The good, the bad and the ugly in books, exhibitions, cinema, TV, dance, music, podcasts and theatre.
The central themes of Russian history have remained constant for over a millennium. Russia’s vast spaces and lack of any natural borders have always made her inhabitants terrified of invasion. And to protect the country against invaders, and to preserve its unity, Russia’s rulers seem always to have felt it necessary to assert their authority
When Ed Smith became a full-time professional cricketer for Kent in 1999 the county side was preparing for the new millennium by shedding anything that smacked of old-fashioned amateurism. Professionalism was to be a state of mind. Players were henceforth required to sign up to a new code of conduct. This Core Covenant consisted mainly
Set in Romania in the 1950s, this is the story of two people, Augustin and Safta, who are both very different and yet very closely linked. Safta is the daughter of the big house, while Augustin is the deaf mute illegitimate son of the cook. Safta’s mother, high-minded, overly religious since the death of a
The authors of this book have attempted a difficult thing: to ‘write about something that could never be known’. Here is a terrific and scary story about a group of American, British and European trekkers kidnapped by jihadists in Kashmir in July 1995 and slaughtered in December. Their wives were allowed to go free, and
Everybody knows that the heart pumps blood around the body, and that a man called William Harvey somehow discovered this fact. Before Harvey, people thought that blood moved around the body in a sluggish fashion. But then Harvey — who was born 14 years after Shakespeare — noticed that, actually, blood shoots out of the
Azazeel comes to Britain as the winner of the 2009 International Prize for Arabic Fiction, inevitably known as the ‘Arabic Booker’. It’s also been both a source of controversy and an unexpected popular hit in Youssef Ziedan’s homeland. According to the translator’s afterword, within months of publication, ‘piles of the novel appeared on the pavements
Back in the Sixties, if you wanted a fruitful, freakout-free LSD experience, you might have called on Mrs Aldous Huxley in Los Angeles, where she lived as a beatifically attuned Buddhist adept until her death in 2007. Aldous Huxley, her husband, had emigrated to America 70 years earlier in search of spiritual solace and the
What happens to a novelist who becomes the conscience of a nation? Nadine Gordimer, who is now 89 and whose writing career began in the 1940s, has represented the progressive white intelligentsia of South Africa through a large corpus of fiction and essays, exploring personal and political morality with passionate lucidity through the apartheid years
In his new book, Wired for Culture, Mark Pagel — a professor of evolutionary biology at the University of Reading — argues that social structures and culture are vital components in human evolution. Human beings are altruistic, helpful, and cooperative in ways that other mammals are not. Pagel says our facility for culture is the
Voldemort was second division as an adversary; Amazon was Harry Potter’s most implacable foe. But the bespectacled wizard has seen off the virtual giant. The major books story this week is the arrival of official eBook editions of the Harry Potter novels. But these books are not for sale through Amazon’s e-commerce system (or Barnes
The man who was probably the greatest banjo player in history has died, aged 88. Steve Martin says everything that needs to be said here. Here he and Earl are performing the immortal Foggy Mountain Breakdown.
