The good, the bad and the ugly in books, exhibitions, cinema, TV, dance, music, podcasts and theatre.
Lionel Shriver finished The New Republic in 1998. ‘At that time’, she writes in a foreword, ‘my sales record was poisonous’ and American publishers showed little interest in novels about terrorism. Both things changed: the next novel she wrote was the phenomenally successful We Need to Talk About Kevin, while ‘post-9/11, Americans became if anything
Stranger men have become stars than Billy Bob Thornton, but not many. His obsessive-compulsive disorder encompasses a bizarre list of phobias: of clowns, of old furniture, of Benjamin Disraeli’s hair. Brutally dyslexic, he won an Oscar for his screenplay for Sling Blade, but writing a memoir, he says, would be beyond him. So, in an
A long-exposure photograph of the night sky will show you something that you never see, however often you look at the stars: thousands of perfect curves, concentrically arranged around an invisible pinhead. Everything is wheeling slowly about a single point. A good book or a great adventure, fictional or real, often does the same. There
‘If you cn rd ths msg, you cn bcm a sec & gt a gd jb’. So ran the advertisement for the Brook Street Bureau employment agency. It was the ubiquitous ornament of tube trains, buses and escalators in the 1970s, now seen no more and forgotten, at least by me, until Andrew Hadfield’s biography
I am deeply envious of Chris Cleeve, so maybe everything that follows should be taken with a pinch of salt. This is a guy whose first novel won the Somerset Maugham Award and whose second nestled snugly in the New York Times bestseller list for over a year. ‘Stunning,’ said the International Herald Tribune. ‘Stunning,’
Peter Hennessy is one of the most engaging and perceptive commentators of our time, so it was with a feeling of pleasurable anticipation that I approached his latest book. This was increased when I discovered, to my considerable surprise, that he had stood as the Conservative candidate in his school’s 1964 mock general election. My
It is an old-established truth, a truism in fact, that money does not buy you happiness — though, as the late Professor Joad pointed out, it does allow you to be miserable in comfort. Yet the great majority of people, knowing this, nevertheless devote their energies to increasing their wealth, which suggests that happiness is
The Letters of T.S.Eliot is a project which already seems to belong to another world, of leisure and detailed scholarship. It was conceived of decades ago, and the first volume, under the editorship of Eliot’s widow Valerie, came out in 1988. A second volume, with the support of the excellent John Haffenden, emerged 21 years
This life of the 11th Lord Lovat, executed on Tower Hill in 1747, in the aftermath of the ‘Forty-Five’ Rebellion of Bonnie Prince Charlie, is primarily a work of pietas. Its author is the daughter-in-law of the last Lord Lovat, who landed with the first fighting troops of the D-Day invasion of Europe, striding ahead
An important part of the critic’s role is to search out artists, living or dead, whose work has disappeared from general view, and to attempt some kind of reassessment of their value. The trouble with most coverage of the visual arts today is that the same few artists are constantly written about because their work
‘The Stone Roses are more important than Picasso’ claims the over-hyped and over-paid fishmonger Damien Hirst. The Manchester indie legends, led by Ian Brown, have reformed and are set to play three packed homecoming gigs this weekend. People will probably still be talking about this in twenty five years, just as they will be about
The death of the author and journalist Gitta Sereny earlier this month drew some strangely critical notices. One piece even tried to blame her for a current cultural tendency to claim people are not responsible for their own actions. Though this was a dissenting view, there was a more general seam of criticism which ran
While the Ancient Greeks ceased hostilities for the Olympic Games, this summer will be business as usual in many parts of the world. Exiled poets from Bangladesh, Sierra Leone, China, and Uganda presented their work yesterday afternoon at the Southbank center, participating in the ongoing Poetry Parnassus. Readings took place in the cavernous, skylit, Front
The Libor scandal continues to shock, prompting bewilderment as well as disgust. The mood has turned against the City, with the FT suggesting that it ‘may be necessary to retire this generation of flawed leaders.’ In the piece below, Geraint Anderson, a former stockbroker and whistleblower, explains why his latest book, Payback Time, a story
