The good, the bad and the ugly in books, exhibitions, cinema, TV, dance, music, podcasts and theatre.
Isn’t it irritating when your ancestral manuscript collection gets in the way of your ping-pong tournament? That was Colonel Butler-Bowden’s predicament in the early 1930s. He was so peeved by the heap of rubbishy papers cluttering up his games cupboard that he declared his intention to burn the lot. Luckily, his ping-pong companion that day
Farming threaded its way through the fields, mud, hedgerows and lifeblood of the people who made up Sarah Langford’s childhood. But her grandfather, ‘an oak of a man’ with his high-waisted trousers and ‘smelling of butter, honey and dust’, occupies no romantic sepia image in her memory. A tenant farmer, proud to have provided for
There is a concept in tech and innovation – branded by an expensive consultancy company, naturally – known as the Gartner Hype Cycle. Any innovation, be it NFTs (a means of owning ‘unique’ digital art), blockchains (the technology powering crypto-currencies like bitcoin), self-driving cars or wearable tech, will go through distinct (buzzword-heavy) stages before it
Shunned by his father and his peers because of his homosexuality, Édouard Louis (born Eddy Bellegueule in 1992) left his village in rural Normandy and moved to Paris, becoming the first member of his family to attend university. By his mid-twenties he had published three well-received autobiographical novels: about working-class machismo (The End of Eddy), his
To study international politics since the turn of the century has been, in large part, to study the changing nature of autocracy – and the West’s relationship to it. We kicked things off by trying to realise the Trotskyite dream of ushering in global democracy through the barrel of a gun. We wanted to bring
Anthony Sattin begins with a quotation from Bruce Chatwin, who famously tried all his life to produce a book about nomads but never quite succeeded (the nearest he got was Songlines). Hoping to persuade Tom Maschler at Cape of the virtues of the project, Chatwin described nomads as ‘a subject that appeals to irrational instincts’
Louise Perry is on a mission: ‘It wasn’t enough just to point out the problems with our new sexual culture,’ she declares at the start of her punchy first book The Case Against the Sexual Revolution. So she offers advice as well to the young women she believes have been ‘utterly failed by liberal feminism’.
Naples, the tatterdemalion capital of the Italian south, is said to be awash with heroin. Chinese-run morphine refineries on its outskirts masquerade as ‘legitimate’ couture operations that transform bolts of Chinese silk into contraband Dolce & Gabbana or Versace. The textile sweatshops are controlled by the Neapolitan mafia, or Camorra. All this was exposed by
‘Witch-hunt’ has become a handy metaphor for online persecutions, especially of women, though these days it is reputations that go up in flames rather than bodies. The mob mentality behind the phenomenon may not have changed as much as the medium or the mindset. In retelling a celebrated case from Elizabethan England, Jill Dawson enters
A popular pastime in Britain is to post one’s breakfast on social media for strangers to pass judgment on bacon crispiness, egg doneness and whether baked beans are a vital component or just spoil the whole thing. Felicity Cloake is a writer after my own heart: she is not a fan of beans with her
The spontaneous mass adoption of deep feeling is always interesting. Jason Whittaker has a very good subject, in the journey of the cryptic lyric section of the preface to William Blake’s incomprehensible epic Milton, written and illustrated between 1804 and 1810, to its becoming the de facto national anthem of England. ‘And did those feet…’
The concept of vaccination evolved from 18th-century inoculation practices and many people contributed to the accretion of knowledge. This book focuses on two individuals: the Quaker doctor Thomas Dimsdale, who, from his small Hertfordshire surgery, pioneered a simple smallpox immunisation; and Catherine the Great, who summoned him all the way to St Petersburg to inoculate
This is a depressing book. It’s a reminder of everything that is sick, broken and generally maledicted about the human condition. It’s also a book based on a podcast, which brings difficulties of its own. To cut a very long story short, The Missing Cryptoqueen tells the true story of a Bulgarian crook named Ruja
‘There are a great many ways of holding on to our sanity amid the vices and follies of the world,’ wrote Ronald Blythe in 2008, ‘though none better than to walk knowledgeably among our native plants.’ To many today, when the age-old connection between people and their indigenous flora is in danger of being extinguished
