The good, the bad and the ugly in books, exhibitions, cinema, TV, dance, music, podcasts and theatre.
It is sometimes said that intelligence failures are often failures of assessment rather than collection. This is especially so when the intelligence is unwelcome or unfashionable. MI6’s first report of prewar Germany’s secret U-boat building programme was withdrawn from circulation at the request of the Foreign Office, reluctant to alarm Whitehall’s appeasers. Action Likely in
Rembrandt Harmenszoon van Rijn (1606–69) is not only the presiding genius of the Dutch golden age of painting, but one of the greatest painters of all time. His work — as painter, draughtsman and etcher — continues to fascinate and move us like none other. He has been the subject of innumerable books, from novels
In January 1973, Science (along with Nature, the most influential general science journal in the world) published an article that immediately captured major media attention. David Rosenhan, a Stanford social psychologist, reported that eight pseudo-patients had presented themselves at a variety of mental hospitals, 12 in all, complaining that they were hearing voices saying ‘hollow,
The latest challenge, to submit a poem beginning ‘Yes. I remember…’, was suggested by a reader who was very taken with Adrian Bailey’s poem ‘First Love’, a clever riff on Edward Thomas’s much-loved ‘Adlestrop’, published recently in this magazine. The winners, in an entry that provided a bracing blast of new year nostalgia, earn £25
Jonathon Green is a tosher. As a lexicographer he dives into archives and emerges with armfuls of slangy curios, such as ‘bell-polisher’ and ‘bitchin’. In Sounds & Furies he sifts English slang from tosheroons as diverse as the Wife of Bath to Fast Times at Ridgemont High. Green’s passion for his subject is infectious. His
A distinctive pattern of horizontal and vertical lines appears in the background of many of Eadweard Muybridge’s best-known photographs, giving his images of animal and human locomotion a strangely modern appearance, despite their being products of the 1880s. The lines also anticipate those adopted in the 20th century against which US criminals appear in police
Tsitsi Dangarembga’s arresting Nervous Conditions appeared in 1988 and was the first novel published in English by a black Zimbabwean woman. She is now in mid-career, prominent among those writers who have emerged since independence, who include Petina Gappah, NoViolet Bulawayo and Tendai Huchu. The reason for this flowering of talent cannot be nailed down,
‘To live and die without knowing the psychedelic experience,’ says the narrator of Threshold, ‘is comparable to never having encountered literature or travelled to another continent.’ Magic mushrooms in Dublin, opioids in Thailand and San Francisco, hallucinogenic cactus in Bolivia and Peru, ketamine in India… he encounters terror, near-death and ecstasy by every means available,
Look up at the sky on a clear night. This is not an astrological game. (Indeed, the experiment’s more impressive if you don’t know one zodiacal pattern from another and rely solely on your wits.) In a matter of seconds you will find patterns among the stars. We can pretty much apprehend up to five
Andrew Lambirth claims that Bryan Robertson was ‘the greatest director the Tate Gallery never had’; but on the evidence of this book, he would have been a disaster — chaotic, hopeless with money and eternally late. What he actually was was the inspired and inspiring director of the Whitechapel Gallery from 1952 to 1969. He
The presiding genius of this original and erudite book is undoubtedly Virginia Woolf, whose essay ‘A Room of One’s Own’ provided the rallying cry, whether consciously or not, for five remarkable women, all drawn at some point in their careers to Bloomsbury’s Mecklenburgh Square. There they found the freedom and independence they craved to explore
Unlike a lot of people in the media, I didn’t personally know Deborah Orr, but I know many who did, and the intensity of their love for her burned very bright after her death in October. They spoke of her wild beauty, her fierce passions and smoky laughter; what great company she was; how every
‘I consist of the shards into which the Republic of Kolyma shattered me,’ Varlam Shalamov once told a fellow gulag survivor. Sentenced to hard labour for Trotskyist activities, Shalamov spent 17 years in the gulag, primarily in Kolyma, located at the edge of the Arctic Circle, eight time zones east of Moscow and ‘one of
Since Robert Lowell’s sudden death in 1977 his critical reputation has suffered from the usual post-mortem slump. Interest in Lowell’s life, however, remains as strong as during his celebrity heyday, when he graced the cover of Time magazine and marched on the Pentagon with Norman Mailer. A biography (excellent, by Ian Hamilton), an edition of