Robert and Edward Skidelsky have written a new book for our times, How Much Is Enough? The Love of Money, and the Case for the Good Life, which is published today. In their own words: ‘it is the story of… how we came to be ensnared by the dream of progress with purpose, riches without
Have you ever written to an author? It’s the norm these days, or at least emailing or Tweeting them is. But it’s not that long since contacting a writer meant applying pen to paper, then stamp to envelope, then feet to pavement until you reached the postbox. Real effort, and not that many people did
The word ‘reboot’, is the most weaselly term I’ve heard in film since people started talking about scripts needing ‘edge’ twenty years ago. A reboot is not a remake or a prequel or sequel or any of that cheesy commercial fare; it’s a reboot, a subtly different, very sophisticated, creative endeavour that has been employed
Journalist and former TV producer, Samantha Brick was recently castigated for her Daily Mail article suggesting that some might be intimidated by her good looks. But since we’re always game at Shelf Life, we invited her to reveal which books she would read during solitary confinement, where she wouldn’t like to find herself with Patrick
The song list drawn up for the opening ceremony of the Olympic Games is a disgrace. Surely everybody knows that by now, but then what can you expect when the selection is made by a pair of disc jockeys? There is nothing that reflects our nation’s love affair with the sea, no acknowledgement of our
If racism presupposes that different ethnic groups cannot live harmoniously together, then segregation puts that theory into practice. Carl H. Nightingale’s Segregation: A Global History of Divided Cities, teaches us that separating cities along racial colour-lines, has always concerned one commodity: real estate. Cities, Nightingale observers, are places where people of several races are meant
The economy is in tatters, Europe in turmoil — but don’t worry: there is an antidote to the prevailing angst, and it’s provided by this book. It could be read simply as a close look at an undemonstrative corner of the English countryside, informed by the special understanding of a landowner, Jason Gathorne-Hardy, and an
Stanzas from ‘The Retirement’ Farewell thou busy world, and may We never meet again: Here I can eat, and sleep, and pray, And do more good in one short day, Than he who his whole age out-wears Upon thy most conspicuous theatres, Where nought but vice and vanity do reign. Good God! how sweet are
The publishing juggernaut that is Alastair Campbell’s diaries rumbles on, with the arrival of the fourth instalment, Burden of Power: The Countdown to Iraq. The 752-page volume covers the most tumultuous part of Blair’s premiership, taking readers from 9/11 to Campbell’s resignation two years later. This is the sort of book whose reviews are
The awards season may be over, but can I nominate Neil White for a gong anyway? He genuinely deserves one. After all, he’s the chap from Nottingham who watched all of the 600 or so films that were released into British cinemas last year — and then blogged about them at www.everyfilmin2011.com. You might question
It’s a rare pleasure to find an unfamiliar artist of the 18th century whose work speaks to the contemporary mind as lucidly as Carlo Labruzzi (1748–1817). I had never heard of him before this show, being still in my playpen when the last Labruzzi exhibition excited the art world in 1960. Although celebrated in his
There’s one exception to the sometimes trivial and artificial events of the Cultural Olympiad: Writing Britain: Wastelands to Wonderlands at the British Library (until 25 September). Where other shows emphasise London’s separateness, Writing Britain subordinates the capital to the geography, peoples and history of the British Isles as a whole. Writers have recorded Britain’s development
It’s as if James Joyce was writing for radio, as if he understood the potential of the new audio technology long before the BBC had begun to broadcast plays and poetry. All that freakish literary invention in his 1922 novel Ulysses suddenly begins to make sense when heard on air, spoken out loud, with sound
Welsh National Opera’s new production of La Bohème, which I saw last week in Birmingham, is striking in a variety of ways, but its outstanding feature is the conducting of Carlo Rizzi. One tends to think that of all operas Bohème can look after itself, and up to a point that is true. Bashed out
Off to Narnia. Director Rupert Goold has recreated C.S. Lewis’s permafrosted fantasy world in a circus tent moored in Kensington Gardens. And at the height of summer too. An impossible feat. But tons of cash, and many months of preparation, have been sunk into this effort. The show starts with The Wardrobe looming up in