The good, the bad and the ugly in books, exhibitions, cinema, TV, dance, music, podcasts and theatre.
When totting up the positives from the British Raj, people often put the railways first, followed by the Indian Civil Service or the Indian Army. The Empire was won by the sword and held by the sword. It was racially exclusive, its taxes were often predatory, and its punishments savage. But at least it left
It can be odd to read a biography of a major political figure for whom, every day while one reads it, the story continues. Everything we hear in the news now about Mitt Romney seems to have been the case in 2008, when he first ran for president; or 2002, when after leading the Olympic
Just in case Private Eye smells a rat, let me put my cards on the table. Not once, but twice, I have sent the galley proofs of my novels to William Boyd and, not once, but twice, he has responded with generous ‘blurbs’, which my publishers have gratefully emblazoned on the covers. Believe me, in
Is there room for yet another book on Dickens? Probably not, but we’ll have it anyway. The Dickens Dictionary (Icon, £9.99) is John Sutherland’s contribution to the great birthday festival — and possibly not his last, for since his retirement from academe, Sutherland has been nearly as industrious as the great man himself. This brief
Editorial conferences are fraught affairs. There is a rush of facts, opinions and suggestions. It’s a brave man who trusts his memory to retain all the information. ‘S’, a young Russian journalist who lived between the wars, was one such brave man. He could recall perfectly each name, number and hint that his editor had
This column is supposed to be about fiction, but it ought to be about good writing in general. Paul Lay, editor of History Today, has picked out his top five narrative histories, mixing ancient and modern classics. I can’t dissent from his judgment that Edward Gibbon is the master of the genre. Nor can I
Not so long ago narrative history was on the way out. Academic historians, ever more specialised, looked set for a solipsistic future writing only for colleagues ploughing the same narrow field. Yet the commercial and critical success of the likes of Antony Beevor, Simon Sebag Montefiore and Amanda Foreman (none of whom is a member
Are you awed by an autograph? Swayed by a signature? As you peruse the shelves and tables of a bookshop, is your eye drawn more readily to a cover if it bears one of those little stickers announcing that the copy in question has been signed by the author? Plenty of people’s eyes are, apparently.
More bad news for people who like their reading matter to come with a spine: January sales for printed books were down 16 per cent on last year’s. There are lots of reasons for this — ebooks, better telly, a global pandemic of attention deficit disorder — but what’s often overlooked is modern publishing’s tendency
Cult US site Flavorwire recently produced a photo-feature on 20 beautiful bookshops from around the world, and it has since compiled a list of 20 beautiful private libraries. The sense of barely contained disorder contrasts with rooms that seem to have been arranged for a lifestyle magazine, such as the design by Sally Sirkin Lewis above. It
As well as being a keen pianist (she practices daily for 90 minutes), Tara Palmer-Tompkinson can also read. In this week’s Shelf Life, T P-T tells us exactly what she’d do if she didn’t find Sidney Sheldon on someone’s bookshelf and why Santa Sebag Montefiore is a godsend for most men. Tara’s latest novel Infidelity
Mary Wakefield, writing this week’s Diary column for the magazine (remember: subscribe!), deplores the Art Fund’s appeal for public subscribers to help purchase Yinka Shonibare’s Victory in a bottle so it may be displayed at Greenwich: Every day, except when it’s raining, I cycle to work through Trafalgar Square and pause to gaze at the
The Leveson inquiry was convened to ‘examine the culture, practices and ethics of the media’. Most of the inquiry’s time has been devoted to newspapers, particularly tabloid newspapers. To date, no publishers have been called to give evidence, although they may yet be. I very much hope that they are, because a new book published
The early years of the twentieth century hold an irresistible draw for the modern imagination. The Lifeboat by Charlotte Rogan takes us back to 1914, the world poised on the precipice of the modern age, with a plot and characters that are of the pre-modern era. A ship is stricken and, in a rescue bid,
