtful whether Asa Briggs ever had an idle moment in his life. Bestselling historian, pioneer of the new universities of the 1960s, chronicler of the BBC, champion of adult education, academic globetrotter and much more besides, he possessed phenomenal energy. He was a miracle of the kind of boundless enthusiasm that his Victorian hero

The powder keg of 1980s New York

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The Bonfire of the Vanities, Tom Wolfe’s romp through the status and racial anxieties of 1980s New York, begins with an unnamed mayor being Mau-Maued by Harlem activists. As he soaks up the abuse, he fantasises about the confrontation spreading: Come down from your swell co-ops, you general partners and merger lawyers! It’s the Third

A century of western meddling in Iran

Lead book review

On 22 June this year, seven B2 Stealth bombers flew on a 37-hour round trip from bases in the US to drop 14 30,000lb bombs on two nuclear facilities in Iran. A third was attacked with cruise missiles fired from a submarine, possibly in the Persian Gulf. Few can say with any certainty how much

Madcap antics: The Pentecost Papers, by Ferdinand Mount, reviewed

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Ferdinand Mount has had an illustrious career, including posts as head of the No. 10 policy unit under Margaret Thatcher, literary and political editor of The Spectator and editor of the TLS. He is a prolific author to boot, with 29 fiction and non-fiction books under his belt. His latest novel, The Pentecost Papers, is

Looking on in anger: Happiness and Love, by Zoe Dubno, reviewed

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The fantasy of telling disagreeable friends how awful they really are is a relatable one. But rarely does it find such extravagant, relentless expression as in Zoe Dubno’s debut novel Happiness and Love. The narrator is a nameless woman who finds herself among former friends in New York. While she never succumbs to an outburst,

The trials of ‘the sexiest man alive’

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This is an account of the Johnny Depp/Amber Heard court cases with a top-dressing of pretentious tosh about the meaning of celebrity, etc – but you can easily ignore the tosh because the basic story is so gripping. Depp was 46 and already a global superstar when he met Amber Heard in 2009. She was

An explosion of toxic masculinity: The Fathers, by John Niven, reviewed

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‘Fucking men,’ spits a woman towards the end of John Niven’s brilliant tenth novel, The Fathers. ‘Why do they always think it’s about fixing everything?’ It’s a classic hit of deadpan humour from a novelist best known for sending up the most appalling blood, spunk’n’booze-spattered excesses of modern men. A former A&R man with a

What’s next for Taiwan?

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When Portuguese traders sailed past a verdant, mountainous land on the fringe of the Chinese empire in the mid-16th century, they named it Ihla Formosa – ‘beautiful island’. But Kangxi, the third emperor of the Manchu Qing Dynasty, was less impressed when his naval forces captured it in 1683, scoffing: ‘Taiwan is no bigger than

Britain’s new role as a bastion of black culture

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One of the great works of journalism to have come out of the Jamaican-British encounter is Journey to an Illusion by the late Donald Hinds. Published in London in 1966, the book is made up of a series of interviews with Commonwealth citizens who had settled hopefully on these shores after the war. Hinds, who

The insoluble link between government and crime

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In the 18th century, the cash-strapped British crown imposed customs duties on tea imports that rose as high as 119 per cent. Unsurprisingly, such huge tariffs sparked a smuggling boom in coastal towns such as Deal, in Kent, where the cliffs were pockmarked with secret tunnels and half the inhabitants lived off profits from such

The merchant as global reporter

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Joad Raymond Wren’s ambitious history of early modern European news, capacious in structure, monumental in volume, is named for a witticism by John Earle (c.1601-65). The author of Microcosmography, a compilation of satirical ‘characters’ whose obvious modern heir is Victoria Mather’s ‘Social Stereotypes’, was arguably the funniest member of mid-17th century England’s most likeable clique,