Culture

Culture

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

Farewell, Tequila Leila

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Elif Shafak once described Istanbul as a set of matryoshka dolls: a place where anything was possible. As with much of her previous work, that city plays a significant and shape-shifting role in this her 11th novel, where the Bosphorus, ‘waking from its turquoise sleep, yawned with force’ one November morning in 1990. It is

… to nonagenarian love

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Towards the end of Live a Little, one of its two main characters says: ‘I’m past the age of waiting for something to go wrong. It already has.’ And we know what has, because some 200 pages earlier we have seen the man as a young boy, just before the second world war, pulling his

From teenage passion…

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The 16-year-old hero of David Nicholls’s fifth novel is ostensibly Everyboy. It is June 1997, the last day at dreary Merton Grange and, having flunked his exams, Charlie Lewis attends the leaving disco — all dry ice, vomit and snogging, laced with Cointreau and disinfectant. An infinity looms of bloated summer days, with only a

The great ministerial merry-go-round

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‘Annual reshuffles are crazy,’ remarked one of the prime minister’s most trusted advisers in July 1999 as I hovered outside the cabinet room, waiting to be anointed as the lowest form of ministerial life in John Prescott’s vast department — environment, transport and the regions. He went on: There is massive in-built insecurity. Ministers, who

The ‘rumours’ we chose to ignore

Lead book review

On 14 October 1942, the 23 Swiss members of the International Committee of the Red Cross met in Geneva to decide whether or not to go public with what they then knew about Auschwitz and the Nazis’ extermination plans. When they emerged two hours later they had voted, almost unanimously, to remain silent. As did

Staring into the abyss

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Rowan Hisayo Buchanan has achieved that rare feat, in her second novel Starling Days, of writing a convincing novel about depression which manages, miraculously, not to be in itself depressing. Her success is partly due to the fact that her protagonist, Mina, is not flattened by her despair and remains alive enough to become fascinated

Love at first sight | 4 July 2019

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France was to blame. Yes, France was most definitely to blame. He was never like this at home. So thinks an English boy, Cromwell, as he lies on a beach at Biarritz, contrasting the green fields of Scotland and Eton with the state he is now in, perpetually waiting and haunted by the ‘constant premonition

Women on the edge

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In Nicole Flattery’s Show Them a Good Time (Bloomsbury, £14.99), her female protagonists grapple with abusive relationships, degree courses, difficult bosses, unemployment programmes and a lascivious professor. The stories are tragicomic and deliciously odd. The author writes sentences that make you laugh, and then immediately want to reread to savour a striking image: a woman’s

King of a wild frontier

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Red Dog is an ambitious hybrid of a book. It was published in South Africa to wide acclaim in 2014 and has been expertly translated by Michiel Heyns, who has retained the cadence and some of the vocabulary of the original Afrikaans — the mongrel tongue that evolved in the Dutch East India Company’s Cape

Harlequin ladybird, fly away home

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I was shocked some years ago to discover, as I scratched bites on my ankles on holiday on Maui, that mosquitoes are not native to Hawaii. They first arrived in the 1820s, in barrels of water from a visiting ship. Of course, the climate was perfect for them, and they settled in very happily. But

Distress signals

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It’s an increasingly common lament that computers have ruined everything, and a longing for the days before Google and Twitter, when everything was somehow more organic and authentic, is on the rise. As someone who can remember writing early reviews on an electric typewriter and then going to the library to fax them to a

Feasts and flowers

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Cedric Morris is often referred to as an artist-plantsman, and while as a breeder of plants, most particularly of irises, he has always been highly regarded in horticultural circles, his reputation as a painter has been subject to regular fluctuations. Last year, two excellent and complementary London exhibitions — Cedric Morris: Artist Plantsman at the

A sea of troubles | 4 July 2019

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Andrew Ridker’s The Altruists (Viking, £20) is a Jewish family saga of academic parents and grown-up offspring. From this rather careworn material he manages to wring a spry comedy of parental failure and romantic misadventure. Arthur Alter is a terrible father, an ‘emotional cheapskate’ who attempts to bring his estranged children Ethan and Maggie together

