The good, the bad and the ugly in books, exhibitions, cinema, TV, dance, music, podcasts and theatre.
John Gimlette and I both won this magazine’s Shiva Naipaul Memorial Prize (awarded for unconventional travel writing) and we both got book deals as a result. Winning the prize changed my life and perhaps it changed Gimlette’s, too. We should toast The Spectator regularly for our good luck. I wrote about the inhabitants of Buenos
There comes a time when all professors of literature think of writing a book like this. Elaine Showalter has been professing it for 40 years, and after such a long and varied career what could be more apposite or timely than to share the wisdom of such experience with her younger colleagues? The answer, I
Joyce Carol Oates is a prolific, even prolix writer, with more than 50 novels and short-story collections to her name. Yet she writes wonderfully of life’s uncertainties and of American reality in the raw. In her latest novel, I’ll Take You There, Oates returns to her old themes of violence, madness and sexual passion. The
When John Moynihan was three and living with his painter parents in a flat off Primrose Hill he used to be terrified by nocturnal howls and squeals from the Regent’s Park zoo. Wetting himself, desperate to be ‘rescued from the labyrinths of an unspeakable jungle’, he was soothed by whoever happened to be around, sometimes
Bill Emmott, the editor of the Economist and author of The Sun Also Sets which accurately predicted the decline of Japan, believes there are two fundamental questions to ask at the beginning of the 21st century. Can capitalism continue to be the dominant force? And, in his words, ‘Will America continue to lead the world
This is a curious story. In 1886, a year after the final British conquest of Upper Burma, a piano-tuner, Edgar Drake, is requested by the War Office to travel to the Shan States – still largely untouched by British power – to tune a rare 1840s Erard piano. The piano was originally shipped to one
Just as Gustav Mahler wove a bugle fanfare into his symphonies, so Joseph Roth wove martial music into his novels. In Roth’s case, it was invariably Johann Strauss’s ‘Radetzky March’, a signature tune which tum-te-tums through his earlier fiction and then becomes the title of this, his 1932 masterpiece. For Roth, like Mahler, military tunes
This is a strange, tantalising book of unintentional poetry; it is rather like a book plucked from the shelves of one of Jorge Luis Borges’ impossible libraries. The first book of the celebrated philanthropist, collector and Daimler heir, Gert-Rudolf ‘Muck’ Flick, it is a highly scholarly and lucid biography of a dozen or so great
I have an unusually vivid recollection of the first time I met John Hall. I went to his flat in Chelsea to be interviewed – as I thought – to establish whether I might make a suitable lecturer for his Pre-University Course in Venice. However, when I arrived, he got straight down to the nitty-
I selected Overnight to Innsbruck by Denyse Woods by chance from the reviewing shelf and discovered a real treat of a read. It is pleasantly old-fashioned in having a strong, page-turning plot, and credible characters who panic and fret in recognisably authentic ways, yet bristling with smart, contemporary dialogue and psychological insight. If only chance
Sven Lindqvist used to be a fairly flabby intellectual Swede with a natural disclination to engage in any kind of sporting activity whatsoever (well, he did a bit of sluggish swimming) – especially team sports. Then, at some point before 1988 (when this book was first published in Sweden), by which time he had reached
How many people have heard of Michael Reeves? Most biographies are written about famous people or people who hobnob with famous people or lesser-known people who have led particularly interesting lives. Michael Reeves is none of these. He was an English ex-public school boy, obsessed by cinema, who made three low-budget horror films and died
It is rare for a first novel to be launched with the degree of enthusiasm that Fourth Estate have bestowed upon this saga of the American civil war. The jacket comes trumpeting its triumph on release in the USA. ‘Deserves the Pulitzer Prize’, it quotes from the Toronto Globe and Mail. A cynic might say,
What is really wrong with the Blair government? The unease it excites is at least as strong on the articulate political Left as on the Right. Indeed the grounds for anxiety may overlap across the political spectrum. Until now it has been difficult to verbalise this sense of malaise. The citation of particular policies that
In 1926 Simon Marks, head of a little-known chain of penny bazaars called Marks & Spencer, placed an order for men’s socks with Corahs, a Leicester knitwear manufacturer. The order was kept secret – the Corah brothers did not want to offend the wholesalers, who forbade their suppliers from selling direct to retailers – but
In the 1840s and 50s, Douglas Jerrold, Dickens and Thackeray were the three best known literary men in England, and it was said at the time that it was ‘hardly possible to discuss the merits of any of them without referring to the other two. What happened to Jerrold? He was born into a family
Here is an astonishing book. It is a biography of Rudolph Nureyev written as a piece of fiction, but it is not a roman
In 1909, in a late letter to his brother, Henry James bemoaned the fact that the ‘novel of ideas’ – the novel ‘built on the momentum and inspiration found in a solid, sustainable and infinitely expandable idea’ – was finally dead, and that it had died from ‘lack of want or appetite in the reading
In this exploration of her pain, terror, and ten years of barely surviving the trauma of rape and near-murder, Susan Brison’s most piercing words are, ‘For months after my assault, I had to stop myself before saying (what seemed accurate at the time),
In the summer, I met a man who made his living by selling computer hardware he found discarded around London’s business districts. A Scorpion tank driver during the Gulf war, he told me how he had been wounded in a firefight and now found himself unequipped for ordinary employment. Soldiers who have seen action are
Michael Kr
Annie Proulx’s latest work is a strange hybrid. It is more a series of short stories than a novel; and though it is immensely readable, fusing sentiment and bleakness with Proulx’s customary wit and irresistible relish for the quirky, some may find the whole ensemble less than a fully fledged work of fiction. The Shipping
I saw the first tourists arriving in Afghanistan this summer. I saw their incredulity at the graveyard of crumpled aeroplanes at Kabul airport and at the Hazara suburb of the city that looks like Berlin in 1945. The question everyone asked was: how did this happen? How did a country famous for its hospitality and
Photographs by Mark J. Rattenbury Further details are available on the archive website, www.somerset.gov.uk/archives/exmoor This is a puzzlingly titled book. Are we being encouraged to look on the contents as mirrored reflections of a way of life, or reflections on the death of the old Exmoor? Perhaps we, like the Lady of Shalott, are supposed
What to do if you plan a book whose essence is a single parachute drop? And what to do if, apparently, that particular parachutist was not deeply committed to the book? Similarly, if your two previous books have been Soup and Mushroom, and if your career has involved theology, minicab-driving, obituary writing, and founding a
This highly readable selection of obituaries is based on the original more general collections of Hugh Massingberd. His object was to celebrate life rather than death; and indeed the persons here described, though from a specialised category, come vividly alive in the capable hands of Canon Trevor Beeson. The period covered is the quarter century
The picture of a maverick which emerges from this book is ever more strongly drawn. In this sequel to his auto- biographical No Voice from the Hall, published in 1998, John Harris takes us forwards, backwards and sideways around his earlier account. There is less fishing, and the kindly figure of ‘Snozzle’, his Uncle Sid,
Quentin Crisp was, among other delightful things, a human paradox. He loathed the Gay Liberation Movement as bitterly as he despised Oscar Wilde, yet he did more than anyone else to change people’s attitudes towards homosexuality. He was unashamedly flamboyant, yet spinsterish and celibate; the sex act, he explained, was like ‘undergoing a colostomy operation
The fine, rusty-gold building of the University Press presides over Walton Street in Oxford with its more monumental than collegiate presence. The touchstone of literacy in homes all over the world will be an Oxford dictionary, compact, shorter or the full, distinguished thing. The livery of the press is recognisable everywhere, ultramarine and gold. Reliably