The good, the bad and the ugly in books, exhibitions, cinema, TV, dance, music, podcasts and theatre.
Andrew Ziminski is the man who rebuilt the West Country. For 30 years, this skilled stonemason has renovated some of Britain’s greatest buildings. Along the way, he has acquired an unparalleled understanding of this country’s stones. He got hooked as a young man when a mason asked him if he noticed that tea tasted different
The reality (or lack thereof) of numbers is the kind of problem some philosophers consider overwhelmingly important, but it’s of no consequence to just about everyone else. It does not make a wink of difference to your life whether the figures in your bank account or the digits on your clock are, in a philosophical
To mark the 70th anniversary of George Orwell’s death, you were invited to submit a short story with an Orwellian flavour. This challenge was inspired by an entertaining thread on Twitter started by @rcolvile who asked for ideas for sequels or spin-offs when Orwell’s work goes out of copyright next January. Among the suggestions that
Menachem Begin was Israel’s most reviled and misunderstood prime minister. Reviled by Britain for his paramilitary activities against the British Army in Palestine, Begin was a keen admirer of the Westminster parliamentary system and English common law. Reviled by Jimmy Carter as a hawk who refused to cede an inch of territory, this ultra-nationalist signed
Faced with Marina Lewycka’s new novel, it’s tempting to say that The Good, the Bad and the Little Bit Stupid is also a pretty serviceable description of its contents. Yet, in the end, that feels far too neat a formulation for a book that goes well beyond the uneven into the realms of the completely
In 1983 I was sent to New York to interview Johnny Rotten and I took the opportunity to call on Andy Warhol. The Factory was in the phonebook; and the receptionist, Brigid Berlin, said that Andy was in Milan but would be back the following afternoon. ‘You better give him half an hour. Why don’t
This book is a rather startling depiction of Hugh Trevor-Roper’s involvement with the Society for Anglo-Chinese Understanding (SACU), his sponsored visit to China in October 1965 (just months before the Cultural Revolution got under way) and his efforts to find out who actually controlled and funded SACU. Having been induced to be a sponsor of
The art of falconry is more than 3,000 years old and possibly as popular now as at any time. Its devotees argue that in a pure form it is a deeply honourable tradition, requiring superhuman patience to coax a magnificent predator to hunt at the owner’s behest. It is a relationship, they would also claim,
There’s something — isn’t there? — of the literary also-ran about Graham Swift. He was on Granta’s first, influential Best of Young British Novelists list in 1983, and he won the Booker Prize in 1996, but he has never attained the public-face status of his contemporaries. That may not be so surprising, given who those
When you’re not a mother it’s hard to imagine what motherhood is like. Anyone you know who becomes one assures you that you have no idea what it’s like, and replaces you with some other woman who does, and you never see her again. The End. So then you have to tax your mother on
Some years ago I participated in a late-night Radio 3 show on exploration and travel. When I left the studio with my fellow contributors, both distinguished explorers, we got lost in the bowels of Broadcasting House. Round and round the dimly lit corridors we trudged, and only after talk of bivouacking did we finally reach
I had assumed, after 40 years of researching and writing about war in the 20th century, that I was prepared for just about any horror. But Christina Lamb’s research, into the mass rape of women and young girls in more recent wars and ethnic cleansing shook me to the core. This is the most powerful
Probably most of the world is bilingual, or more than bilingual. It is common in many countries to speak a national language alongside an international lingua franca such as Arabic, Spanish or English. On top of that, there may be a mother tongue that is not the same as a national language. A Nigerian, for
Dear Life arrives at a time when the public appetite for the personal accounts of medical insiders shows no sign of abating, with scores of such books having been published in recent years. Their enduring popularity is often — and, arguably, best — characterised as a kind of literary fallout from a decade of austerity
Lizzie, the narrator of Jenny Offill’s impressive third novel Weather, is ‘enmeshed’ with her brother, according to her psychologist-cum-meditation teacher. The word ‘mesh’ returns a few pages later, in a podcast, referring to the interconnectedness of different species: ‘a better term than “web”, they think’. With its paradoxical meaning of both containing spaces and joining
