Culture

Culture

The good, the bad and the ugly in books, exhibitions, cinema, TV, dance, music, podcasts and theatre.

Short and sweet: Xstabeth, by David Keenan, reviewed

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Aneliya, the Russian narrator of David Keenan’s enjoyably weird new novel, is worried about her dad. Tomasz’s modest music career is coming to an end; his wife left him years ago, and he lives in the shadow of his louche and much more successful best friend Jaco. ‘The famouser musician’ pulls some strings to get

Sybille Bedford — a gifted writer but a monstrous snob

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Sybille Bedford died in 2006, just short of 95. She left four novels, a travel book, two volumes of legal process and a memoir. Selina Hastings has written a wonderful biography, with lashings of lesbian lovers, which provides a soundtrack to one version of the 20th century. Born German in 1911, Bedford grew up in

Wistful thinking: Mr Wilder & Me, by Jonathan Coe, reviewed

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Mr Wilder & Me is not in any way a state- of-the-nation novel — and thank goodness. Brilliant as Jonathan Coe’s last work, Middle England, was, I’m not sure I could stomach a fictional barometer of pandemic Britain. Coe’s new book is instead a comfortingly nostalgic coming-of-age novel, or rather, a coming-of-old-age novel, probing the

Too much sound and fury in Christopher Nolan’s movies

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In 2006 the director Christopher Nolan filmed an adaptation of one of my novels, written a decade and a half earlier. Other than providing the source book, I had no involvement with any part of the filming. Unlike some novelists who have a Hollywood film made, I was not at all disappointed with the result:

Demystifying the world of espionage

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John le Carré once wrote sadly that he felt ‘shifty’ about his contribution to the glamorisation of the spying business. David Omand doesn’t deal in glamour. He was at the top of the Ministry of Defence and the Home Office, director of the code-braking Government Communications Headquarters, chairman of the Joint Intelligence Committee, and responsible

The humble biscuit has a noble history

Lead book review

Sin-eating is an old European practice. After a person’s death, during the period of lying-in, a biscuit would be placed on the corpse in its coffin. Before the burial, one of the mourners would eat it in order to take on the sins of the departed and allow them to move on into the next

Aunt Munca’s murky past

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Kiss Myself Goodbye. It sounds a bit like a William Boyd novel. It looks likea William Boyd novel, too: the cover shows an old hand-coloured photograph of a fur-stoled woman, determinedly leading a man in morning dress towards the camera. And, indeed, the raw material would likely make a very good William Boyd novel —

We should never take our daily bread for granted

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In the seventh and final chapter of this small but lingeringly powerful book, the author reveals his motivation for writing it. His father, he explains, a Russian-born Yugoslav soldier, had been a prisoner of war of the Germans, part of a group consigned to do forced labour felling trees during the bitterly cold winter of

The scholars who solved the riddles in the sands

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In 1835 the first two Egyptian antiquities were registered in the British Museum: a pair of red granite lions from Nubia. Each bore the name of Tutankhamun — not that anyone had ever heard of him. All serious understanding of the millennia-spanning Nilotic civilisation had disappeared before the last hieroglyph was carved in 394 AD.

Cyber apocalypse: The Silence, by Don DeLillo, reviewed

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Elaborated over a writing career that spans half a century — a career crowned with every honour save the Nobel Prize — Don DeLillo’s great project has been to explore a world where paranoia is not only warranted but healthy, a sane response to imminent threat, man-made or otherwise. He didn’t win the Nobel again

Looking for love: Ghosts, by Dolly Alderton

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Of all the successful modern female writers documenting their search for love, none has been as endearing as Dolly Alderton. Candace Bushnell’s alter ego Carrie Bradshaw in Sex and the City was too brash, perma-groomed and designer-clad. Liz Jones is vulnerable and self-effacingly funny, but her low self esteem and anorexia ring my ‘needs therapy’

The power behind The Few: Rolls-Royce’s Merlin engine

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Eighty years ago this summer Britain was facing its greatest moment of peril as Göring’s Luftwaffe attacked airfields, cities and convoys in a prelude to invasion. Nazi plans for us included all able-bodied men being sent to slave labour camps on the Continent. Thanks to the bravery of the RAF and the brilliance of their

Sarah Maslin Nir enjoys the rides of a lifetime

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The appeal of a book called Horse Crazy risks being limited to those who are. Yet many moments in Sarah Maslin Nir’s restorative memoir will chime with readers indifferent to things horsey. Part love letter, part reportage, it niftily braids together her family history, the history of horses, and the stories of the humans on

The gospel of separation according to Malcolm X

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In late April 1962 Los Angeles police shot and killed an unarmed black man, Ronald X Stokes, during a disturbance outside a Nation of Islam temple. Malcolm X, then the second most powerful figure in the NOI, rushed to the city. At a rally he told protesters: ‘You’re brutalised because you’re black, and when they

Tom Bower pulls his punches with his life of Boris Johnson

Lead book review

Tom Bower explains in his acknowledgements that this is not an authorised biography and he did not seek Boris Johnson’s co-operation. Instead, he followed his usual biographical method of interviewing well over 100 people who knew Boris, some named, some not. Obvious sources are his mother Charlotte, his sister Rachel, his first wife Allegra, his

Behind the veil of secrecy: GCHQ emerges from the shadows

Lead book review

Is it ever possible to truly see inside the heart of another? To divine hidden intentions and the darkest of thoughts? For a long time — before we all became sourly aware of our own computers spying on us like HAL 9000, and flashing ads for haemorrhoid ointments — this godlike omniscience was ascribed to

Playing devil’s advocate: a Mexican historian defends the Conquistadors

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Many books claim to describe junctures that changed the world but few examine ones as consequential as Conquistadores: A New History. Hailed by the Romantics as courageous explorers, the Spanish conquerors are increasingly seen as violent and rapacious exploiters. That, says Fernando Cervantes, oversimplifies the complexities of the early modern period. Cervantes, a Mexican historian,

‘I wonder about his humanity’: Malcolm McDowell on Stanley Kubrick

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Twenty-five years after making Spartacus, a parable of Roman decadence and rebellious slaves shot in California, Stanley Kubrick made Full Metal Jacket, a ’Nam flick shot in Beckton. Ever the perfectionist, Kubrick had imported palm trees from Africa, the better that the local gas works resemble downtown Hué. Alas, he wasn’t happy. Something about the

Dublin double act: Love, by Roddy Doyle, reviewed

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Far be it from me to utter a word against the patron saint of Dublin pubs, Roddy Doyle. Granted he’s a comic genius, his dialogue comparable with Beckett and that this, his 12th novel, is garnering rave reviews in America. But is not Doyle’s trademark conversation between two men in a pub not just a

Diplomatic daughters go behind the scenes at Yalta

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From Downing Street to Pennsylvania Avenue, history’s powerful inter-family influencers, whether spouses or children, have long operated behind weighty political front doors. With an unerring eye for the revealing detail, Catherine Grace Katz has uncovered a fascinating generational back-story to the Yalta summit of February 1945. The three varyingly spirited daughters of Churchill, Roosevelt and