The good, the bad and the ugly in books, exhibitions, cinema, TV, dance, music, podcasts and theatre.
When, many years ago, I finished reading Cecil Woodham-Smith’s fine and tragic The Great Hunger, I swore never to read another book about the Irish famine of 1845-9. But they continue to be published, and they do not always agree. Tim Pat Coogan’s The Famine Plot: England’s Role in Ireland’s Greatest Tragedy, whose title says
Where to publish my fiction? The question will have occupied all aspiring writers. It is famously hard to publish fiction in Britain, which is why each of the few prizes for unpublished fiction attracts vast attention. There is a new prize in this sparse field: The White Review, the thriving independent quarterly arts journal, has inaugurated a
Nicholson Baker is intensely interested. He looks at the world like he has never seen it before, fixating on the mundane and capitalizing upon the strange lacunae which exist between seeing and understanding. In the purist sense, his interest makes him interesting. The Way the World Works is a colourful digest of his essays, conference
A German Jew fleeing Nazism to America; a soldier in the D-Day landings; a US citizen moving to the GDR for the socialist cause; a writer denounced by the Party; a Berliner politician in a newly reunified Germany: all sound like separate characters in a novel, yet all apply to Stefan Heym, the pseudonym of
Just as the classical world was built around the Mediterranean, the modern world was built around the Atlantic. The Romans called the Med ‘Mare Nostrum’ – Our Sea. The Atlantic, on the other hand, was a place of contest for centuries. European nations fought for supremacy and plunder upon it, traded for wealth across it,
In his new book Classified: Secrecy and The State In Modern Britain, Dr Christopher Moran gives an account of the British state’s long obsession with secrecy, and the various methods it used to prevent information leaking into the public domain. Using a number of hitherto declassified documents, unpublished letters, as well as various interviews with
Five years ago I had never heard of Percy Kelly (1918–93). I knew the work of some Cumbria artists, and much admired the dark and moody landscapes of Sheila Fell (1931–79), for instance, but Percy Kelly had not then registered on my radar. He was already highly regarded in the Lake District, but it was
In 1929 the founder of Italian Futurism, Filippo Tommaso Marinetti, reported from Milan that, after a wartime setback, the movement was ‘in full working order’ under the leadership of ‘the very young and very ingenious Bruno Munari’. Bruno Munari (1907–1998) was 22 at the time. He had arrived in Milan two years earlier as a
Does the costume make the man or the man the costume? Well, a little bit of both if the Hollywood Costume exhibition at the V&A is to be believed. Five years in the making, this collection of more than 100 of the most iconic outfits in movie history, from Scarlett O’Hara’s green ‘curtain’ gown to
Rain keeps us indoors, so we live by constraint and denial. No walk on the beach, no sea-swimming, no bicycle ride, no watching the peep-and-vanish of lizards. Instead, the clock ticks and one page of the book turns to another. Our fingertips now and again touch as if to suggest the inside and outside of
Although the starving artist in the garret is no longer the favourite public stereotype, painters and sculptors remain something of a mystery even to those who spend time looking at their work. So a film that helps to explain their assorted motivations can only be a good thing, and one as lucid and entertaining as
Was that it? Was that the sum total of 90 years of radio? Radio Reunited, the three-minute ‘celebration’ of the first BBC wireless broadcast in November 1922, was a very odd affair. Billed as a revolutionary simulcast to a ‘potential’ 120 million listeners round the world, playing out on all the BBC’s radio stations at
God, I’m jealous of Michael Gove. Not for being a cabinet minister in the same coalition as Nick Clegg and Vince Cable, obviously, but for being outed as a queer in the new series of Harry & Paul (BBC2, Sunday). Now that’s what I call fame. Harry & Paul has had mixed reviews. Some of
Are we barmy or what? Our mawkish obsession with the first world war demonstrates that we’re in the grip of a mass delusion: institutional sentimentality. The latest symptom of our death-mania is Nick Dear’s engaging play about the pastoral poet Edward Thomas, who was killed in action in 1917. Thomas began writing verse aged 36
Record companies: if you insist on sending CDs to my home address without so much as a covering note or a press release, well, that’s just fine by me. West Hill Radio Archives, I can’t say I’d heard of you, but the discs of Toscanini and the BBC Symphony Orchestra that landed on my doormat
I think I have developed a crush on Donizetti’s L’elisir d’amore, which is strange, considering that it is so evidently adorable a work that most opera-goers fall for it straight away. I have never been averse to it, in the way that I am to quite a lot of Donizetti’s work, but in the light
The star of Gambit, it seems, is the Savoy. And why not? Nobody else seems to want to lay claim to this movie, a refashioning of the 1966 art con caper that starred Michael Caine. Not even Colin Firth, who spends a fair amount of time in the new film unhappily legging it, trouserless, up
For those of us who find passion in national iconography, this is a melancholy historical moment. It’s a very bad time for British manufacturing and an even worse one for British symbols. The Chinese-owned maker of the London taxi (which Charles Eames described as one of the greatest designs of all time) is going bust.
