The good, the bad and the ugly in books, exhibitions, cinema, TV, dance, music, podcasts and theatre.
In 2019, Kate Bush felt the need to issue a statement on her website clarifying that she was not a Tory supporter. Nearly three years earlier, in an interview with a Canadian magazine, the singer-songwriter had appeared to express her admiration for Theresa May, stating: ‘I actually really like her and think she’s wonderful… It’s
‘I would lend you my copy, but the fucker who previously borrowed it still hasn’t given it back.’ Those precise words were uttered to me by an eminent churchman, more in anger than in sorrow, while chatting at high table about a book he believed I might find useful. Its title has long since slipped
The United States of China, anyone? The idea that a federal China might be able to accommodate within it a relatively autonomous Taiwan is one of the more radical solutions mooted to the thorny problem of Taiwan’s status. The difficulty, of course, is that neither the Chinese Communist party nor Taiwan’s leaders would find such
Which came first to the designers of chess: the rules or the metaphor? It feels impossible to prise the system from the story: a military battle between two monarchs, each with perfectly symmetrical assets and equally balanced capabilities. Yet there have been dozens of ‘reskins’ of chess, swapping the kings and their minions for characters
Publishing is a business. Authors are its brands and books its products. When, as sometimes happens, one of the bigger brands inconveniently dies or retires, there’s an understandable desire to keep the brand going and to attach its lucrative name to new products. And why not? If it’s done well, everyone benefits – publishers, readers
Fresh out of Hollywood High, Eve Babitz introduced herself to Joseph Heller: ‘Dear Joseph Heller, I am a stacked 18-year-old blonde on Sunset Boulevard. I am also a writer.’ It was 1960, and while her writing was the sheerest bliss, ‘Eve Bah-Bitz with the Great Big Tits’, as she was known, was herself a work
You need only mild interest in the second world war to be aware of the Arctic convoys of 1941-45, escorted by the Royal Navy through savage weather and unimaginable cold to deliver supplies to Russia. Their purpose was to keep Russia in the war; the conditions were such that storms could last nine days, blowing
Resurrection has become its own literary genre. Though hardly a new phenomenon (Moby-Dick, for example, was out of print at the time of Herman Melville’s death), the success of such ‘forgotten’ classics as Suite Française, Stoner and Alone in Berlin proved that an author’s death and/or obscurity were no barrier for readers. So publishers from
On Friday 13 November 2015 France suffered the deadliest terrorist attack in its history. In quick succession, gunmen and suicide bombers struck the outer concourse of Paris’s Stade de France; then the pretty canal-side cafés and restaurants of the tenth arrondissement; then, most notoriously, the Bataclan theatre, where the doors were blocked and, over the
‘Recipes are like magic potions. They promise transformations,’ says Bee Wilson in her introduction to Sylvia Plath’s Tomato Soup Cake (Faber, £12.99), a collection of classic authors’ recipes. You have to pray that tinned tomato soup will indeed be transformed into something nice-tasting, or that Noel Streatfeild’s filets de boeuf aux bananas will not be
On 18 May 1781, Tupac Amaru II’s rebellion came to an abrupt and grisly end. Seized by Spanish forces, the Peruvian muleteer-turned-popular-revolutionary knew the game was up. Still, he refused to go quietly. After Tupac’s captors’ horses failed to wrench off his limbs, the executioner reached for his axe. ‘You kill only me,’ legend has
Peter Parker The New Zealand novelist Catherine Chidgey ought to be much more celebrated in this country than she is. Do not be put off by the fact that The Axeman’s Carnival (Europa, £14.99) is narrated by a magpie; whimsy is entirely absent from this highly original, thrillingly dark and often very funny novel. The
One of the joys of getting older is the appreciation of the solitary pint. But what to do as you sip your hard-earned beer? Usually after a suitable period of contemplation I’ll start fiddling with my phone. Not Adrian Tierney-Jones; he writes books, and his latest, A Pub for All Seasons (Headline, £20), is a
Jonathan Sumption Barbara Emerson’s The First Cold War: Anglo-Russian Relations in the 19th Century (Hurst, £35) is an outstanding account of Britain’s relations with Russia at a time when ambassadors mattered and Britain was the only world power. No one has explained the Great Game in Central Asia or the intricacies of European dynastic politics
