The good, the bad and the ugly in books, exhibitions, cinema, TV, dance, music, podcasts and theatre.
One of the best permanent shows in London is the Science Museum’s collection of electrical and magnetic instruments commissioned by George III. Here, gathered in one room, you can see orreries, Leyden jars, air pumps and – my favourite – electrostatic spangles flickering like lightning in the glass pillars of a temple intended to stand
The publicity material likens this book to The Forsyte Saga, but in fact it’s far more gripping than fiction: the true story of a larger-than-life political dynasty. The diaries of Margot Asquith form the core of the book. For too long Margot’s voluminous diaries have been unavailable, and Colin Clifford is the first biographer to
Few admirers of Faber’s recent spate of tales and novellas – the spacious and admirably unadorned The Courage Consort and The Hundred and Ninety-Nine Steps, for instance – will be prepared for the solid and all-inclusive recreation of (an echo here of Iain Sinclair’s White Chappell, Scarlet Tracings) The Crimson Petal and the White. Twenty
‘What a swankpot!’ Sir Norman Wisdom pseudo-modestly pseudo-rebukes himself after listing some of the trophies in a display cabinet at home on the Isle of Man. ‘But why not?’ he asks, almost disarmingly. ‘I did get ’em, didn’t I?’ This is ventriloquial star-speak by William Hall, an expert writer-with, whose credits include biographies of Michael
Until recently, a lively sub-genre of English literature was that devoted to London’s creepier, darker back streets. Peter Ackroyd took us on a grim tour of early 1980s (and early 1700s) Shoreditch and Limehouse in Hawksmoor; Iain Sinclair angrily traversed the weed-sprouting, rubbish-strewn streets of Hackney and Tilbury and what he called the ‘sumplands’ of
Perhaps it is not a good idea to call Dervla Murphy ‘redoubtable’. She is a strident anti-militarist and might not enjoy being given the sort of name that could so easily belong to an old dreadnought or hunter-killer submarine. But the 71-year-old cycling grandmother can hardly be thought of as anything less. While half the
No ghostwriter haunts this account of a cricketing life, so obviously written by the man who played the way he did: stubborn, scornful of frills and too intelligent to be dull; a man (a boy) who could stick up for himself. At 19, in 1987, while still at Cambridge, he was already playing for Lancashire,
KEANE: THE AUTOBIOGRAPHYby Roy KeanePenguin/Michael Joseph, £17.99, pp. 294, ISBN 07181455 One could imagine an American visitor to Hatchards being mildly puzzled by a joint biography of the Kennedys which sports a picture of two duelling footballers on its cover, but no, Jack and Bobby turns out to be a chronicle of the Charlton brothers.
Two years ago in The Spectator I praised Ha Jin’s earlier novel, Waiting. It was about a kindly, ineffectual army doctor who waits and waits for a divorce from his peasant wife so that he can marry a nurse, his lover without sex for 13 years. Ha, who teaches English at Boston University after learning
This queer, black novel is mainly concerned with the special funeral train service which once plied between Waterloo Station and Brookwood Cemetery in Surrey. Its hero is an intensely innocent young railway apprentice, who dreams of becoming an engine driver ‘of the better sort’, and its villains – or so it seems – are a
VJ night, the war in the Pacific is finally over, and in William Kennedy’s Albany the war of senatorial election is about to begin. The candidates stand up to be counted and the consequences of their election are considered. Small crooks fresh out of crook school and the army rise into the lower reaches of
The Blank Slate, more readily recognised in its original Latin as tabula rasa, is the soubriquet for the view that in the eternal Nature-Nurture debate the scales tip heavily in favour of the environment: when it comes to the human mind, nothing is left to the caprice of genes. Steven Pinker, well known for The
After several acclaimed novels, including last year’s Pulitzer prize-winning Empire Falls, Richard Russo has now produced a volume of short stories. However, the qualities which endear the novels to their readers – a wry sense of humour, vivid characterisation and the sense of lives being lived over time – are less apparent here; the shorter
In the years following the second world war, Tony Crosland, Roy Jenkins and Denis Healey either became Labour Members of Parliament or worked closely with the Labour party. Few parties in so short a time can have gathered three recruits so obviously of prime-ministerial calibre. No other party could have so contrived things that none
