The good, the bad and the ugly in books, exhibitions, cinema, TV, dance, music, podcasts and theatre.
Last week I was staying in a cool hotel in the middle of San Francisco. When I walked out to find coffee in the morning, I came across a man with his trousers lowered as he injected himself in the groin. An older fellow nearby used the street as a toilet, adding to the human
‘Peace — slept for 14 hours. The roar of the sea slashing the rocks — is there any more soothing sound in the solar system?’ Although this observation was made by Chips Channon at Sandwich after the rigours of electioneering in 1935 it could be aptly cited in this novel by the radiation physicist Agustín
A new novel by Esther Freud — her ninth — raises the perennial but always fascinating question about the use of autobiography in fiction. Since her first novel, Hideous Kinky, Freud has frequently used an underpinning of autobiography, but mostly it’s been discreet. You didn’t need to distinguish what was life, what fiction. But with
Sam Riviere has established himself as a seriously good poet who doesn’t take himself too seriously: his first collection, 81 Austerities, opened with an account of how he blew all the arts funding money awarded him, and his second, Kim Kardashian’s Marriage, is the only appearance of that august celebrity’s name in the distinguished Faber
Mircea Cartarescu likens his native Romania to a Latin American country stranded in eastern Europe. Certainly, his writing delivers not the pared-down parables and ironies of his self-exiled compatriot (and Nobel laureate) Herta Müller, but a rainbow-hued riot of fantasy, imagination and invention. The gender-switching narrator of ‘The Twins’ — one of five linked tales
At George Harrison’s 1971 concert for Bangladesh, awkwardly, the audience applauded after Ravi Shankar and his musicians had paused to tune their sitars and tablas. ‘If you appreciated the tuning so much,’ Shankar said, half in jest, ‘I hope you’ll enjoy the music even more.’ To the untrained ear, Indian music may sound unmelodious and
‘Jewish Resistance in Poland: Women Trample Nazi Soldiers,’ ran a New York headline in late 1942. That autumn, the Nazi occupying forces in the ancient town of Lubliniec, in southern Poland, had forced the Jewish community to assemble in the square. As men, women, the elderly and children were ordered to strip, a dozen women
What just happened? Some 15 months after the pandemic first struck, it’s still horribly unclear, which is perhaps why there have been no decent books making sense of Covid-19. This is not just about a virus but a collision of politics, panic, digital media, human behaviour and incompetence. Niall Ferguson’s Doom looks at each of
Rapid technological advance, a dark underworld of uncensored publishing, a threatened rupture with Scotland, even fears of a new outbreak of plague. Close scrutiny of the first few decades of the 18th century reveals some startling (and oddly reassuring) parallels with our own trying times. In his new book, Pat Rogers, an expert on the
In 2009 Margaret Atwood published The Year of the Flood, set in the aftermath of a waterless flood, a flu-like pandemic that almost extinguishes human life. Twelve years ago such apocalyptic visions still felt speculative. Today, Jessie Greengrass’s new novel, The High House, imagining a near future in which civilisation is engulfed by an actual
As Britain starts its long Covid recovery, are deeper problems lurking beneath the surface? Matthew d’Ancona certainly thinks so, and in this brief, rather shrill polemic, he urges us to face some uncomfortable truths. Uppermost in his mind is the threat posed by the populist right, which he worries will try to blame Britain’s post-Covid
Few journalists can have conducted such a dismal interview as mine with George Mackay Brown in the summer of 1992. The Times had sent me to Orkney, and the night before we met I sat up in my B&B reading his poetry, spellbound. So much to ask him! But that first meeting was a disaster.
