The good, the bad and the ugly in books, exhibitions, cinema, TV, dance, music, podcasts and theatre.
Louise Erdrich intrigues with her very first sentence: ‘My travels have become so focused on books and islands that the two have merged for me.’ She explores this integration in her astonishing account of her trips to the lakes and islands of Minnesota and Ontario, where ancient painted signs on rocks inspire her to perceive
Julie McDowall ‘first encountered Armageddon’ in September 1984 when she was only three. Her father was watching a BBC Two drama called Threads about a nuclear attack on Sheffield, but instead of putting her to bed (which he obviously should have done) he let her watch it too. She saw ‘milk bottles melt in the
One of the great unsung heroes of modern times is Lt Colonel Harald Jäger, an East German border guard who was the commanding officer at the Bornholmer Strasse checkpoint in central Berlin on that wondrous night of 9 November 1989. There are heart-rending stories of those who were shot ‘wall jumping’, the near-impossible method of
‘When someone leaves, existence splits into a before and an after.’ Lydia Sandgren’s epic, multigenerational saga explores both these existences within the Berg family in a novel that won Sweden’s August Prize in 2020 before going on to sell more than 100,000 copies in Sweden alone. Rakel Berg is only 11 when her mother, the
British nature is having a moment, thanks to David Attenborough’s Wild Isles (BBC One). As ever, spring brings a crop of new nature writing, but you are unlikely to come across anything like Once Upon a Raven’s Nest. This is the story of the life of an Exmoor man – Hedley Ralph Collard, known as
This is the second excellent book by Benjamin Balint to consider the cross-cultural perils of being a great writer after you’re dead. His first, Kafka’s Last Trial: The Case of a Literary Legacy, described legal battles over the residence of Kafka’s literary estate. This new one shifts the focus to a very different (and equally
Thanks to the work of the caricaturists of the late 18th century, the mistresses of the future George IV – Mrs Fitzherbert, Mary ‘Perdita’ Robinson and Lady Jersey among them – are better known to us than his eventual wife, Caroline of Brunswick. The Prince of Wales’s decadent, spendthrift lifestyle (we see him emerging in
Romance, and romantic comedy, make up a third of all novels sold – by far the highest-earning genre of fiction. They outdo crime novels 2:1. They are very rarely reviewed, and are generally excluded from year-end round ups, awards, gongs and TV book shows. They do not have their own festivals or celebrations; romance writers
One rather surprising fact emerges from a history of humanism: most humanists were nice people. This might, on the surface, appear a totally fatuous observation. There is not much value in debating whether, say, architects, chancellors of the exchequer, engineers, surgeons or gardeners have been obviously nice people, and we would roll our eyes if
By now a genuinely radical way to turn a Victorian novel into a TV drama would be to take that novel and turn it into a TV drama. But while we wait for someone to do it, Great Expectations stays true to the current ideals of junking large parts of the source material and infecting
Grade: A– No, Lana, I didn’t, thank you – all cleared up. The most extravagantly talented of that lachrymose, self-harming genre, miserycore, returns with an album described by critics as ‘heavy’, as if we might have expected Mungo Jerry or the Venga Boys. The difference between Del Rey and the rest of those dispossessed chicks
Berlusconi: A New Musical, an excellent title, has opened at a new venue in south London, Southwark Playhouse Elephant. The show begins with the former Italian prime minister preening triumphantly on a white marble set that resembles the Capitol in Rome where Caesar was murdered by rivals who’d grown sick of his power lust. Berlusconi
Godland is a film to see on the big screen: not just for its awesome, immersive cinematography, but because it is so remorselessly bleak that if you’re watching it at home you are likely to give up. To get the most out of it you need to be trapped. Lucas (Elliott Crosset Hove), an upright,
Despite its widespread rating as one of his masterpieces, Frederick Ashton’s Cinderella is chock full of knots, gaps and stumbling blocks – all of which the Royal Ballet’s new production throws into relief. Ashton isn’t altogether to blame: Prokofiev’s graphic score dictates an excessive amount of time given over to knockabout for the Ugly Sisters
Walking on Hampstead Heath the December before Covid, I got caught up in a festive party of bichon frises dressed, like their owners, in Christmas jumpers. It seemed bizarre at the time but wouldn’t surprise me now. During lockdown the local dog population exploded and the smaller breeds now wear jumpers all winter. There are
