The good, the bad and the ugly in books, exhibitions, cinema, TV, dance, music, podcasts and theatre.
Nicholas Shakespeare is one of the few contemporary British novelists who successfully integrate the political with the personal in the lives of his characters. Like Graham Greene, he has an eye for a dramatic historical backdrop: in The Dancer Upstairs, it was the Shining Path insurgency in Peru; in his new novel, Snowleg, it is
The Portraits of Hector Berliozby G
The sea frightens me. It seems so cold and cruel, even when it looks warm and inviting. It was with some wariness, therefore, that I approached David Austin’s first novel, in which the sea, or the Sea, as it is sometimes called in this book, is a major player. Robert Radnor has returned from India
Turgenev wrote, ‘Whatever a man prays for, he prays for a miracle. Every prayer reduces itself to this: “Great God, grant that twice two be not four.”’ Pete Dexter starts from the other end. His characters know that, whatever they pray for, twice two will always be four — and it will always be held
The first distinguished person I ever met told me that he preferred funerals to weddings. ‘Weddings,’ he said, ‘are so final.’ It is true that many changes take place to the human body after death, practically all of them of surpassing unpleasantness. Perhaps that is why no one before Professor Bass had the idea of
If time travel were possible, surely there’d be people from the future causing mischief in the present? Well, not necessarily: perhaps when you travel back in time you visit a parallel universe and therefore can’t muck about with history, even if you try to. Alternatively there might already be time travellers dotted about, but when
Titles that begin with the phrase A Brief History of … are no doubt written that way to connote a certain sense of humility, as if the author has been engaged in a casual endeavour and can offer no guarantee that the results will be definitive. The roots of this trend go a few decades
It’s hard to find an exciting biographical subject who has not been done and on whom sufficient unpublished papers and records exist (not to mention alluring photographs). By good fortune, persistence and enthusiasm, Miranda Seymour has done just that with Hélène Delangle. Who she? Well, she was born in 1900 (her preferred date was 1905)
Simon Phipps, says the cover of this slim but engaging volume, was ‘the last of his breed of Bishop’. One hopes not. Does Eton, the Guards and Cambridge now preclude preferment in the Anglican episcopacy? This aside, what is the edification or entertainment in recollections by the great and the good of the varied life
The constant command in the works of Alberto Manguel is ‘look closer’. From his terrifying novel, News from a Foreign Country Came to his A History of Reading and Reading Pictures, A History of Love and Hate and Into the Looking Glass Wood and his book of notes that analyse the film The Bride of
Like Francis Wheen’s other books, this one ends in a deliriously funny index, which is worth the cover price on its own. One entry: Blair, Tony; claims descent from Abraham; defends secondary picketing; defends teaching of creationism; displays coathangers; emotional guy; explores Third Way; likes chocolate-cake recipe; sneers at market forces; takes mud-bath in Mexico;
Catherine de Medici was, quite literally, the original black widow. After her husband, King Henri II of France, was accidentally killed in a jousting contest in 1559, she always dressed in black, despite the fact that French queens traditionally wore white mourning. Figuratively the term might seem equally apt, for Catherine has customarily been depicted
The engagement diary of Anne Thackeray Ritchie (1837-1919) reads like a Victorian Who’s Who. Dickens, Trollope, Browning, George Eliot and Mrs Gaskell were all among her acquaintance. While holidaying on the Isle of Wight she went on long walks with Tennyson, struggling to keep up with the poet, ‘listening to his talk, while the gulls
To my mind one of the relatively few happy circumstances of our time, as we grope into the 21st century, is the condition of Wales. By no means all Welsh people would agree with me. Those who love the Welsh language above all else must still fight their heroic battle in its defence. Those who
H. L. Mencken once said that the function of journalism was to comfort the afflicted and afflict the comfortable, but few of us manage to live up to that standard today. On the contrary, most of us are more likely to hurl ourselves at the feet of the high and mighty and ignore everyone else.
Oracle Night describes a nine-day episode in the life of a writer, Sidney Orr. Orr is recovering from a long illness after a sudden collapse resulted in critical head injuries. He has been lucky to escape with his life — or, to put it another way, he should be dead. Eight months after the accident
The story is a good one. Lady Anne was born in 1837 and died, in Egypt, in 1917. Her mother, Ada, who was connected with Babbage and his prototype computer, was Byron’s only legitimate child. Aged 32 and wealthy, Lady Anne was plucked off the shelf by the poet and philanderer Wilfrid Scawen Blunt. After
Jhumpa Lahiri won the Pulitzer Prize in 2000 for her first volume of short stories. The Namesake is her first novel, graceful, funny and sad, its theme dislocation and the pain of building a new life in a different world. In building that new life, something must also be destroyed. After an arranged marriage, Ashoke
State constitutions throughout the ancient world were designed to imitate the order of the universe. Their model was an esoteric code of number, harmony and proportion which was supposed to reflect the perfectly structured mind of the Creator. From this procedure came a form of society, like those of archaic Greece, where the nation was
Susanna Moore’s fifth novel opens on board the Jupiter in February 1836, with the ladies — make that a capital ‘L’ — Eleanor and Harriet, together with their brother Henry (the incoming governor-general), en route to India. Storms rattle the halyards, rats scrabble at the sodden travelling library and Eleanor, our raisonneur, is somewhat put
It is a measure of the hypermnesia of the Nazi period — and of the concomitant amnesia of the history of communism — that Willi M
When Count Mikl
When in 1890 Captain A. T. Mahan, United States Navy, produced his book on The Influence of Sea Power on History, 1660-1783, it made a world-wide sensation and had important historical consequences; both Germany and Japan took note, and set out to build great navies. There is now room for a book on the influence
Four years ago this author gave us Night & Horses & the Desert, an anthology of classical Arabic literature, all brave deeds, high thinking and love, wit and wisdom — chivalry, in short — reminding why so many generations of the English have fallen madly in love with this culture that is now dead and
Rivalled only by the Rabbit novels, John Updike’s early stories — the 100 or so pieces of short fiction he wrote for magazines such as the New Yorker, the Atlantic Monthly, Harper’s Magazine and Playboy between 1954 and 1975 — now seem very close to being the best things he has written, surely placing them
In July 2001, a few days after Slobodan Milosevic was flown to the War Crimes Tribunal in The Hague, Janine di Giovanni went to Sarajevo to see how it felt for those who had suffered so brutally from his rule. But she found no one celebrating. Some of the ‘big fish’ were getting caught, but
William Beckford’s Fonthill Abbey is thought of as a supreme example of romantic hubris and defiance of nature. The tower, 276 feet high, originally intended to exceed the spire of Salisbury Cathedral, crumbled and fell within 20 years. Robert J. Gemmett, Professor of English in New York State University, gives a very readable account of
This book is an abridged version of one of the great works of modern classical scholarship, Donald Kagan’s four-volume history of the Peloponnesian war, which originally appeared between 1969 and 1987. This crisis in the affairs of the Greek world in the fifth century BC was seen, even at the time, as a turning point
Tim Guest spent his boyhood in the Rajneesh spiritual communes during their heyday in the 1980s when they caused countless eyebrows to rise, boomed spectacularly and bust luridly in Poona, Oregon, Suffolk, and scores of places in between. So naturally he was dressed in orange from head to toe and inside and out, wore a