Vanessa Salomon is an internationally successful translator. Clever, beautiful, privileged – ‘born in a trilingual household: French, English and money’ – she can indulge herself professionally with obscure, neglected books. About to embark on a forgotten nouveau roman by Alain Robbe-Grillet, she’s offered an irresistible assignment. A bestselling French novelist who is definitely not Michel
‘The law,’ according to W.S. Gilbert’s Lord Chancellor, ‘is the true embodiment of everything that’s excellent’ and, by common consent, Michael Beloff QC has been one of the prime exemplars of that excellence over the past 50 years. While he may not enjoy the profile of contemporaries such as Helena Kennedy, Michael Mansfield and Geoffrey
I do not think I am alone in confessing that I had read critical works on James Joyce before I got around to reading him. As a schoolboy I drew up my own private curriculum, and one influential book was Malcolm Bradbury’s The Modern World, where I first encountered Joyce; and then moved on to
‘America is merely a story the nation tells itself,’ the historian and cultural critic Sarah Churchwell writes in The Wrath to Come. Of the many American stories, few are more disturbing than the complex one represented by the rioter Kevin Seefried inside the Capitol on 6 January 2020. He carried the Confederate battle flag to
The moment before the fall of women’s football can be precisely dated. On Boxing Day 1920, Dick, Kerr Ladies FC beat St Helens 4-0 at Everton’s Goodison Park in front of 53,000 paying spectators, a sellout crowd. That was too much for the men at the Football Association. Hysterical at the sight of women running
Margo Jefferson’s Constructing a Nervous System compresses memoir and cultural criticism into one slim, explosive volume, and in doing so the Pulitzer Prize-winning author makes both forms new. Hers is a wry, intimate portrayal of a passionate and intellectual woman coming to maturity: ‘Older women’s tales… are hard to pull off,’ she writes: ‘They risk
In the Zhuangzi, a collection of tales attributed to the eponymous 4th-century BC Chinese philosopher, a frog that lives in a well boasts about its comfortable way of life to a visiting sea turtle. When the turtle describes its own existence in the vast expanse of the ocean, however, the frog has no idea what
If MI5 had a Cold War file on you – paper in those happy days – it didn’t mean they thought you were a spy. Nor even that you were especially interesting. Files were a means of storing and retrieving information. They could be general subject files or personal files (PFs) relating to individuals. Some
Has there been a better novel this century than Ottessa Moshfegh’s My Year of Rest and Relaxation? There might not have been. The book was a hit when it came out in 2018 and had a second wind during the pandemic, when readers found themselves ‘resonating’ with its cabin-fever plot. Not that there was much
No one had prepared the Allied soldiers, as they began their invasion of the Reich early in 1945, for what they would find. The discovery by the Soviets of the extermination camp of Majdanek in July 1944, and Auschwitz in January 1945, had not really registered, not least because they had been partly emptied and
Geography, climate, economics and nationalism are often seen as decisive forces in history. In this dynamic, original and convincing book Dominic Lieven considers emperors and their dynasties as motors of events. Defying constrictions of time and space, ranging from Sargon of Akkad, the ruler of what is now northern Iraq (r. 2334-2279 BC), to the
‘To talk about Crabbe is to talk about England,’ E.M. Forster declared in a radio broadcast in May 1941, but few people today talk about this Suffolk-born poet or indeed read him. This makes Frances Gibb’s slender but thorough account of George Crabbe’s life and work all the more welcome. In his time he was
After 13 years in parliament, rising star Chris Patten had the bad luck to be one of the few Tory MPs to lose his seat in 1992. Had he been re-elected he would probably have become chancellor of the exchequer. Instead, he found himself in the wilderness. But not for long. Within months he had
A Little Hope, Ethan Joella’s debut novel, is about the lives of a dozen or so ordinary people who live in smalltown East Coast America. By helicopter over Connecticut ‘you wouldn’t notice Wharton right away’. Yet the problems its inhabitants face are universal. There is the seemingly American Dream family – Greg, Freddie, Addie the
Mark Vanhoenacker dreams of my nightmares. Ever since he was a young boy, he fantasised about piloting airplanes. Ever since I was a young boy, well, let’s just say I’ve preferred to take the train. Of course I know that, statistically, flying is safe; but that knowledge doesn’t stop the unnerving sense that at some