King of the World: The Life of Louis XIV

Lead book review

I was flicking through an old copy of The Spectator the other day, one of the issues containing contributors’ ‘Christmas Books’, and there was a comment of Jonathan Sumption’s that ‘as a general rule, biography is a poor way to learn history’. It is primarily a matter of approach rather than simply subject of course,

Binding love

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In the spring of 1998, Rolling Stones fans in Germany were disappointed to hear that the band had been forced to cancel a string of gigs. Keith Richards, the ne plus ultra of rock’s wild men, had damaged a rib in a tumble from a ladder while trying to retrieve a book from one of

Writer’s Notebook | 27 June 2019

Notebook

Someone should write a guide to the best literary festivals. Sydney and Auckland would certainly be there, along with Sri Lanka, Jaipur and Dubai. Later this year I’m off to Mumbai and I’ve been invited to Mandalay. I swear there are writers who never actually have time to write any more, they spend so much

Ideas are history

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Wallace Stevens called it ‘the necessary angel’. Ted Hughes thought it ‘the most essential bit of machinery we have if we are going to live the lives of human beings’. Coleridge described its role a little more vigorously: ‘The living Power and prime Agent of all human perception… a repetition in the finite mind of

Born to be wild

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It was high time we had a proper look at the four beautiful, original Olivier sisters. Hitherto, with one exception, they have been seen in glimpses, playing marginal parts on the Bloomsbury stage after about 1910. The exception was the youngest, Noel, who all her life and since has been stuck with her invidious role

On a wing and a prayer | 27 June 2019

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In 1979, despite the best efforts of scientists for more than a century, a butterfly called the British Large Blue became extinct. There is widespread concern about the more recent decline in butterfly populations, but the American ecologist Nick Haddad writes that the collective weight of the known populations of the five rarest butterflies he

Cindy Yu

A Kan-do attitude

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The defining feature of Chinese millennials is not Instagram, avocado on toast or propertylessness. Born in the early years of China’s growth miracle, my generation idled away days on dusty village roads that would be paved as we grew up. Our adolescence coincided with the arrival of the smartphone; and now, with our jet-setting cosmopolitan

Return of the iceman

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It is more than a generation since the appearance of Barry Lopez’s classic Arctic Dreams. That book’s effortless integration of history, anthropology and ecology, mediated through its author’s radiant prose, introduced a global audience to the frozen north. It freed the frigid ice world from much historical polar literature, conjuring instead landscapes of delicate beauty

Mothers meeting

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Niven Govinden’s This Brutal House is set in the demi-monde of the New York vogue ball. This is an organised, charged battle of display, a peacocking, glitter-fuelled extravaganza, in which transvestites and transsexuals compete against each other for kudos and cash prizes. Eyelashes lengthen, hair is piled up for hours, dresses shimmer and heels clack,

Between the devil and the deep blue sea

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Death by water haunts the stories of Africans in Europe that flow through this fourth novel by Helon Habila. From the drowning of Milton’s swain Lycidas (a sort of tidal refrain for the book) to the capsized boat in the closing pages that offers victims in their hundreds to the ‘enraged leviathan’ of the sea,

Going bats

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When it was recently announced that Robert Pattinson, who played the vampire Edward Cullen in the Twilight films, had secured the role of Batman, a Twitter user wrote: ‘Worst vampire ever. Took him 11 years to turn into a bat.’ This is  probably Twitter’s second greatest bat joke, beaten only by @LRBbookshop’s ‘I reckon Nagel

The riddle of Chapel Sands

Lead book review

At first glance, Laura Cumming’s memoir On Chapel Sands begins with what appears to be a happy ending. On an autumn evening in 1929, a small child is snatched from a Lincolnshire beach. Her name is Betty Elston and she is three years old. The girl’s mother, Veda, is happy to let Betty play on