The good, the bad and the ugly in books, exhibitions, cinema, TV, dance, music, podcasts and theatre.
The biographical note on the jacket of this magisterial book tells us that Professor Geza Vermes was born in Hungary in 1924 and that from 1957 to 1991 he taught at the universities of Newcastle and Oxford. It also tells us that ‘his pioneering work on the Dead Sea Scrolls and the historical figure of
One of the paradoxes of our age is that the hereditary principle is in eclipse everywhere except the first great republican democracy. With all our faults, we love our house of peers no more, and there are no longer any political dynasties in England (unless you count Benn) or elsewhere in Europe. But the last
Why, oh why, would a pleasant-looking, intelligent woman of 66, a retired English teacher with a grown-up son living in California, place an ad in the New York Review of Books announcing her age and inviting men to approach her for sex and then publish an account of the gruesome encounters that followed? A profound
Here’s a Christmas present for anyone with a serious interest in travel. It doesn’t matter whether you’re an armchair aficionado or grizzled explorer. There’s something for everyone, as they say. Eric Newby, the octogenarian doyen of the travel-writing genre, has put together a wonderful literary journey through the centuries and across the seven continents. Where
This lovely little bluffers’ guide to the founders of the American Republic came out of a chat Gore Vidal had in 1961 with his old friend, John F. Kennedy. There they were, Jack, Bobby and Gore, lounging around the Kennedy holiday compound in Hyannis Port after a vigorous game of backgammon — Gore won. Jack
This new collection is, surprisingly for a little black book, decidedly unsexy. In fact, A. S. Byatt — unsurprisingly, perhaps, for those readers who persisted through the Victorian mumblings and fumblings of Possession — does bad, awkward sex rather well. Here is a gynaecologist and an art student getting together (note especially the prophylactic double
Who Killed Daniel Pearl?by Bernard-Henri Levy, translated by James X. MitchellDuckworth, £20, pp. 454, ISBN 0715632612 The last time Mariane Pearl saw her husband Daniel, correspondent for the Wall Street Journal, she was preparing a celebratory dinner for their last night in Karachi, and he was setting off for a final interview he believed crucial
Behind many great stars of stage and screen lurks a mysterious, sometimes sinister manager figure, minder or mastermind, whose precise role in their protégé’s life, especially in terms of creative input, may be hard to define. Richard Burton’s career was kick-started by the Welsh schoolmaster whose surname he took. Tommy Cooper’s affairs were handled for
Twenty years ago Clive James’s poetry represented all that I most disliked about contemporary Englit. For a start it was practically ubiquitous. Barely had one laid down the Christmas number of the London Review of Books containing a lengthy Jamesian summary of the bygone year, it seemed, than one walked into a bookshop to find
When Philippe Labro, novelist, journalist, cineast, television producer and man about Paris, woke up one morning in 1999 at his usual hour of three o’clock it was with a profound and intimate conviction: ‘Quelque chose a changé.’ This was not occasioned by a physical malaise, although his bedclothes, even his pillows, were drenched with sweat,
For all of us who are paid to make jokes about pop music, Sting is a bit of a godsend. Earnest to the point of pomposity, visibly self-satisfied and even more serious about his music than George Michael, the former teacher and long-term sex symbol has come to represent a certain sort of middle-aged rock
When Dylan Thomas first lived at the Boathouse, Laugharne (tel. Laugharne 68) there was no electricity, no running water and the rats took liberties. Today it is a spick and span little gimcrack museum. I went there recently hoping perhaps for a faint psychic whiff of Wales’ most famous son. But the place has been
Minette Walters is an unusually uneven writer. Although we know she is just one person it is as though there are two writers taking it in turns to produce the novels. Her last one, Fox Evil, was a histrionic, scrappy affair, while Disordered Minds is far more intriguing, and has characters that seriously engage your
‘Cora sits at the bay window, writing, in a fat manuscript book with a lock, about a man she once married … and wishing in the nicest possible way that he was dead.’ At the beginning of this novel, Cora, former madame of the Hotel de Dream, Jacksonville, Florida, finds herself alone and lonely in
Say ‘Rossetti’ to most people, and you will get back ‘Dante Gabriel’, or ‘Christina’, or perhaps a description of paintings of exotically beflowered, heavy-jawed women. It is impossible to imagine that anyone will respond with, ‘Of course, William Michael’, much less ‘Lucy Madox’. Angela Thirlwell, in her passionately argued double biography, wants to bring Dante
In the United States several diplomats have written profound books about countries where they have been posted. For example, the works on the Soviet Union by George Kennan and Chip Bohlen were among the most important studies of that once menacing empire. I remember little recently by British ambassadors apart from Percy Cradock’s admirable Experiences
In his 100-page introduction to the Collins Guide to the Parish Churches of England and Wales (1958), John Betjeman does not deem it necessary to explain any of the symbolism in architecture or decoration. It is interesting to speculate whether this was because he could have assumed that, despite only ‘scattered worshippers in the nave’,
Kathy Lette’s latest novel begins with a zany one-liner: ‘How can we win the sex war when we keep fraternising with the enemy?’ The next sentence is a zany one-liner: ‘God, apparently as a prank, devised two sexes and called them opposite.’ The third is also a zany one-liner, and the fourth and the fifth.