In the 1930s, a group of American airmen had a dream. Air power, they believed, would do away with the need for armies and navies. The aeroplanes of the future would be able to drop bombs so accurately that there would be no need to kill soldiers in their millions: a handful of strikes on
Thirty-two years ago the young Nicholas Crane, who would go on to become one of England’s most esteemed television geographers, set out to woo a young woman by spiriting her off to the unfailingly romantic landscape of Chimborazo and Cotopaxi. The couple spent their high-altitude idyll walking the hills in hobnail boots, making river passage
This is a curious book, by turns profound and whimsical. Karl Schlögel, a professor of Eastern European history at Frankfurt, begins by stating he didn’t know anything about his chosen subject of perfume beyond going into department stores and duty-free shops to encounter a ‘peculiar mélange of scents… the light and sparkle of crystal, the
Perhaps the secret to understanding Russian history lies in its grammar: it lacks a pluperfect tense. In Latin, English and German the pluperfect describes actions completely completed at a definite point in the past… Early Russian had such a tense, but it was erased. This grammatical lack costs its speakers dear. Russian history never becomes
‘I saw the best minds of my generation destroyed by cat videos,’ begins Henry Mance’s How to Love Animals, winningly. That is the paradox he sets out to unpick in this densely factual and intermittently horrifying book: how a world in thrall to cuteness, endlessly compelled to click on videos of kittens and owls having
Welcome to Utopia — not an idyllic arcadia but a secretive tech incubator in a Manhattan office block. Here a computer scientist, Asha Ray, the narrator of The Startup Wife, her charismatic husband Cyrus and best friend Jules are nervously pitching their app platform — Asha’s cutting-edge algorithm aimed at people yearning for ritual without
Halfway through what must count as one of the more esoteric quests, Jennifer Lucy Allan finds herself on a hill near Birkenhead, in a cottage which houses the archive of the Association of Lighthouse Keepers. In a small bedroom long since surrendered to the past, she is handed a homemade CD of 90 foghorn recordings
This is not a novel about four chickens of various character — Gloria, Miss Hennepin County, Gam Gam and Darkness — that belong to the nameless narrator of Brood. That is incidental. It is a novel about a miscarriage — ‘our baby had been a girl’ — and, because it is a novel about the
When the British formed the basis of their empire in the 1600s by acquiring territories in India and North America, they already had many centuries’ experience of foreign involvement. One of the most remarkable aspects of the force that reshaped Eurasia 1,000 years earlier is that there was no prelude: the Arab conquests, and the
A great writer must be prepared to risk ridiculousness — not ridicule, although that may follow, but the possibility that the work will collapse into some or other version of nonsense. If it doesn’t, though, it is precisely the elements that flirt with disaster that will likely make it both superficially distinctive and artistically substantial.
Ezra Pound in ABC of Reading: ‘Dichten = condensare.’ Meaning poetry is intensification, ‘the most concentrated form of verbal expression’. Simon Armitage saying the same thing, memorably, genially, metaphorically, democratically: ‘How much power and force could be stored in — and retransmitted by — such compact shapes. Poems as the Duracell batteries of language.’ Both
The 20th-century Austrian mathematician Kurt Gödel did his level best to live in the world as his philosophical hero Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz imagined it: a place of pre-established harmony, whose patterns are accessible to reason. It’s an optimistic world, and a theological one: a universe presided over by a God who does not play dice.
Spare a thought for the white van man. It’s not yet nine on a summer’s morning and already Joseph, a plumber and the hero of James Clammer’s arresting novel, is having a pig of a day. He’s slept poorly. It’s the umpteenth day of a heat wave, and the biscuits left by his client Amanda
‘Who do you think you are — Stirling Moss?’ a genially menacing traffic cop would ask a hapless motorway transgressor. At the peak of his popularity as the most successful English motor-racing driver, Moss personified the glamorous daredevilry of racing at top speed. Richard Williams, the author of this sympathetic, exhaustive anatomy of an international
There are few certainties in life. Death and taxes are the ones regularly trotted out. However, there is another that rarely gets mentioned: the fact that every single human who has ever existed has come out of a woman’s body. This act of creation, while being a marvel, has also become banal. In Motherhood, Eliane
At the risk of encroaching on Spectator Competition territory, what is the least surprising thing for any given narrator in a particular author’s work to say? (For one of Irvine Welsh’s, a single word of four letters might be enough.) In the case of Patrick McGrath, I’d suggest, the answer comes on page 55 of
If you want to judge how much society has changed, you might do worse than visit a few secondhand bookshops. Obsolete volumes rest undisturbed on their shelves. The more popular they once were, the more unwanted copies accumulate. An almost inevitable presence nowadays is Sir Arthur Bryant, in his time a bestselling writer on historical
