Culture

Culture

The good, the bad and the ugly in books, exhibitions, cinema, TV, dance, music, podcasts and theatre.

Heaven and hell | 5 November 2011

Opera

Rameau is the great baroque master who has yet to be properly rediscovered, at any rate in the UK. It isn’t easy to see why, when one contemplates the Handel-mania that has been sweeping the land for the past quarter-century. Rameau is at least as melodically fertile, his scoring is extraordinary and often extraordinarily lovely,

Lloyd Evans

Splendid dereliction

Theatre

Long may it lie in ruins. Wilton’s Music Hall, in the East End of London, is a wondrous slice of Victoriana which exploits its failing grandeur to the max. All visitors are implored to find a couple of quid for the restoration effort. But decay and dilapidation are the best things about it. Every wrinkled

Ancient and modern: Rome and the world

Ancient and modern

The title of Boris’s forthcoming book on the people of London claims that it is ‘the city that made the world’. Whoa back, steady on, now. Surely Boris means Rome, centre of a vast ancient empire, not to mention the worldwide Catholic Church? When the poet Martial described the opening of the Colosseum in ad

Books of the Year | 5 November 2011

More from Books

Our regular reviewers were asked to name the books they’d most enjoyed reading this year. More choices next week •  A.N. Wilson Rachel Campbell-Johnson’s Mysterious Wisdom: The Life and Work of Samuel Palmer (Bloomsbury, £25) is one of those rare biographies which is a work of literature: beautifully written, overwhelmingly moving. A great art critic,

After America: Get Ready For Armageddon by Mark Steyn

More from Books

There are people sent to depress us, and prominent among them is Mark Steyn, whose speciality is apocalyptic predictions. Following his bestseller America Alone: The End of the World as We Know It, which was about the collapse of all of the Western world with the exception of the United States, he is now predicting

The ripple effect

More from Books

Penelope Lively’s new novel traces the consequences of a London street mugging. As the culprit sprints away with a handbag, the victim, Charlotte, a retired widow, falls and cracks her hip. Her daughter, Rose, personal assistant to the once-eminent historian Lord Peters, is meant to be in Manchester to help her employer give a talk

The Marriage Plot by Jeffrey Eugenides

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Jonathan Franzen. David Foster Wallace. Jeffrey Eugenides. Giant, slow-moving, serious writers, notching up about a novel per decade, all with their sights set on The Big One, The Beast, The Great American Novel. Wallace pulled it off, undoubtedly, with Infinite Jest in 1996, before ending it all by suicide in 2008 — a tragic loss.

AfterWord edited by Dale Salwak

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‘Conjuring the Literary Dead’ is the sub-title of this outlandish, sometimes beguiling book. Its editor, Dale Salwak, coaxed 19 writers — of the status of Margaret Drabble, Francis King, Jay Parini and Alan Sillitoe — to write essays in which they imagine speaking to dead authors who intrigue them. The resulting chapters are often inquisitive,

Why Be Happy When You Could Be Normal? by Jeanette Winterson

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In the 26 years since the publication of her highly acclaimed first novel, Oranges are Not the Only Fruit, Jeanette Winterson has proved herself a writer of startling invention, originality and style. Her combination of the magical and the earthy, the rapturous and the matter-of-fact, is unique. It is a strange and felicitous gift, as

Steve Jobs: The Exclusive Biography by Walter Isaacson

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America has always idolised its entrepreneurs, even when it has proved a thankless task — if you can glamorise Bill Gates, you can glamorise anyone. Especially Steve Jobs, whose death from pancreatic cancer has been greeted as the loss of Mammon’s Messiah. Is any of this justified? Well, yes and no. Jobs did as much

Sam Leith

Martin Amis: The Biography by Richard Bradford

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Where’s Invasion of the Space Invaders? That’s what I want to know. Only by consulting Richard Bradford’s bibliography would you know that in 1982 Martin Amis published a book — subtitled ‘An Addict’s Guide’ — on how to win at Space Invaders, and that he (presumably) hasn’t let it come back into print. An entire