Nineteenth-century British politics used to be the historian’s bread and butter, but it has gone sadly out of fashion. Instead of the Great Reform Act, what every schoolgirl knows today is Hitler and Stalin, studied over and over again. The story of reform is too narrowly political for today’s tastes. The historians spoiled it too.
At a garden party in Kampala, Uganda, in 1994 I overheard Tom Stacey, a tall elegant figure, saying with some urgency, ‘The Bakonjo when I first met them 40 years ago in the west of your beautiful country …’ and later noted, ‘Tom is fascinating for quite a long time about Rwenzori, their king Charles
The Enterprise of England, the name given by His Most Catholic Majesty, Philip II of Spain, to the attempted overthrow of Queen Elizabeth I and the conquest of England, was part of a great plan. In 1588, when the Spanish Armada set sail for the English Channel, Philip already controlled the greater part of the
Lord Haw-Haw: The English Voice of Nazi Germanyby Peter MartlandThe National Archives, £19.99, pp. 308, ISBN 1903365171 Although I yield to no one in my admiration of Mary Kenny as a journalist, an uncomfortable doubt arose in my mind as I read the lengthy acknowledgments with which she prefaces her biography of Lord Haw-Haw. I
Hugh Massingberd Surrounded by spin, mealy-mouthed political correctness and Orwellian ‘newspeak’, I longed for the absolute frankness demanded by the Memoir Club of Old Bloomsubry — and found it in A. N. Wilson’s joyfully funny Iris Murdoch As I Knew Her (Hutchinson, £18.99); the tenth volume of James Lees-Milne’s addictive diaries, Beneath a Waning Moon
This unusual and nostalgic novel comes from a writer whose last work, The Transit of Venus, remains as startling and effective today as it did when it was published in 1980. The Transit of Venus was an open-ended love story whose development could only be pieced together from clues dropped unobtrusively in the text and
Abelard has been made to play many roles in French history. In 1796 Alexandre Lenoir created the first museum of French national monuments. The French Revolution had abolished the past, but they thought that the French people should know about it. So the tombs of the French kings illustrated the continuity of French history, and
When aid workers, battling in distant places to bring some kind of comfort and safety to displaced and miserable people, are asked why they do what they do, many reply that it all comes down to the immediate and very simple satisfaction of giving a hungry person something to eat. ‘There are,’ notes David Snyder,
The Pedant in the Kitchenby Julian BarnesGuardian Books, £9.99, pp. 96, ISBN 1843542390 ‘I haven’t cooked since the War,’ proclaims the Duchess of Devon- shire in the introduction to her Chatsworth Cookery Book. Though it was put to her that writing a cookery book was, in that case, ‘like a blind woman driving down the
John Oaksey is the archetypal English gentleman. He is a sweetheart, a star, the bravest of the brave, funny and kind: the only person who will disagree with this is himself. His modesty is complete, his successes are never his, the credit always goes elsewhere, to the horses mostly, or to his friends, his colleagues,
Melvyn Bragg’s superb new history of the English language is told as an adventure story, and rightly so. Brought to the British Isles in the 5th century AD by Germanic warriors, ‘this hungry creature, English, demanded more and more subjects’, until today, with 1.5 billion speakers, it is poised for global domination. Nearly strangled first