The good, the bad and the ugly in books, exhibitions, cinema, TV, dance, music, podcasts and theatre.
Good stories have a dénouement. The Act III moment when all is revealed and the narrative comes in to land is critical to most plays and novels. And so we want it to be with Brexit. Who will turn out to have been right, and who wrong? Whose bluff will have been called, and to
My guest on this week’s Books Podcast is the poet and playwright Lemn Sissay. Lemn’s new memoir My Name Is Why describes his early life — given up for fostering in the late 1960s as the son of an unmarried Ethiopian mother — and his progress, when his foster family gave him up, through the
Georges Simenon, creator of the sombre, pipe-smoking Paris detective Jules Maigret, pursued sex, fame and money relentlessly. By the time he died in 1989, he had written nearly 200 novels, more than 150 novellas, several memoirs and countless short stories. His demonic productivity and the vast sales and fortune it brought him were matched by
There are many books about what it’s like to live with mental illness and the aftermath of child sexual abuse. Most of them, though, fall into that deeply off-putting category of ‘misery memoir’: greyscale covers and cloying titles such as ‘The Child Who Everyone Hurt’ and ‘When the Darkness Never Lifts’. You’re unlikely to want
Nobody can accuse Tom Holland of shying away from big subjects. Dominion is nothing less than a history of Christianity with an underlying theme. The subtitle says it all. It is dedicated to the idea that Christianity has formed the western mind, not just in its moral and intellectual conventions but in their opposites, such
Twenty years ago, I visited the ancient Egyptian city of Amarna with a party of American journalists. Even in those days this place, near Asyut on the Middle Nile, was regarded as a dodgy destination for western tourists. As a tribute to the value of an entire CBS television crew as a terrorist target, we
A camera sweeps across the verdant, shimmering beauty of Jamaica before descending on to a raffishly charming wooden house built into the hills. We’re at a music studio where four of the pioneers who gave birth to reggae are congregated to record a new album. ‘It’s tranquil, a real feeling of nature, just birds, trees
Pedro Almodovar can sometimes be overly flamboyant if not out-and-out nuts — let us never talk about I’m So Excited! ever again — but his latest film, Pain and Glory, is wonderfully restrained and all the better for it. Partly autobiographical, it’s about ageing, and the reckoning that always comes with that — when you
Professor David Scheel, the presenter of a BBC2 documentary on Thursday, instantly brought to mind that American scientist in The Fast Show: bearded, bespectacled, softly spoken and willing to try an experiment just for the hell of it. A marine biologist in Alaska, Scheel has been studying octopuses (his own preferred plural, incidentally) for 25
All symphonies were sacred symphonies, once. Haydn began each day’s composition with a prayer, and ended every score with the words ‘Laus Deo’. ‘These thoughts cheered me up,’ he told his biographer Albert Dies. Haydn, like Mozart, was a lifelong Catholic, and the Swiss theologian Hans Küng has suggested that the daring, exuberance and glorious
The madeleine upon which Proust’s seven-volume epic In Search of Lost Time pivots makes its significant appearance after just 18 minutes in the new Radio 4 adaptation — with which, if you’re not obsessed with the Ashes or holed up with the family in some dank seaside cottage, you can while away this bank holiday
Some of the marketing efforts by amateur impresarios up in Edinburgh are extraordinary. I was handed a leaflet for a poetry show called Don’t Bother. I didn’t. Tony Slattery appears in Slattery Will Get You Nowhere (a good pun that advertises the content), in which the ageing comic takes the audience back to the 1990s.
Serious readers and serious writers have a contract with each other,’ Deborah Levy once wrote. ‘We live through the same historical events, and the same Pepsi ads. Writers and readers, nervously sharing this all too fluid world, circle each other to find out what the hell is going on.’ Figuring out what the hell is
The 1950 B-film The Mudlark tells of an urchin who ekes out an unpleasant existence scavenging the slimy Thames foreshore. He finds a coin bearing the head of Queen Victoria, and creeps into Windsor Castle to see the sequestered sovereign for himself. Through sheer goodhearted pluck, he succeeds where sophisticated politicians have failed, appealing to
How interesting is local history? The history of my Cotswold village — recently celebrating the centenary of the Armistice with a well-researched exhibition and booklet on events in the Sibfords in the first world war — fascinates me, but I am not sure that people from other parts of Oxfordshire, let alone further afield, would
My local shop in Yangon was owned by a retired army officer and his wife and guarded by their handsome coal-black dog. When I asked the name of the hound the man smiled and said ‘Kalar’, before enquiring if I knew the meaning of the word. I did. Kalar is a racial slur, employed originally
One autumn night in 1991, I stood on the rooftop terrace of a tacky villa in Saranda once owned by Albania’s Stalinist dictator Enver Hoxha, beside three elderly former SOE officers who were returning to Albania for the first time since 1945. In an image that summed up the waste and the horror of the
There was a time when travel writers would set off with a spring in their step: Coleridge knocking the bristles from a broom in his impatience to make it into a stick; Laurie Lee walking out one midsummer morning; Patrick Leigh Fermor singing as he headed down the lane. To travel was an expression of
Readers of Jane Austen gain a clear idea of the task facing the daughters of gentlemen. They need to secure a husband who can enable them to keep or even improve their social and economic status. But what about their opposite numbers? How did the younger sons of gentlemen face up to the challenges and
This is a gentle, lovely book. It will, I’m sure, appeal to many an aspiring cook and baker, and should be read by anyone grieving for the loss of someone they loved. It is a memoir — each chapter ending with a recipe — covering a few years, from the sudden death of a beloved
The spy writer Mick Herron’s Slough House series of comic thrillers has steadily established him as perhaps the most influential author in the genre since Le Carre. The latest in the series, Joe Country, is out now — and we thought to celebrate its publication with another opportunity to listen to my conversation last year
Only one thing makes Frank Skinner nervous. ‘Water. Water scares me. I don’t get nervous on stage. Just in swimming pools. I didn’t learn to swim until 2013. Avoiding water is easier if you live in Birmingham.’ The stand-up comedian’s image is plastered across the centre of Edinburgh on six-foot placards to advertise the dates
‘It’s very hard for you to really live in the day,’ says Ruth, ‘because you don’t know by evening you may have a letter from an agency saying you’ve got to go tomorrow.’ She arrived in the UK in 1937, aged 15, sent here by her Jewish family to escape the Nazis. Now 98, she
Jazz died in 1959. At least, that’s what New Orleans trumpeter Nicholas Payton wrote in 2011 as part of a series of tweets that riled jazz lovers the world over. It later transpired that he meant jazz the word (which, he reckoned, was ‘a label forced upon musicians’) rather than jazz the genre. Semantics aside,
Quentin Tarantino’s latest film, Once Upon a Time in Hollywood, is a sprawling tale set in Hollywood in 1969, against the backdrop of the Manson murders, so it’s not a meditative, rural parable, just to be clear. No changing seasons, autumnal leaves, frosty mornings or any of that. Instead, he’s trying his hand at combining
Jeremy Deller’s Everybody in the Place: an Incomplete History of Britain 1984-1992 (BBC4) began with some footage of kids queuing up outside a warehouse rave in Stoke-on-Trent in 1991. It was at once banal and extraordinary: everyone was white; nobody was overweight; none of the clothes were designer, expensive or branded; nobody wore facial hair.