In this week’s Book Club, my guest is the historian Tom Holland, author of the new book Dominion: The Making of the Western Mind. The book, though as Tom remarks, you might not know it from the cover, is essentially a history of Christianity — and an account of the myriad ways, many of them
The inspiration for the latest challenge — to rearrange the letters of the names of poets (e.g. Basho: ‘has B.O.’) and submit a poem of that title in the style of the poet concerned — was puzzle writer and editor Francis Heaney’s wonderful Holy Tango of Literature, which includes such delights as William Shakespeare’s ‘Is
Empires are born to die; that’s one source of their strange allure. An untenable form of society judders, in technicolor and often loudly, to an inevitable end. Romesh Gunesekera was born in Ceylon in 1954, and much of his fiction has lingered in fascination on its years as a dominion — no longer a colony,
The word ‘jewel’ makes the heart beat a little faster. Great jewels have always epitomised beauty, love — illicit or sanctified —romance, danger and mystery. And no one knew better how to cash in on this mystique than the firm of Cartier, for years the go-to jewellers for discreet, elegant razzle-dazzle. Its customers were kings,
Pauline, Petrova or Posy? Which Fossil sister are you? Or, rather, which Fossil sister did you hope to be when you first read Noel Streatfeild’s Ballet Shoes? It has to be Posy. The third and last adopted Fossil arrives in a basket with a note — ‘This is the little daughter of a dancer’ —
Debbie Harry, Blondie’s lead singer, has written a memoir in which she relates, in her usual deadpan, punk-rock way, the strange, horrific things that have happened to her. She had a narrow escape from Ted Bundy, the serial killer; David Bowie showed her his penis (‘adorable’, apparently) and early in her pop career she was
The reality of animal communication (or, more precisely, our belief in that reality) is a fact underwritten not by science but by direct experience. A dog owner knows that his dog communicates with him because he makes eye contact with it, notices its body movements, listens to its barks and whines and yips, and associates
Making attributions to Leonardo da Vinci, the great art historian Adolfo Venturi once remarked, is like ‘picking up a red-hot iron’. Those who wish to avoid injury, he advised, should exercise great caution. Whether or not the scholars who attributed the ‘Salvator Mundi’ to the great man are now suffering from badly burnt fingers —
Leslie Jamison is creating quite a stir in America. Her first collection of essays, The Empathy Exams, went straight to the New York Times bestseller list, and this second collection comes crowned in laurels: ‘She’s an unstoppable force of nature,’ says her American editor. ‘This is the essay at its creative, philosophical best,’ says Eleanor
‘The victor will never be asked if he told the truth,’ Hitler remarked on the eve of invading Poland in September 1939. Nobody believed his claim that Germany was acting in self-defence; but they did believe his carefully crafted propaganda to the effect that the Poles were so dumb they used cavalry armed with lances
This engaging book describes the Norwegian author’s travels round the five Central Asian Stans — a region where toponyms still make the heart beat faster: Samarkand, Bukhara, Tashkent. Fittingly, given the means by which foreign powers have harmed the Stans, Erika Fatland begins her story with the disastrous methane spill which Soviet geologists caused in
I don’t care for Elton John. A cross between Violet Elizabeth Bott and Princess Margaret, his temper tantrums are legendary, whether asking fans on to the stage to dance and then screaming at them not to get so close, or demanding that an employee do something about the blustery weather keeping him awake. They say
My guest in this week’s Book Club is the rock musician, writer and sometime Faber editor Pete Townshend. Pete has just published his first novel The Age of Anxiety, an ambitious work jointly conceived as an opera. We talk about madness and creativity, Who lyrics popping up in the fiction, how he settled on an
Clive James is gone. What a great spirit, what a lively and curious mind, what an instinct for laughter we’ve lost. I had the chance to talk to him in 2017 at his home in Cambridge about poetry, fame, late style, discovering Browning, being silly and serious, watching box sets, facing the end, and why he
Clive James died last weekend at his home, surrounded by his family, after a long illness. The poet, writer, critic and television star was one of the most remarkable, talented and insightful members of his generation. Loved by millions, he was an incomparable presence in the lives of his friends and readers right up until