The good, the bad and the ugly in books, exhibitions, cinema, TV, dance, music, podcasts and theatre.
The Warsaw uprising of August 1944 was one of the most tragic episodes of the second world war, resulting in the destruction of the city and some 200,000 of its inhabitants. It is also one of the least well known. The fact that the Red Army had stood by while the city was pounded to
John Fowles’s diaries — or ‘disjoints’, as he calls them — are evidence of his own theory that while some writers have a genius for a specific genre, others ‘have merely a universal mind’. ‘I’m a mind-writer … I feel master of none, yet at home in all,’ he wrote in 1954, about halfway through
Douglas Hurd’s political career ended only eight years ago, but it already seems to belong to another world. When he entered the House of Commons in 1974, at the age of 44, after a career in the diplomatic service, politics was still available as a second career. It had not yet been wholly professionalised. Overpowering
This elegant synthesis (you can tell immediately that Simon Jenkins is an Oxford man and not a product of the other place) is intended to complement the author’s successful Thousand Best Churches. It could be argued that England’s houses are much better known than its churches and that this sister volume is hardly essential. ‘Not
He was born to a virgin honoured with the attentions of the most high god. He assumed human form and gathered disciples around him who were derided for their adoration. Having performed a variety of miracles and made a journey to the underworld, he ascended to heaven, where he joined his father, president of the
It is never easy to tell a story that everyone knows and still harder to tell one that everybody thinks he knows. For more than 200 years the mutiny on the Bounty has been part of British folklore, and its main protagonists — William Bligh and Fletcher Christian — enshrined in myth as types of
Introducing the first true Dave Eggers’ McSweeney production (and it is a production — jacket, binding, illustrations, chapter headings and all) to be published here, Michael Chabon explains that the starting point for this eclectic collection is the notion that all the short genre fiction which once supported American magazines of the Fifties should be
The joke surely with Monty Python is that these trainee doctors, accountants, solicitors and bank managers, who met at college when they were reading law or medicine, never really stopped being those respect- able middle-class things. There’s an air of put-on daftness about the Pythons; this is an end-of-term cabaret by the chumps from Management
‘Lucy could have wished that Florence were not quite so ingenuous. One should not seize on a delicate implication and put a pin through it,’ writes Frances Towers in ‘The Chosen and the Rejected’, one of ten short stories published in 1949, the year after the author’s death, as Tea with Mr Rochester, here reprinted
The 2003 Shiva Naipaul Memorial Prize winner.There were more than 100 entries from a total of seven countries. The runners-up were Henry John Elsby Sanderson, Enrico Boerger, Gregory Lourens, Matthew Lawrence Holmes, Simon Rew, Kevin Barry and Joanna Elizabeth Streetly. Harry was eight, and he bore the mark of a victim. It wasn’t that he
In 1961 the anthropologist Richard Mason was exploring a river in southern Amazonia when he was ambushed by a hitherto unknown tribe of Indians, later identified as the Panar
It is difficult to demonstrate why the Lees-Milne diaries, of which this is the tenth volume, are among the best of the 20th century. Easy to feel why, for you race through the pages with addictive passion, not wishing to miss a word, but awkward to justify the excitement. These are not records of momentous
At the risk of being vulgar, I can’t help thinking that Dr Greer’s (‘At least she’s got an “ology!”’, I always say in her defence, when callow acquaintances mock her) attitude to matters sexual goes up and down like a bride’s nightie. Whereas most of us, thanks to our helpful male classmates, learn whether we
The early life of Arthur Miller reads a bit like the first chapters of The Adventures of Augie March by Saul Bellow: a precocious Jewish boy during the Great Depression, an influential older brother, an adolescent sexual awakening with a prostitute. Indeed, his life as a whole — in which he was to marry and
When Michael Frayn wrote Copenhagen, he could surely scarcely have imagined the interest it would generate and the furore it would cause. A play that consists almost entirely of erudite conversations between two eminent physicists (Niels Bohr and Werner Heisenberg) about the development of quantum theory and the moral responsibilities of nuclear scientists is not