In between feeds, I read to my babies. I like to read. It is the thing I do — I like to read more than I like to write or eat or sleep. Reading has been my go to method for getting through every-day life since I was bout three. My cutting-edge English teacher mother
There are two notable diamond jubilees this year: the obvious one and Jewish Book Week (JWB). The festival opened last weekend and will run at Kings Place in London until Sunday evening, when David Aaronovitch and Umberto Eco will end proceedings with a discussion about the latter’s novel, The Prague Cemetery. JBW is a celebration of
If cat-eyed, then a Pallas is their love; If freckled, she’s a party-coloured dove; If little, then she’s life and soul all o’er; An Amazon, the large two-handed whore. She stammers; oh, what grace in lisping lies! If she says nothing, to be sure she’s wise. If shrill, and with a voice to drown a
Colm Tóibín has a new book out this Thursday, New Ways to Kill Your Mother — a collection of essays examining how writers and their families relate to each other. Tóibín introduced the essays in Saturday’s Guardian, and was interviewed by the Times’ Erica Wagner (£): ‘As with his memoir, in which what is left out is as
When Lucian Freud (1922–2011) was hailed as the Greatest Living Painter towards the end of his career, it was almost as a mark of respect for having survived so long and kept stubbornly painting in the way he wanted, without any quarter given to fads and fashions, in pursuit of truth to appearances, whatever that
Peter Hoskin says that thanks to the DVD and advances in film restoration there has never been a better time for movie fans Whatever happened to silent cinema? Oh, yes, that’s right, it was supplanted by the talkies in the late Twenties and early Thirties, until it suddenly came back to life in time for
Unless I am Extremely Dim & Incredibly Thick, which is always a possibility — you think I don’t know? I do — this Stephen Daldry adaptation of Jonathan Safran Foer’s 2005 novel Extremely Loud & Incredibly Close just doesn’t seen to have any point, and is sentimental and banal as well as very, very long
We are all just trying to make a living here, obviously. Musicians are no different. There are so many of them now, several generations of them, for the old ones never stop and new ones seem to appear every day. To make any impression at all, then, you need what sportsmen call ‘momentum’. That’s the
Is any opera more frustrating than Offenbach’s The Tales of Hoffmann? It persistently arouses hopes which it almost as persistently fails to realise. Because there is no such thing as an authoritative text, one always hopes that a new production will have hit on a solution to its numerous problems. I’ve seen enough accounts of
As a human, Maria Callas was a diva. As a musician, she was a divinity. In the early Seventies she came down from Olympus to share her wisdom with us mortals and gave a series of open classes at the Julliard in New York. These seminars inspired Terrence McNally to create a full-scale portrait of
Sister Juana Inés de la Cruz is accounted the most considerable literary figure in 17th-century Latin America. I’m happy to take this on trust, remembering with great pleasure her comedy The House of Desires, a palpable hit when given in 2004 as part of the RSC’s still memorable festival of plays from the Spanish Golden
He writes about the stuff you’d rather not know, prefer not to think about, pretend to ignore. But it lives on with you in the mind. It won’t let you go. By his words, the sharp, brittle, spot-on dialogue, he forces you to recognise the limitations of your experience, your understanding. Roy Williams’s new trilogy
Only this morning I got an email from an evidently very bright 17-year-old at a certain nameless public school. ‘I’m so sick of having to study “environmental ethics” for hours on end, being split into “study groups”, and making lovely colourful mind-maps for presentations; the syllabus is infantile, and I feel increasingly infantilised by my
Absent Friends is the least technically adventurous of Alan Ayckbourn’s plays. Yet Jeremy Herrin’s revival (Harold Pinter Theatre, booking until 14 April) seems determined to display all its workings. The fact that the action unfolds in real time is thrust in our face with a big clock on the back wall, and an even bigger
Why in 1737 did Dr Johnson choose to leave his home in Lichfield in the Midlands and travel to London to make a fresh start as a writer, asks Jerry White in his encyclopaedic portrait of the 18th-century capital. It’s a good question. London was dangerous, it was dirty, you could die of ague in