The good, the bad and the ugly in books, exhibitions, cinema, TV, dance, music, podcasts and theatre.
Visits from the Drowned Girl starts out with a gripping idea as old as crime fiction: the bystander. Benny Poteat climbs communications masts for a living. One day, from the top of such a mast out in the back- country, he looks down and sees a girl set up a video-camera on a tripod by
Actors’ biographies, once a comparative rarity and usually ghosted and bowdlerised, spring forth every season. They are often pruriently, dubiously, sensational: we are told that Olivier had an affair with Danny Kaye, that Peggy Ashcroft was a near-nymphomaniac and Alec Guinness a covert gay cruiser, all with scant evidence and with little relation to their
The ‘campaign biography’ has become a familiar enough phenomenon in any American presidential year. So it should be said straight away that this book, with the slightly teasing adjective in its subtitle, is in no way representative of that genre. Far from being a dazzling encomium of the qualities of the Democratic candidate in this
The Eighties, you might say, didn’t end on time. The speculative financial boom in the United States and elsewhere, which became synonymous with the price of reputation and the importance of money, which began with the Ronald Reagan tax cut and the gloss of Tina Brown’s Vanity Fair, which rode out a crash in 1987
John Bierman, the co-author of a recent book on Alamein, had doubts about writing this biography of Lazlo Almasy, the Hungarian-born explorer of the Libyan desert, whose exploits were ‘immortalised’ in Michael Ondaatje’s Booker Prize-winning novel, The English Patient, and the subsequent Oscar-winning film by Anthony Minghella. Bierman did not want to be seen to
For a critic as seriously intelligent as James Wood, a discussion about the nature of comedy is, inevitably, no laughing matter. And this is appropriate enough: modern comedy, in his opinion, appears to contain few actual laughs. The historical shift from an essentially religious, theatrical ‘comedy of correction’ to a secular, novelistic ‘comedy of forgiveness’
Professor Preston has done his subject proud. This is a better biography than his 1,000-page indictment of Franco, not only because he is in sympathy with the Spanish king but because, in some respects, he now appears less implacably hostile towards the Generalisimo. It was thanks to Franco, after all, that the monarchy was restored,
Stalin’s admirers wanted it sooner, to help our Soviet allies. Others wanted it sooner, to give us a chance of beating the Russkies to Berlin (as we didn’t). But time and tide set the date, and the invasion of occupied France had to be in spring, at low ebb, after many months of planning, training,
Richard Holmes wrote this book 20 years ago when he was a humble lecturer at Sandhurst, long before his splendid television performances had made him a national figure. He has not had to do much to update it. In a useful foreword he describes the progress made since he wrote it in the historiography of
After defeating two fascist powers in a world war, the citizens of the democratic West have gradually come to throw the label ‘fascist’ around with abandon. Police officers are fascists to the protesters they confront. University administrators are fascists to the students they discipline. Think back: many of you probably had parents who were fascists
The author of a weighty tome on a 16th-century attempt to create a Utopia in Mexico might well expect to be exempt from Elmore Leonard’s advice to ‘leave out the parts readers tend to skip’. A book that runs to 60 pages of footnotes, bibliography and index might even be required to have such parts.
In the summer of 2001 Sofka Zinovieff accompanied her husband, Vassilis — first met when he was press officer to the Greek embassy in Moscow — on a posting back to Athens. This book is both an account of her enthusiastic, if often balked, attempts to transform herself into a Greek, and a vivid evocation
I read every page, every line of this very long book with sustained interest and pleasure. It is a collective biography of four Grenadier Guards officers — Harold Macmillan, Lord Salisbury, Oliver Lyttelton and Harry Crookshank — who, after becoming friends at Eton, and serving together gallantly and bloodily in the trenches of the first
Jason Tomes’ excellent book charts the rise and fall of Albania’s only king. Of perhaps greater interest is the story it tells of this Ottoman outpost’s late essay into statehood. Overrun by seven foreign armies during the first world war, Albania was always under threat of being carved up among it neighbours. Ahmed Zogu can
Now in his late eighties, Bernard Lewis is one of the last representatives of a once venerable scholarly type, the Orientalist. Born and brought up in a Jewish family in London, Lewis effortlessly mastered Arabic, Hebrew, Turkish and Persian, wrote his doctoral thesis on the mediaeval Muslim sect known as the Assassins and taught at
Stephen Potter, author, radio writer and producer (1900-69, floruit 1940s and 1950s), is an instantly recognisable name, as his son Julian ruefully remarks, ‘to those over 70’. He belonged to the particularly English genus of the highly professional amateur. Cantankerous J. B. Priestley — whom Potter revered and loved working with — had Potter’s number.
