Culture

Culture

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

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 Peter Guralnick’s book, written with full access to Parker’s unpublished, witty, clever letters, now owned by the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

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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,

Mothers’ union: The Benefactors, by Wendy Erskine, reviewed

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This blistering debut novel from the acclaimed short-story writer Wendy Erskine circles around a case of sexual assault, expanding into a polyphonic story that is at once an evocative fictional oral history of contemporary Belfast, a powerful depiction of trauma and a provocative exploration of social power dynamics. Erskine teases out narrative strands through a

Pity the censor: Moderation, by Elaine Castillo, reviewed

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After her America is Not the Heart was published in 2018, Elaine Castillo was named by the Financial Times one of ‘the planet’s 30 most exciting young people’, alongside Billie Eilish and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez. That debut novel told the story of three generations of women torn between the Philippines and the United States. In Moderation,

With glee to the silvery sea

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Was it more profitable for an early-20th-century seaside railway poster to promise the undeliverable or to be slightly less enticing but at least tell the truth? In his charming and unashamedly train-spotterish book about how the British travelled to the seaside in the great days of rail, Andrew Martin quotes slogans from posters. The Great

A summer of suspense: recent crime fiction

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Time was when historical fiction conjured images of ruff collars and doublets, with characters saying ‘Prithee Sir’ a lot. Nowadays, the range of featured period settings has expanded unrecognisably, though a new favourite has emerged – the second world war, where Nazis stand in for nefarious noblemen. The Darkest Winter by Carlo Lucarelli, translated by

Assassinations have an awkward tendency to backfire

Lead book review

Plutarch says that Julius Caesar dined with friends the day before he was assassinated. When conversation turned to considering the best way to die, Caesar looked up from the papers he was signing (being in company never stopped him working) and said, without hesitation: ‘Unexpectedly.’ Thanks partly to Shakespeare, Caesar’s has a claim to be