‘Gliff’ is a word which can mean ‘a short moment’, ‘a wallop’, and ‘a post-ejaculatory sex act’; to ‘dispel snow’, ‘to frighten’, and to ‘escape something quickly’. It’s ‘really excitingly polysemous’, says one of Ali Smith’s characters. It’s certainly an apt title for a book which can’t seem to define itself. At its centre are
I have to confess that I am not a fan of horror fiction. I have a stack of unread H.P. Lovecrafts sent to me by enthusiasts. M.R. James scares me silly. Even Elizabeth Bowen’s ghost stories remain neglected among her other much-loved books. I have, however, been impressed over the years by writers usually identified as belonging
You’d think a book about a paralysed man lying in hospital for a year would be bound to be depressing. It never is. Hanif Kureishi is such an exhilarating writer that you read agog even when he’s describing having his nappies changed or fingers stuck up his bottom. It all started on Boxing Day 2022
In Regency Britain, balls were often timed to coincide with full moons. Provided there was no cloud cover, moonlight made it safer to send out carriages. When Ronald Blythe accepted social invitations, he also took the lunar calendar into account – because a full moon was ‘best for a merry bicyclist wheeling homeward along unlit
Many readers of Dante get no further than the Inferno. The inscription over the gates of Hell, the demon-haunted circles, the howling winds that buffet the lovers Paolo and Francesca, even the poet’s grim profile and bonnet, are part of the world’s literary and artistic heritage. Several translators also stop at the point that the
As Hilary Mantel memorably noted, history represents what people try to hide, and researching it is a question of ferreting out what they want you not to discover. Claire Hubbard-Hall’s plan to unearth the identities and lives of the legions of women who have worked unheralded in the British secret services was bold: looking for
Somewhere, there must be a PhD: Flashing: Exhibitionistic Disorder in the Oeuvre of Alan Bennett. It’s there in the first of his Talking Heads monologues (‘He’s been had up for exposing himself in Sainsbury’s doorway – as mother said, Tesco, you could understand it’) and in the last, Waiting for the Telegram, which opened with
In ‘Church Going’, the poem that gives this charming book its title, Philip Larkin talks about ‘one of the crew that tap and jot and know what rood-lofts were… Some ruin-bibber, randy for antique’. Well, Andrew Ziminski is king of the ruin-bibbers, randy for antique churches. He doesn’t just know what a rood-loft is; he’s
Jeremy Catto’s first sexual experiences were with a greengrocer’s son, but he lost interest in the boy after discovering that his family used tea bags rather than tea leaves. As a youth he marched with the Oxford branch of the Committee for Nuclear Disarmament, but bearing aloft a banner calling for the restoration of the
Unfortunately, She Was a Nymphomaniac must be one of the most eye-catching book titles of the year. I assumed it was just a riff on John Ford’s 17th-century tragedy ’Tis Pity She’s a Whore, but apparently it came directly from the mouth of a modern tour guide in a museum in Rome. The man was
The words ‘country houses’ immediately make one think of England, yet only five of the 15 featured in this hefty, impressively illustrated book are in Britain. It is a compilation of essays: part histories of various Jewish families, part architectural descriptions and part stories of the chateaux, mansions, villas and, of course, country houses all
To millions of people across America, Hillary Clinton sits atop a global network of satanic child-traffickers and is battling an underground resistance led by Donald Trump to maintain her malign influence. That is the core tenet of the QAnon movement, a conspiracy theory that originated in obscure corners of the internet before being seized upon
Ellen Barkin, Al Pacino’s lover-cum-prime- suspect in his comeback movie Sea of Love (1989), once dismissed the artifice of the British acting tradition (by way of an oddly ill-tempered pop at Nigel Havers) by comparing it with the immersive naturalism of the greats of post-war American cinema: Marlon Brando, Meryl Streep, Robert De Niro and
Is occult knowledge even possible in the age of the internet? If a recondite author obsessed you back in the day, it took hours of fossicking in far-flung dusty bookshops to feed your hunger. Oh, the joys of hunting down a shabby collection of Arthur Machen weirdiana! Now a few keystrokes will do the job.
In the early 1960s, glimmers of change start to appear in the Irish ‘backwater’ parish of Faha. A smuggled copy of Edna O’Brien’s banned The Country Girls is read surreptitiously by the doctor’s daughter, Ronnie Troy; a photograph of John F. Kennedy, the first Catholic president of the USA, hangs proudly on the postmistress’s wall.