The latest competition asked for application letters for a job at No. 10 from a fictional character of your choice. This challenge was inspired by the PM’s chief special adviser Dominic Cummings’s suggestion, in a recruitment ad, that the ideal candidate for one of the positions on offer might resemble ‘weirdos from William Gibson novels
This is a very nuanced and subtle novel by Philip Hensher, which manages the highwire act of treating its characters with affection and anger at one and the same time. Politically, ethically and emotionally it places the reader in a kind of vertigo by addressing a singular moral question: is it better to be steadfast
The insomniac may come to dread the night’s solitude, but the next day poses the greater challenge. That’s when you are obliged to walk among the rested population and pass for one of them, when in truth most interactions are conducted in a state of self-doubting confusion; when harnessing one’s thoughts is like grabbing at
Kapka Kassabova’s previous travel book, Border, was rightly acclaimed and won several prizes. The author travelled to the edge of Europe, between Greece, Bulgaria and Turkey, and teased out ‘where something like Europe begins and something else ends, which isn’t quite Asia’. This is a sequel of sorts. She now travels to another border, that
There is a vogue at the moment for books which use art as a vehicle for examining the writer’s wider life and interests. Toby Ferris will certainly not have seen this as in any way an autobiography, but what it essentially does is use a quest for the 42 surviving paintings by Pieter Bruegel the
Of the many bleak moments that have lodged in my mind since reading this extraordinary book the most unshakeable is the image of the once dignified Otto Neumann, walking to his death in torrential rain, with black shoe polish running down his face and into his eyes. Thus was his fate sealed as the silver
Actress is the novel Anne Enright has been rehearsing since her first collection of stories, The Portable Virgin (1991). It is a perfect jewel of a book, a dark emerald set in the Irish laureate’s fictional tiara, alongside her Man Booker Prize winner The Gathering (2007) and The Green Road (2015). Its brilliance is complex
When an American describes a woman as wearing a ‘Park Avenue Helmet’ you know exactly what is meant. This is a hairdo so precise and sculpted that it trembles, category-wise, between coiffure and armour. Both natural and artificial, it also accurately signals social status. The link between hats, hair and caste was first made by
Georgina Landemare cooked for the Churchill family in all their kitchens, during the 1930s and 1940s. She got as close to the inner workings of the prime ministerial stomach as it was possible to get for a non-family member. At Admiralty House, Chartwell, Chequers, Downing Street and even in the hastily put-up fitted kitchen in
What compelled three well-known British writers to leave their homes and travel 6,000 miles to participate in a nasty late-19th-century conflict in the far-off South African veldt? This question lies at the heart of Sarah Lefanu’s excellent analysis of how Rudyard Kipling, Arthur Conan Doyle and Mary Kingsley found themselves following the flag in Britain’s
John Bercow obviously intended his book to annoy people, and he’s certainly succeeded in that. MPs who don’t find their names in the index can generally count themselves lucky. He just loves pouring shit over other politicians, especially Tories. He finds David Cameron ‘an opportunist lightweight, sniffy, supercilious and deeply snobbish’; Theresa May ‘as wooden
The latest competition asked for poems featuring one of T.S. Eliot’s practical cats getting to grips with the modern world. Your 21st-century reincarnations of Eliot’s felines (the poems were originally published in 1939 and inspired by the poet’s four-year-old godson, who invented the words ‘pollicle’ for dogs and ‘jellicle’ for cats) were terrific, making it
‘This is the West, Sir,’ says a reporter in The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance. ‘When the legend becomes fact, print the legend.’ This is very much the advice that has applied to Calamity Jane over the years. She was the lover of ‘Wild Bill’ Hickok, avenged herself on his killer and bore his secret
In 1935 the troops of Benito Mussolini’s sinister-clownish Roman Empire II invaded Ethiopia, in large part out of spite for Italy’s embarrassing defeat there 40 years earlier. Initially largely uncontested — thanks both to Emperor Haile Selassie’s desperate faith in international brotherhood and to a hearty dose of Quislingism from his leading nobles — when