Boycott Amazon was the message from Margaret Hodge MP in last weekend’s Observer. This comes in the wake of new revelations about just how little UK tax is paid by Amazon and other corporate giants Starbucks and Google. According to Conservative MP Charlie Elphicke, Amazon’s UK sales amounted to £3.9 billion last year, but it
Almost 20 years ago, Alice Munro, the Canadian genius of the short story, was interviewed by the Paris Review. She recalled a time when she was having trouble with her writing, and found herself looking round the ‘great literature’ on the shelves of the bookshop she was then running with her first husband as if
Nearly all the pages in this book are filled with thank-you letters. As a child, Elizabeth Bowes Lyon was writing to thank for presents of sweets and chocolates. As the Duke of York’s betrothed, she was writing ‘Dear Prince Bertie, Thank you ten million times for sending me all those gramophone records, which arrived in
The final volume of Proust’s Remembrance of Things Past, released at the end of last month, is a landmark in audio publishing. The seven volumes — over twice the length of War and Peace — are narrated unabridged by the actor Neville Jason: at a staggering 150 hours, it is the longest audiobook in existence.
This book purports to be a history not of London but of its suburbs. In the end this amounts to much the same thing, because the author is referring not to the present suburbs but to all the suburbs of London that have ever been, from Southwark onwards. After Boadicea sacked their original wooden settlement,
In 1974, as editor of the Connoisseur magazine, I ran an ‘1874’ issue to mark the centenary of Winston Churchill’s birth, to which John Betjeman, Asa Briggs and Lady Spencer-Churchill all contributed. So I know the virtues of selecting a single year and ‘sinking a shaft into history’. Effective use has often been made of
The Dutch writer, Cees Nooteboom, was living in West Berlin in 1989 when the gates opened and the Wall finally came down. At the time he wrote a series of essays about what was happening around him, which were published to great acclaim in Germany and form the first part of Roads to Berlin. He
A few years ago, in West Africa, a woman came up to me and said, ‘You know what’s wrong with our men? They go crazy once they get power. Crazy and bad.’ Chinua Achebe’s saving has been the fact that he never sought power, at least not of the kind that leads to conflict and
One of our more cherished national myths is that we British do not torture prisoners of war and criminal suspects. We support decency and fair play. Ian Cobain’s book proves beyond doubt that we do indeed make use of torture, and sometimes with relish. It shows that the British state has long practised a secret
Had the artist Rex Whistler not been killed in Normandy in 1944 at the age of 39, in what direction would his great talent have gone? It is futile to speculate, write Hugh and Mirabel Cecil, the authors of this sumptuously illustrated new biography. But many did. Cecil Beaton thought he would have become another
Dear old Pesto, we all make jokes about him but we all secretly admire him. The BBC business editor’s strangulated elocution and stream-of-consciousness style were never going to make him a natural broadcaster — ‘He won’t last six months,’ one of his household-name colleagues whispered to me in the early days. But six years on