The good, the bad and the ugly in books, exhibitions, cinema, TV, dance, music, podcasts and theatre.
Quizzed about pop by the teen music magazine Smash Hits in 1987, the year of her third consecutive electoral victory, Margaret Thatcher singled out ‘Telstar’, a chart-topper from a quarter of a century earlier, for special praise. She pronounced it ‘a lovely song… I absolutely loved that. The Tornados, yes.’ As a whizzily futuristic sounding
Every government has its éminence grise. The quiet, ruthless man (or occasional woman) operates in the shadows, only to be eventually outed when the boys and girls in the backroom fall out among themselves or when someone pens a memoir. Think Peter Mandelson, Nick Timothy, Fiona Hill and Dominic Cummings. The authors of Get In,
In The Builder’s Stone, Melanie Phillips reminds us forcefully that we must never forget how 7 October 2023 changed the world. On that day Hamas terrorists from Gaza invaded southern Israel and brutally raped women and butchered or burned alive 1,100 Jewish men, women and children. They also dragged 250 Israelis, including three-year-old twins, grandparents
How do you make the life of Woody Allen unbearably dull? Mainly by retelling the plots of every one of his movies, along with lists of cast and crew, box-office receipts and critical reactions. And there are so many movies – 50 so far, but there’ll probably be another by the time you read this.
Call it a mosaic. Here it all is – the pathos of a botched first date, a birth, a death, a feud, a stumble into love. The Café With No Name deals with the small dramas of everyday life. The setting is Vienna – not the elegant city of Schönbrunn but the Karmelitermarkt, one of
Among the most striking and memorable exhibits in the British Museum are the Assyrian reliefs depicting the royal hunt. These huge panels show the king, Ashurbanipal, shooting, spearing and stabbing a succession of lions, albeit ones that had been trapped beforehand and released from cages for the occasion. It is a magnificent work of art,
Nearly a decade after Eimear McBride published The Lesser Bohemians (her second novel after the success of A Girl is a Half-Formed Thing),the Irish writer has returned to the drab, smoke-filled world of 1990s London. The City Changes its Face is told from the perspective of 20-year-old Eily, two years after she has left Ireland
At 8.15 a.m. on 6 August 1945, a B-29 bomber called Enola Gay dropped ‘Little Boy’ over Hiroshima. The thermal radiation from the atom bomb was 900 times more searing than the sun. An estimated 118,661 civilians died, horribly. Survivors staggered about with their skin in shreds, their intestines hanging out and their blacked and
The role of personality and charm in running a state is one theme of Richard Bassett’s superb book, the first English biography of the Empress Maria Theresa since Edward Crankshaw’s in 1969. The different parts of the Habsburg monarchy – Austria, Tyrol, Bohemia, Hungary, Croatia and Milan – had little in common except dynasty, geography
Elizabeth Eleanor Rossetti, as this new book calls her in a break with convention, is better known by her maiden name: Elizabeth Siddal or Siddall (the spelling is uncertain, as is much else about her). The Pre-Raphaelite icon was familiar to the public as the model for John Everett Millais’s ‘Ophelia’ sinking to her watery
What did the great Marxist historian Christopher Hill think of orgies? Michael Braddick’s splendid and judicious biography doesn’t ponder this question. However, it strikes me as worth posing since, for a three-week period in the winter of 1978, an ensemble of actors (including the future Hollywood star Bob Hoskins) could be found naked at the
Christopher Fowler was almost absurdly prolific, for much of his life combining fiction with a hectic job heading a film promotion company (he wrote the Alien tagline ‘In space no one can hear you scream’). His debut, the horror novel Roofworld, was inspired by the view from the top of his Soho office building. Soho
Anne Tyler, who won the Pulitzer Prize in 1989, is much admired by writers, ranging from Hanya Yanagihara to Nick Hornby, for novels such as The Accidental Tourist (1985) and A Spool of Blue Thread (2015). In Three Days in June, Tyler’s 25th novel, Gail Baines is not having a good day. An assistant headmistress,
Edmund White grew up in a world where sex, and gay sex in particular, was an unspoken reality. In 1950s Cincinnati, ‘no one “came out” except drag queens and the campy peroxided waiter at the diner’, he writes in the first chapter of The Loves of My Life. That blanket of near-silence doesn’t seem to