The centrepiece of the exhibition at Britain’s only contemporary art gallery in a prison is an installation, consisting of two broken, stained armchairs. They’ve been placed face-to-face, as if for a therapy session. Elsewhere there are silkscreen prints and paintings. This outbuilding-cum-art studio and gallery is where prisoners are also taught dry-point etching – surprising
When a shocking, plot-terminating event occurs almost halfway through The Warlock Effect, it’s not just the prospect of another 200 pages to go that alerts the reader to narrative trickery. The central character, Louis Warlock, is after all a stage illusionist who has already pulled off a seemingly impossible feat of mind-reading in front of
Imagine you work for a grubby Soho publishing company (the fictional Glass Eye Press) in the late 1960s and an unhinged anarchist gets in touch, offering to send you his memoirs which will detail how and why he will commit the crime of the century. Such is the premise of Richard Milward’s clever dark comedy,
On Tuesday afternoons, pathology teaching at medical school required me to peer down a microscope for two hours, screwing my inactive eye ever more tightly shut as if that would make the looking eye suddenly see clearly. Each eosin-stained slide with its pink and purple lines and splodges of diseased cells was as legible to
Tell me who you go with, and I’ll tell you who you are. Guided by this principle, Michael Frayn devotes his new memoir to his friends, embracing the chance to pay tribute to those who shaped him. The octogenarian warns in the foreword that his choice of protagonists is ‘pretty capricious’ – a comment on
The cover design of this tract-length book associates it with David Baddiel’s excellent Jews Don’t Count (2021), which exposed a prejudice infecting both ends of the political spectrum. The God Desire resembles its precursor in other ways. Wit and dry humour abound. But as a verdict on the human appetite for the divine, it is
This is a rather odd book and, I regret to say (given the reading that seems to have gone into it), not a very good one. If one had little knowledge of the reign of King Edward VII, or of the jokes, anecdotes and scandals of that period, then it might serve as a useful
Beneath a flinty church tower deep in the Kent marshes, ‘among putrid estuaries and leaden waters’, lies a monument to an Elizabethan man of business. It is not much to look at. David Howarth calls it ‘second rate… dull’ and ‘strangely provisional’, despite its expanse of glossy alabaster. Moreover, the name of the man commemorated
Catherine Lacey’s new book is the second literary novel I’ve read recently to radically rewrite American history. In last year’s To Paradise, Hanya Yanagihara imagined a different outcome for the Civil War: the Confederate states secede to become the thoroughly racist ‘United Colonies’. Up north are several political unions, such as the ‘Free States’ (including
Nigel Townson’s history of modern Spain begins with disaster – or, more specifically, with the Disaster. When an ignominious defeat in the 1898 Spanish-American war lost the country its last major colonies, a crisis of confidence followed, and the ‘Generation of 1898’ set about trying to diagnose Spain’s problem. Since the scope of Townson’s book
I have a theory that many great artists’ strength is a product of their weakness. The flaw of the relentlessly frivolous creator of Succession Jesse Armstrong, for example, is that he is very easily bored by grown-up subjects such as big business, finance, corporate structure, legal affairs or anything involving depth and seriousness. Which ought,
Recently in these pages, ruminating on the ghastly Rock and Roll Hall of Fame, I wrote that music does not conform to any equation. I should have added: except, of course, for the occasions when it does. One tried-and-true formulation is that ‘super-groups’, those bespoke vehicles bringing together artists best known either for working alone
Most of us are familiar with the notion of writer’s block, that paralysis of invention induced by the appalling sight of a blank page. Composer’s block is less widely discussed, although musicians seem equally afflicted by creative drought. Perhaps the best known case is that of the Russian composer Sergei Rachmaninov, the subject of Radio
There are some films that you know will be quality simply by the actors who have agreed to be in them. They’re like a kitemark. Emily Watson is such an actor, as is Paul Mescal, who hasn’t put a foot wrong since Normal People and must have an excellent agent or just a feel for
