Culture

Culture

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

The best podcasts about dying, or almost dying

Radio

If there’s any form of entertainment that I will reliably find time for, no matter how big the to-read pile or how long the to-do list, it is the dying-on-an-adventure true story. I have yet to watch about half the films being called the best of the year, but I am devouring documentaries about hikers

A late fling: Free Love, by Tessa Hadley, reviewed

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Tessa Hadley is the queen of the portentous evening, the pregnant light and the carefully composed life unwittingly waiting to be unravelled. Free Love, like its predecessor Late in the Day, begins on one such evening. The year is 1967 and Phyllis, a suburban housewife, is applying her make-up. She and her husband, a ‘respected

A topsy-turvy world: Peaces, by Helen Oyeyemi, reviewed

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At a village train station in deepest Kent two men and their pet mongoose are setting off on their honeymoon. The men are Otto and Xavier Shin and the mongoose is Árpád Montague XXX; the train is the Lucky Day — a former tea-smuggler’s transportation, now home to a mysterious woman named Ava Kapoor. They

When did postmodernism begin?

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There’s a scene in Martin Amis’s 1990s revenge comedy The Information in which a book reviewer, who’s crushed by his failures and rendered literally impotent by his best friend’s success, is sitting in a low-lit suburban room beside a girl (not his wife) named Belladonna: ‘She was definitely younger than him. He was a modernist.

Celebrating Konstantin Paustovsky — hailed as ‘the Russian Proust’

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When is a life worth telling? The Soviet writer Konstantin Paustovsky’s six-volume autobiography The Story of a Life combines high drama with heroic misadventure in a comico-lyrical amalgam of history and domestic detail that enchants from start to finish. Why Paustovsky is not better known outside his native Moscow is a mystery. In the mid-1960s

The Greeks’ bitter fight for freedom

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Last year was the 200th anniversary of the outbreak of the war of Greek independence in March 1821. It has been celebrated by a flood of books and events, a particularly instructive exhibition at the Benaki Museum in Athens and this gruesome page-turner. Mark Mazower, professor of history at Columbia University and the author of

The novels that became instant classics

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In the world of books, a modern classic is an altogether more slippery thing than a classic: it must walk a line between freshness and durability; reflect the current age but hope to outlast it. For individual publishers, given many 20th-century writers are still in copyright, a modern classics list will necessarily be partial. However,

Variations on a theme: To Paradise, by Hanya Yanagihara, reviewed

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My daunting brief: to tell you about Hanya Yanagihara and her new, uncategorisable 720-page novel in 550 words. It’s the book-reviewing equivalent of a heated round of Articulate. Bums on the edge of the sofa, team. Flip that egg-timer. Here goes! American, born 1974, childhood spent largely in Hawaii. Debuted with The People in the

Emperor for three years: the doomed reign of Maximilian I of Mexico

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On 8 April 1864 an Austrian archduke with a penchant for daydreaming agreed to be emperor of Mexico. As Edward Shawcross describes in his majestic history The Last Emperor of Mexico, the process to install Maximilian of Habsburg began two and half years earlier. The plan was proposed by a determined clique of Mexican Conservatives

Beautiful enigma: Garbo’s mystery lives on

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‘We didn’t need dialogue’, glares Gloria Swanson’s crazed silent picture star midway through Billy Wilder’s Sunset Boulevard. ‘We had faces!’ She had a point. Even those of us who believe the movies weren’t really the movies until they had snappy dialogue (and no dialogue ever snapped the way Wilder’s did) have to concede that Swanson

A cursed place: Small Things Like These, by Claire Keegan, reviewed

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Claire Keegan’s tiny, cataclysmic novel takes us into the heart of small-town Ireland a few decades ago, creating a world that feels in certain respects dead and buried but whose legacy the country is still processing. This is Ireland before the boom and bust of the Celtic Tiger; before the insidious, everyday power of the

The first fairy stories were never intended for children

Lead book review

Stories are fundamental to humanity and no one can guess how far back they go — long before they were first recorded, no doubt. As Thomas Mann says at the beginning of Joseph and his Brothers: The further down into the lower world of the past we probe and press, the more do we find

Welcome to Houellebecq’s France

On 8 January 2015, the day after eight Charlie Hebdo satirists and four others were murdered, a posthumous cartoon by one of the victims appeared in France’s answer to Private Eye. It showed two decrepit-looking authors side by side at a book signing, with the caption ‘71 per cent of the French are pessimistic’. One was Michel

The debt I owe to cannabis

Boris Johnson, Dominic Raab and Jeremy Hunt have all admitted that they tried cannabis as young adults. Neither the admission nor the THC psychoactive component of the drug, which makes you high, seem to have done them much harm in their pathways to successful careers in parliament. But a new governmental war on drugs is

Musical conservatives ought to love identity politics

Classical

It’s 2022 and classical music is, again, dead. It’d be surprising if it wasn’t. In 2014 the New Yorker published a timeline by the industry analyst Andy Doe showing the precise chronology of the decline and fall. Ageing audiences in the 21st century, the gramophone in the 20th, the dangerous new technology of the pianoforte