Eugenides: I’m more Hillbilly than Mr Greek

Don’t believe the pseuds. You don’t have to be clever to read Jeffrey Eugenides’ The Marriage Plot. The novel is his first since the Pulitzer Prize winning Middlesex in 2002 and on one level it is terribly, terribly clever. The central character goes to university, where she studies the intricate marriage plots common to many

November poetry competition

The votes are in and the decision is made. The winner of last month’s poetry competition is Sam Gwynn, for this entry on the theme of ‘dirt’: If dirt is bad, then so are we and so is history, For all of us were dirty once, as dirty as can be. Our milieu was the tillage where

The art of fiction | 4 November 2011

Here is the late and incomparable Kurt Vonnegut giving a short lecture on stories and relativity. This video was apparently used in American high schools in the ‘80s and with good reason: displaying narrative as a graph is a brilliant way of examining structure and character development. You could go beyond Vonnegut’s rough demonstration and

Twenty-first century Pelican

I have an idea that will rescue not only civilisation, but publishing too. It came to me in a second-hand bookshop in Oxford. I was idly browsing their selection of Pelicans from the forties and fifties, sniggering at the barmy ideas in Town Planning by Thomas Sharp and thinking George Bernard Shaw’s Intelligent Woman’s Guide

Inside Books: The bother of embargoes

Emily Rhodes used to work for a major publishing house and now manages an independent bookshop in London. She is currently writing a novel. She blogs at EmilyBooks, and has just started tweeting @EmilyBooksBlog. This is the first column in her ‘Inside Books’ series, which will endeavour to shed light on the inner murk of the

A new kind of classic

The best discoveries in reading are not those we simply enjoy ourselves but those we can share with others whose pleasure we know will equal our own – and the best of these discoveries are those we can share with children whose passion for reading is just developing. The iPad app The Fantastic Flying Books

Literary pornography, with Will Self

The Gallery at Foyles hosted the launch of the latest issue of Granta earlier this evening. The magazine teems with illustrations by the Chapman brothers, which gives away the theme: horror. Contributors Will Self and Mark Doty were the guests of honour and they discussed their essays. Self spoke of the nature of blood in

Shelf Life: Michael Arditti

The charming novelist Michael Arditti kindly offered to answer a few questions for Shelf Life, the new feature where we ask literary people impertinent questions about their reading habits. He also posed for a photo in a rather debonair fashion on his sedan chair with his bookshelf in the background. He mentioned that he does

Room for error

This clip, about a Luddite monk’s discovery of the book, has been circulating YouTube. How do you use it? If you close this ‘book’, will all the text inside be saved, or will it just disappear? Plus ça change…  On a separate but related point, there was a particularly well-documented case of a vanishing text in 2009. Following

Book of the Month: Horowitz’s Holmes

The launch of Anthony Horowitz’s new Sherlock Holmes book, The House of Silk, went swimmingly. You might say it was elementary, if you couldn’t resist the temptation to talk Holmesian. Many could not. An astonishing number of people turned out for the exclusive book signing this evening at Waterstone’s Piccadilly, which had been turned into 221B Baker Street.

Hatchet Jobs of the Month | 1 November 2011

We bring you October’s most scathing book reviews: Phil Baker on Our Lady of Alice Bhatti by Mohammed Hanif (Sunday Times) ‘Too knockabout and buffoonish to be a serious study of violence to women in Pakistani culture, too ugly to be funny, this heavy-handed book might be well intended but it is a bloody mess.’

Before Dickens was a Victorian

Robert Douglas-Fairhurst’s Becoming Dickens: The Invention of a Novelist works as a companion piece of sorts to Claire Tomalin’s rival biography Charles Dickens: A Life. The clue is in the subtitle. While Tomalin takes the subject from birth to death, Douglas-Fairhurst’s book focuses on Dickens’s early years. And what early years they were.   With

Reader’s review: Snowdrops, by A.D. Miller

Nicholas is a British lawyer working in Russia. It’s sometime around the start of the last decade. Putin is in the full pomp of his first presidential term and it’s the golden age of the Wild East (the days of ‘tits and Kalashnikovs’ as Nicholas puts it). After meeting two young Russian women on the