When Howard Amos first came to Russia, in 2007, it was a country you visited with interest, even enthusiasm. Modernisation, potentially a progressive development, was on the cards; America was getting ready to ‘reset’ US-Russian relations; foreigners were able to volunteer at Russian orphanages. That was what Amos did, working with disadvantaged children in Pskov
On 27 January 1688, Mary Hobry, a French midwife living in London, strangled a man to death. The corpse lay in her bed for several days before she carved it up. Then, in the dead of night, she used her petticoat to drag the dismembered body through the neighbourhood – Castle Street, Drury Lane, Parker’s
As Charles Dickens lay in his coffin, his will was read out to the assembled mourners. ‘I conjure my friends,’ he sternly instructed them, ‘on no account to make me the subject of any monument, memorial or testimonial whatever.’ It’s an appeal that later generations have studiously ignored, as can be seen in the piles
‘Is it necessary to have the window open when listening to the new device?’ asked Edith Davidson, the wife of the Archbishop of Canterbury, in 1923, referring to the latest fashionable contraption, the wireless. We might laugh – but it does take time for the older generation to catch up with new technology. To this
Our immiseration came swiftly and stealthily. At the start of the 21st century, Britain was a prosperous country. Ambitious people fought to come here. We trusted that, over time, we would become wealthier – an expectation that had been accurate for most of the previous two centuries. Since the millennium, Britain and western Europe have
Beartooth, the second novel by the Montana-based writer Callan Wink, opens with two brothers elbow-deep in the viscera of the third black bear they have just shot out of season. Hazan’s hands are ‘moving around the hot insides of the animal as if he were rummaging through a junk drawer’. He wants the gallbladder, which
There is something wonderful about a novel being rescued from obscurity. Robert Plunket’s My Search for Warren Harding was first published in 1983, given a few decent reviews and then disappeared. Occasionally admirers – including rather influential ones like Amy Sedaris and Larry David – would lend a weathered copy to friends, insisting they read
Occasionally a book is published, perhaps twice in a generation, which is so bad but internationally celebrated that one questions everything one has believed about literature. The Wizard of the Kremlin, written in French by the Italian political scientist Giuliano da Empoli, was awarded the French Academy’s Grand Prix de Roman in 2022. It narrowly
At the turn of the century, the ineluctable march of democracy seemed assured. The Cold War extinguished and eastern Europe freed, a Whiggish history of the world continued to be written. A quarter of a century on, the great wave has broken and rolled back. Democracy is not what it was in Chile, Peru, Venezuela,
This is a remarkable book by a remarkable man. Based on the Coromandel coast at Chennai in south-eastern India, Yuvan Aves is an active naturalist and an ardent activist. Still in his twenties, he teaches outdoor classes, he campaigns and he notes down the movements and habits of invertebrates, birds and fauna in his local
Edward Wilson-Lee writes rather chin-strokey, erudite books for the half-educated general reader with a strong taste for big ideas and the ever-so-slightly weird –which is to say people exactly like me and very possibly like you. The Catalogue of Shipwrecked Books: Young Columbus and the Quest for a Universal Library (2018); A History of Water:
Shortly before Bill Gates’s seventh birthday in 1962, his parents stuffed their son into a button-down shirt and blazer for a visit to Century 21, a bold showcase of scientific prowess in their home town of Seattle. This futuristic fair was intended as the nation’s rebuff to Soviet Russia following the Sputnik satellite launch, which
Since it became independent in 1929, Vatican City has been the world’s smallest state. Every evening the gates close, leaving behind only 500 permanent residents. I once spent a week behind the walls as a guest in the Santa Marta hostel where the Pope lives; at night the deserted courtyards are thrillingly spooky. But it’s
I came to Suetonius’s Lives of the Caesars as a schoolboy after watching I, Claudius, the BBC series based on Robert Graves’s pair of novels about imperial Rome. Incredibly, it’s almost half a century since this was compulsory Monday night viewing in our household. The mere sight of the snake slithering across the opening credits
Sharks were never far from our minds as we grew up on the beach in Adelaide. Although attacks were rare, they were real. My grandfather was witness to the fatal mauling of a swimming instructor in the 1930s, and later a friend from university was killed while scuba diving off Port Noarlunga. Yet for the