There are now thought to be about six million people interested in having an allotment, with waiting lists as long as 40 years in one London borough. There have also been huge numbers of words written trying to explain their revival. Perhaps the real question is why they ever went away, given the success
Lately, I have been giving rather a lot of thought to the humble paperback. I say humble, for this is a format with no pretensions of grandeur, no fancy binding, no place-keeping ribbon, no dust-protecting jacket that can be slipped on and off as you will. I have always been told that modesty is a
Perhaps one of the best things to come out of Birmingham, Mike Skinner, mastermind behind The Streets, lets us know what he’s reading in this week’s Shelf Life. He reveals an interest in 20th Century history, what he once managed to get 10,000 people to do and a fondness for Philip Marlowe’s bon mots. His
Dr Gregory L Reece’s fascinating book, Creatures of the Night, is an enjoyably macabre stroll through the misty swamps of folklore where myth and religion are intertwined. Why do we create monsters and why is there such a desire and appetite for the darker side of the human soul? Whereas one reader may dismiss the
The march of David Mitchell continues. The author of Cloud Atlas and other acclaimed novels has won the American Academy of Arts and Letters’s E.M. Forster Award, worth a princely $20,000. The prize is intended to assist a ‘young writer from the United Kingdom or Ireland for a stay in the United States.’ Every little
Everywhere one goes these days, people are talking about John Updike. Death, it seems, concentrates the mind. Updike died more than 2 years ago, but he is the talk of the town. His name crops up at book launches and at literary events around London, usually accompanied by words like ‘genius’ or ‘under-appreciated’. That last
There are concentration camps in North Korea. We can see them clearly, via high-resolution satellite images on Google Earth. There are six of them, according to South Korean intelligence, and the largest is bigger than the city of Los Angeles. Of the six, four camps are ‘complete control districts’ where ‘irredeemable’ prisoners are worked to
As we approach the thirtieth anniversary of the Falklands War, Britain’s victory is justly recalled. That the war came near to disaster is conveniently forgotten. How well-placed are we to hold the islands today? When the 127 ships of the Task Force — a number that could not be assembled now — returned in triumph
Guardian HQ visited the future this weekend. The newspaper group hosted its inaugural ‘Open Weekend’ — a ‘festival of debates, workshops, music, comedy, poetry, food and fun’, according to the blurb. There was live music (banjos and interpretative dance, naturally). A farmers’ market ran along the adjacent canal and a selection of seedlings for sale from
You know those sad, confused people you sometimes see, standing on street corners and shouting dementedly at passing cars. Well, the other week, that madman was me. I was in Sheffield to cover the Crucible’s Michael Frayn season, and had risen early to write my review. And then my usually reliable laptop failed to come
One of the more considerable pleasures of exhibition-viewing outside London recently was the Claude show at the Ashmolean. London exhibitions are becoming mobbed by crowds, and there is little enjoyment in shoving or being shoved in the supposed pursuit of artistic enlightenment, and absolutely no chance to contemplate individual pictures in the hurly-burly. As the
Will Gore talks to David Suchet about his forthcoming West End role and his debt to the Belgian detective The first thing I notice about David Suchet is his facial hair. It isn’t a stick-on Poirot tash, unfortunately, but a grey beard that he has grown for his latest role, James Tyrone, in the West
There should be a sign on the door. ‘Plotless play in progress.’ Moon on a Rainbow Shawl, by Errol John, won first prize in a 1957 scriptwriting competition organised by Kenneth Tynan and judged by Alec Guinness, Peter Ustinov, Peter Hall and others. The West End promoters thought the script uncommercial and never gave it
Totally unexpectedly, as I don’t like Brit gangster films particularly — so many sociopaths, so little time — I loved, loved, loved, loved, loved Wild Bill and, for those of you who are slow on the uptake, let me say four times more: I loved, loved, loved, loved it. It may not even be a
Judith Weir’s Miss Fortune, whose UK première was at the Royal Opera last week, has received the severest critical panning I can recall for any new opera. It is no masterpiece, but I wonder why it has been rounded on when so many new — not to mention old — pieces with no more going
On the page a minute’s worth of words doesn’t look like much. A hundred and forty-four or thereabouts. But try spouting forth for 60 seconds on any given subject without hesitation, deviation or repetition and those 144 words become an awful lot to find, especially when they have to be summoned up at speed from
Two documentaries this week made us ponder what our country, with its 1 per cent of the world’s population, exists for. How God Made the English (BBC2, Saturday) had the historian Diarmaid MacCulloch musing about the way we have believed for a thousand years that we were God’s chosen people, having taken that baton from
‘It’s like acting,’ says the illustrator Quentin Blake about his latest project. ‘You imagine yourself there, in that situation. You imagine you are that person.’ The first-ever children’s laureate has been taking his acute eye for gesture, for character, into hospitals, as part of the Nightingale Project. His funny, colourful, bursting-with-life paintings are now decorating