In the spring of 1990, at the age of 21, I found myself sitting on an English hillside in the sun as one member of a brand-new training platoon of British squaddies. Having been marched up hill and down dale for a couple of hours that afternoon, we were handed large cans of beer by
Until I read his enthralling account of what it’s like to be a middle-class sixtysomething crack addict, I’d never quite appreciated the genius of William Donaldson. I know his Henry Root letters are supposed to be very satirical but I found them a bit hard going myself — like a complex in-joke that you really
Robert Hughes has suffered no shortage of appalling things over the past five years. He has experienced deep depression and a second divorce; he suffered atrocious injuries in a car crash which came within inches of killing him, and has had to undergo 12 operations to piece his body back together again; a feeble attempt
Where is England’s smallest church? The question must have preoccupied nerdish retired vicars for centuries and is probably best answered then forgotten. Despite the title of this survey, John Kinross fails to give a clear answer. ‘Smaller’ churches would have been fine, but smallest raises expectations. The apparent shortlist is Culbone (Somerset), Dale (Derbyshire), Wide-
This massive volume weighs in at seven pounds on the bathroom scales and cost The Spectator £14.50 in stamps to send out for review. If it is difficult to write about, this is not because of its size and weight but because the eye is constantly caught and distracted by fascinating pieces of information, so
First published in 1914, two years after he had married Virginia, Leonard Woolf’s second novel The Wise Virgins must have shocked its readers with its tale of an unfortunate coupling and hasty marriage. Now the romance/sex all seems rather tame, and this fiction startles for a very different reason: its harsh caricature of Jewishness (Woolf
The Duke of Bedford insisted that railway stations built on his estate had to be picturesque. He chose a half-timbered design based on Loudon’s Encyclopaedia of Cottage, Farm and Railway Architecture. His stations can still be seen from that improbable survival, the slow train from Bletchley to Ridgmont, Millbrook, Fenny Stratford and Woburn Sands. Future
This first volume of Bill Clinton’s biography, taking the story as far as his presidential election victory in 1992, comes at a peculiar time. Unlike many of the hasty invectives pronounced upon the 42nd president, Nigel Hamilton’s study is written on the grand scale, drawing on much of the published record and delving further with
Whatever else this is, an intimate portrait of Mrs Parker Bowles it is not, or at least not one written by the author. This is a scissors-and-paste job, the bones of earlier would-be biographers whitening in every chapter, which gives it an air of California or Bust. Clearly done at speed, there are many errors
The work of the obituarist is not unlike that of the book reviewer. Both have to tell their reader what the subject of their piece is all about; both have to pass judgment on its merits and demerits; both have to provide something which will be entertaining as well as informative. Under the direction of
Here’s a real cure for anyone with a bad case of things-are-getting-worse-itis. Written in 1962 principally for the American market, London Perceived has now been republished over here for the first time in 40 years, which seems staggering. I’ve never read a better summary of London or Londoners. And it has hardly dated at all.
As a historical novel Thomas Gage is more Hardy than Tolstoy. The classic historical novel — as concocted by Walter Scott and perfected by Tolstoy — gives the reader an unexpected viewpoint from which to witness a great historical moment. Fictional characters with fictional relationships are the centre of attention, but they weave in and
This is an exceptional biography, which is just as well, since I don’t think one could bear to have the heartbreaking story it tells recounted carelessly. John Clare is one of the great Romantic poets, but his history and origins have always meant that he was either treated with neglect or used by his admirers
This is not exactly an autobiography — John Mortimer has written three already, one about old age — but more like a collection of reminiscences designed to inspire and warn his grandchildren of the delights and pitfalls of life. It is a testament, the ‘Will’ of his title, in which he bequeaths to them the