The new, 107th edition of Burke’s Peerage comes in three massive volumes. It is likely to be the last in printed book format. The previous, 106th edition (1999) was in two volumes, and all the Burke’s Peerages before that were single volumes back to No. 1 in 1826. There seems to be a touch of
Sir Peregrine is a romantic. He has drawn his sword from its scabbard in defence of aristocracy in a self-conscious act of courage which defies the pressures of self-censorship. We should admire his intention and welcome an essay whose style is so reminiscent of the man with its echoes of the dégagé elegance of corduroy
To become a famous philosopher, as the French have discovered, you need an all-embracing theory. It does not have to be right, or even particularly well thought out, provided that it is interesting and admits of no exceptions. Michael Oakeshott, who died in 1990, was an academic political philosopher who passed much of his life
Was Hitler’s favourite actress a Russian spy? asks the publisher’s ‘shout line’ on the book-jacket, positioned to look like the author’s subtitle, suggesting that we are to be plunged into the world of a latterday Mata Hari. Readers hoping to have the curtain lifted on boudoir vamping, messages in invisible ink, or le Carré intrigue
Amid the enmities of contemporary letters, it’s salutary to recognise that for most of us allegiances go farther back, and are just as partisan. Neill Powell’s excellent evaluation of Crabbe delights me not just because Crabbe has always been one of my favourite poets but because this study of a writer usually held to be
It is almost impossible to write a good biography of Shakespeare. His plays contain at once too much and too little for the biographer; his extraordinary impersonality means that he hardly ever reveals his hand. Every voice has its counter-voice; no single character speaks on behalf of the author. Christopher Marlowe, by contrast, is a
Can a writer be guilty of an excess of sympathy for his characters? Sympathy, we are forever being reminded (Tolstoy and Chekhov being the great exemplars), is the hallmark of great fiction. But unless it is combined with a touch of icy objectivity, it can come to cloy, honeying the sensibility rather than truly taxing
A gushy woman told Whistler that she thought he was the greatest artist since Velazquez. ‘Why drag in Velazquez?’ Whistler drawled. One of the bonuses of any book on absinthe is that it drags in — corrals — more or less all the great French artists and writers from the 1860s to the early 1900s,
In 1976 Godfrey Hodgson published In Our Time, a portrait of America in the years from ‘World War II to Watergate’. To this American, newly arrived in Britain, it seemed remarkable that the best social history of my country during my then brief lifetime should have been written by an Englishman. His sharp eye captured
W.B. Yeats became a member of the magical Order of the Golden Dawn on 7 March 1890. According to its founder, W. W. Wescott, the Order was based on certain magical manuscripts written in code, and discovered on a book barrow in the Farringdon Road. Subsequent research proved this to be an invention, so everyone
It’s not often that one can recommend a biography of a writer as long as this, particularly since Isherwood was not, in the end, a writer of the first rank. But in this case there is no doubt: this is a book which simply must be read, a triumph which produces from years of dense
James Joyce scholars and the Irish tourist industry are both gearing up for 16 June, the centenary of the day on which Leopold Bloom, the hero of Ulysses, set out on his odyssey through the bars and brothels of Dublin. We can expect a deluge of new books and monographs to explain or ‘deconstruct’ Joyce’s
Do not be put off by the silly sub-title: this is an admirable book on several levels. Botanical origins; plant-hunting; the arrival of plants in England; hybridisation, and the American connections. There is much history, including that of great gardens like Exbury. All is here, plus some gorgeous illustrations, including one of Marion Dorn, designer