Forgery ranked with murder as a capital crime well into the 19th century. Faked texts and signatures could falsify wills and violate the sanctity of property, until photolithography, then typing, devalued the uniqueness of the handwritten text. But a modern forger can still make a decent profit by turning out the fake-historical or fake-literary stuff
In 1760s Bath, the promenade from the Pump Room to the tree-lined Walks of Orange Grove passed a row of luxury shops and a sign reading ‘Mr Gainsborough, Painter’. The artist’s showroom shared the ground floor of a handsome town house with his sister’s millinery shop, and the smell of the perfumes on sale mingled
At the Edinburgh Book Festival this year, Dr David Starkey, the television historian and iconoclast, pronounced that history was elitist – it was about kings and queens and power-brokers rather than the marginal or the dispossessed. He liked big and important subjects. He was uninterested in peasants. Neal Ascherson, by contrast, is deeply interested in
In fiction, as in other branches of the creative arts, reputation is all, or nearly all. One of my most cherished bookworld fantasies involves a bored literary agent plucking A. S. Byatt’s latest (not the internationally celebrated author, but an A. S. Byatt who has laboured on unregarded for 40 years) from the unsolicited manuscripts
The heroine of Margaret Drabble’s new novel is on first sight pretty depressing, and supposed to be so. The opening part of The Seven Sisters is in the form of Candida Wilton’s diary, written from the time she moves to a modest flat in London after the break-up of her marriage. Despite her incongruously glamorous
Some novels are something; others are about something. If fiction is an art, then the former class is more likely to qualify. When, for instance, Lolita is said to be ‘about’ paedophilia, or at least nymphetolepsy, it becomes aesthetically dubious. Hence admirers insist that Nabokov is using H. Humbert’s passion as a metaphor for the
In any discussion about the English judicial system with foreigners, they are always amazed to learn that more than 90 per cent of the criminal cases in this country are tried by unpaid lay magistrates. In a society where an applicant for the most unskilled job is required to be able to produce some paper
Coleridge’s Notebooks have been a companion during most of my mature life and this is a marvellously judged and varied selection, 1794 to 1820, from his 22nd year to his 48th. By that time he had become the loquacious Sage of Highgate, ‘an archangel, a little damaged’. To the end he was a self-observer, still
THE HUMOUR AND THE PITY: ESSAYS ON V. S. NAIPAULedited by Amitava KumarBuffalo Books, in association with the British Council, New Delhi, Rs 175, pp. 174, ISBN 8187890029 In ‘London’, a short essay written for the Times Literary Supplement in 1958, the up-and-coming V. S. Naipaul accurately analysed why his fictions about the Caribbean would
William Trevor is the voice of a civilised Anglo-Ireland capable of apologising for ancient privileges and extensive estates while discreetly lamenting their departure. Laying out and constantly refolding a finely observed landscape (County Cork) of water, rock and sand, of religious divide and class deference, Trevor conveys the baffled rage of Fenian fire-bombers and the
Porno is billed as ‘the sequel to Trainspotting’, which immediately is a worrying sign, like the blow-up doll that stares out from the front cover. Why is Irvine Welsh returning to the territory of his phenomenal debut after all these years? Does it mean he has run out of ideas? And does anyone really want
It is impossible in a short space to convey not merely how good, but how important Geoffrey Hill’s writing is. In his mystic journey to the Goldengrove of his Worcestershire childhood this latter-day Blakean reopens problems which philosophy had long ago abandoned as intractable and which politics in its corruption had discarded. If I had
I have always counted myself a loyal, even an enthusiastic eel fan. I seek them out and buy them whenever I can find them live: they deteriorate quickly and should be killed just before cooking. The French like to buy them skinned. This is a culinary error and usually, though not necessarily, means they are
In September 1946 a 23-year-old Englishwoman sailed for India in one of the first passenger liners to be reconverted from a trooper. She spent the following Cold Weather as the dogsbody with a documentary unit making films about tea gardens in Assam. Fifty-four years on she would describe this excursion into Asia as ‘a huge
EDITH WHARTON’S FRENCH RIVIERAby Philippe Collas and Eric VilledaryFlammarion, £22.50, pp. 149, ISBN 2080107224 London, even in normal years, is rained on for 150 days to Nice’s 60; it receives a paltry 1,500 hours of sunlight in comparison to Nice’s enviable 2,700. And yet, despite the town’s proud boast of having 1,000 hotels and 3,000