The good, the bad and the ugly in books, exhibitions, cinema, TV, dance, music, podcasts and theatre.
If ever there was a book for our uncaring, unsharing times, it is Gwendoline Riley’s First Love, in which Neve, a woman in her mid-thirties, struggles with a truly awful family and with the men in her life, while trying to make a career as a writer. That latter point might suggest some kind of
2016 was probably the year even the most optimistic of us — those who can genuinely square the new populist politics with a bright future for truth-seekers, scientists and rational thinkers — gave up on the possibility of time travel. Surely, on every rally stage there should have been at least one white man from
In this week’s podcast, I sit down with the Conservative MP, sometime diplomat and writer Rory Stewart to talk about his remarkable new book The Marches. Rory’s first book The Places In Between described a huge journey he took on foot across Afghanistan in the early noughties. His latest work sees him lace on his
August Geiger led an unremarkable life. Born in 1926, the third of ten children of a Catholic farming family in western Austria, the most unusual thing about him was his unwillingness ever to leave Wolfurt, the village where he had grown up. He built a house there, for his schoolteacher wife and their children, and
In Deaths of the Poets two living examples of the species, Paul Farley and Michael Symmons Roberts, retail the closing moments of close on 30 poetical lives, ranging from Thomas Chatterton to Robert Frost, Lord Byron to Rosemary Tonks, John Clare to Thom Gunn. Why? Because they feel the influence on ‘our’ generation (Farley was
‘I was single, straight, and female,’ Emily Witt begins, with all the élan of an alcoholic stating her name and what’s wrong with her. Only there isn’t anything wrong with Emily Witt. (The book jacket tells us she has three degrees and won a Fulbright scholarship to Mozambique.) Unless you count not having a fella
Molly Keane achieved fame and critical acclaim in 1981 aged 75, when she published the novel Good Behaviour, a razor-sharp social comedy about the Anglo-Irish in the 1930s. Her success was the more sensational because it was unexpected. Twenty years previously her play Dazzling Prospect had flopped disastrously at the box office. A drawing-room farce
Sigizmund Krzhizhanovsky was born in the wrong place at the wrong time. Had his Polish ancestor not been exiled to Siberia, he might have become a figure in European literature; living in Soviet Russia he was, in his own words, ‘known for being unknown’. His fiction and plays, written in the 1920s–1930s, remained mostly unpublished
I was a young, aspiring writer when I decided to leave everything behind and move to Istanbul more than two decades ago. I rented a tiny, dingy flat at the bottom of the Street of Cauldron Makers not far from Taksim Square, the heart of the modern city. That first night, I sat by the
There isn’t a clear line separating crime and literary fiction, but a border zone where ideas are passed from one genre to another. Flynn Berry’s debut Under the Harrow (Weidenfeld, £12.99) is set well to the literary side of this border, but doesn’t shirk on the thrills of a psychological mystery. Nora Lawrence expects to
Michael Chabon’s back. He’d never gone away, of course — more than a dozen books in all — but it’s been a long time since The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay (2000), a book entirely true to its title, so amazing and adventurous, indeed, so full of pizzazz, that it seems to have taken
Tara Palmer-Tomkinson, the socialite and reality TV star, has died at the age of 45 from a brain tumour. In the 27 July 1996 issue of The Spectator, she advised people not to believe all that we read about her in the papers: It is agreeable to wake in the morning and find a national newspaper praising
The chief appeal of Saint Joan, which I saw last night at the Donmar, is that it is a brilliant vehicle for a young actress. Gemma Arterton is great, if a little too mature and attractive to convey teenage innocence. Otherwise, I don’t quite see the point of George Bernard Shaw’s play, and wonder why
James D. Zirin is an experienced litigator as well as the host of a popular television talkshow. In this provocative polemic he uses skills developed both from behind the bar and in front of the camera to mount the charge that the US Supreme Court is a political court. How far does his evidence support
In early January, lastminute.com recommended its top 15 destinations for 2017. In 12th spot, just above Montreal, Croatia and Japan, was Hull. And if you’re tempted to opt for a snooty chuckle at this point, my advice would be to go to Hull — because, judging from my recent experience, even on a cold January
Two divergent approaches to printmaking are on view in an exhibition of graphic work by Francis Bacon and Lucian Freud at Marlborough Fine Art, Albemarle Street. For the former, media that depend on line, such as etching, were of little interest, since — as his friend Freud would point out — Francis couldn’t draw very
As if on cue, The World At One on Monday (Radio 4) ended with a short (too short) interview with an Austrian documentary film-maker who recently made a film about Brunhilde Pomsel, secretary to Hitler’s propaganda minister, Joseph Goebbels. The announcement of her death in Munich, aged 106, prompted the conversation, which happened to follow
Before he died aged 44 (probably of a pulmonary embolism, poor chap), Frederick, Prince of Wales, compiled a list of precepts for his son, the future George III. ‘Employ all your hands, all your power, to live with economy,’ was one. ‘If you can be without war, let not your ambition draw you into it,’
‘All that glisters is not gold,’ wrote Shakespeare (The Merchant of Venice), and you have to hand it to the guy, as he’s nailed it on the head. This Gold certainly glisters. You look at the poster and think: ‘Oh, yes. Glistery.’ It’s directed by Stephen Gaghan, who wrote and directed the terrific Syriana. It
Kids: who’d have them? Certainly no one who has ever been to the opera. If they’re not murdering you, they’re betraying you, defying orders or throwing themselves into the arms of the nearest unsuitable suitor. What happens when that suitor is a god, or — god forbid — their own brother or sister? Answers came
It could be the nuttiest idea ever. The protagonist of this American musical is Death, who secretly reprieves a beautiful Italian princess, Grazia, and spends the weekend at her father’s palace where a house party is in full swing. The dad knows the gatecrasher’s identity. But Death introduces himself to the others as a suave
Norse myths are having a moment. Or should I say another moment; one of a long chain of moments, in fact, beginning in the primordial soup of the oral tradition of storytelling in Iceland and Scandinavia. This mythology is old; old and very tenacious. First chronicled by scholars and historians some centuries after the Christianisation
After a long struggle to receive mainstream publication, Paul Auster’s first few novels were a genuinely significant contribution to American letters, his patented mix of postmodernism, deadpan comedy and metatextual homage to Kafka, Hamsun, Melville and Hawthorne so singular it invited parody. Among these books, The New York Trilogy and The Music of Chance seem
Clover Stroud opens her memoir with the crippling bout of post-natal depression that hit after the birth of her fourth child. ‘I felt like a fist. Dash was always naked, plastered bare to my breast, sucking from me as my body dripped milk and tears.’ She even contemplates harming the baby then killing herself, guilelessly
The great deserts of the world hold a compelling attraction for a rare breed of men who are ‘unwise and curiously planned’. Once under the spell of that seemingly infinite arena of sand and stone, many are helplessly hooked. It is an arena where the sun burns down relentlessly during the day, to be replaced
‘How often’, wrote Sigmund Freud in 1914, ‘have I mounted the steep steps from the unlovely Corso Cavour to the lonely piazza where the church stands, and have essayed to support the angry scorn of the heroic glance.’ The gaze that the founder of psychoanalysis struggled to withstand belonged to Michelangelo’s Moses, centrepiece of the
James D. Zirin is an experienced litigator as well as the host of a popular television talkshow. In this provocative polemic he uses skills developed both from behind the bar and in front of the camera to mount the charge that the US Supreme Court is a political court. How far does his evidence support
Blood, they say, is quick on the knife in Albania, where Balkan-style revenge killings, known as giakmarrje (‘blood-takings’), settle ancient scores and land disputes. The great engine of vengeance — the old idea of purification by blood — was explored by the Albanian novelist Ismail Kadare in his first novel, General of the Dead Army.