The good, the bad and the ugly in books, exhibitions, cinema, TV, dance, music, podcasts and theatre.
First published in 1991, and reissued now in paperback by popular demand, this enchanting book chronicles the life and work of one of our finest realist painters. John Ward (born 1917) looks back on his life in a short but poignant memoir, describing his early years in Hereford where his father kept an antiques shop,
The Horror Horn (1974) by E.F. Benson‘Are you ready for the ultimate in sheer horror?’ asks the back cover of this 1970s paperback. ‘Here are stories from the darker reaches of the mind, stories which will cling like mould in your memory because there is something horribly real and convincing about them.’ Well, of course
Spy fiction, or ‘spy-fi’, has its specialist practitioners, but big literary names have also turned to the genre for their own varied purposes. Graham Greene’s The Quiet American springs to mind, as does Norman Mailer’s Harlot’s Ghost, a fictionalised study of the CIA. But where these two literary spy thrillers struggle to shed the suspicion
The Silence of the Grave, Indridason’s previous novel, won the three international crime-writing awards, including Britain’s Gold Dagger. It featured his Icelandic series detective, the lugubrious policeman Erlendur, who returns in Voices to investigate the murder of a doorman at one of Reykjavik’s smartest hotels. It’s just before Christmas, and the hotel management is less
A personal note, but relevant: I first picked up this large book at about two o’clock in the afternoon, and began to dip into it, a preliminary reconnaissance. I had an appointment at six with an impatient man, the sort who leaves if you are ten minutes late. When I next looked at my watch,
The sixtysomething Mick Jagger is currently bringing tears of nostalgia to all eyes as he relives his glory days of 40 years ago, singing pop songs. In one respect, at any rate, Cicero would have applauded him, as he explains in his essay On Old Age (44 bc). De senectute is an imaginary conversation staged
Thirteen years ago, I was driving with a German friend through the Russian city of Kaliningrad (until 1945 the east Prussian city of Königsberg) when my friend said, ‘There’s the old German army barracks.’ As we stared glumly at the bleak building, darkness settled on me, brought on by three words, each — on its
‘To follow the Silk Road is to follow a ghost,’ writes Colin Thubron at the start of this magnificent book, ‘it flows through the heart of Asia, but it has officially vanished, leaving behind it the pattern of its restlessness: counterfeit borders, unmapped peoples.’ This pattern is the ‘shadow’ of his title — the marks
Researching the history of a destroyed Polish shtetl, I met some of its survivors, among them Julius, an assimilated Jew, a fearless horse-rider, who had served in the army. He went home to Konin in 1945, alone and hungry, his sole possession a torn blanket. A council official told him, ‘The Jews wanted the war
The best-known exchange between artist and royalty must be George VI’s celebrated remark to John Piper, who had been painting the castle and surrounding parkland at Windsor: ‘You seem to have had very bad luck with your weather.’ It was the early 1940s, and Piper had invested his watercolours with a brooding quality he no
Recently the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation interviewed me about some of my views on Wagner, as part of their featuring the first complete Ring cycle to be performed in Canada. In the course of the interview, I was asked how I would like to see the Ring and Wagner’s music dramas in general staged and produced,
These have been trying times for itinerant musicians. Anybody who had already built up a dislike for the way airport staff are entitled to treat their customers would have found the recent situation testing to the point of phobia. To be fair, my fellow-citizens showed remarkable good humour in those endless and often directionless queues
It is with great sadness that we heard of the sudden death of Michael Vestey on Friday. For more than ten years, he had been The Spectator’s radio critic — indeed the first and only one. His column was perceptive, authoritative, witty, sometimes caustic and opinionated, but always immensely readable. We asked him to file
Since every mafiosi’s favourite movie is Goodfellas and favourite TV programme is The Sopranos, I suppose similar rules apply to Islamic terrorists and Sleeper Cell (Channel 4). Probably, every Wednesday night secretive groups of sinister bearded men all over Britain tune in in the eager hope that this will be the episode when scary Faris
In The Master, a fictional portrait of Henry James, Colm Tóibín constructed a convincing and ultimately moving account of a man who craved — albeit ambiguously — emotional distance. His life is shown as balancing between a yearning for and shrinking from personal intimacy; involving what can be seen as a ‘betrayal’ of the world,
With apologies to Antic Hay, if you can have biography and biology, why not biosophy? Or biolatry, biotomy, bionomy and biogamy? The need for these neologisms is prompted by this extraordinary childhood memoir which combines adolescent intensity with a search for salvation, a hot glorification of life with its cold dissection, and the trade and
It’s that time of year again, the last week of August, and people are already jockeying in order to cash in a year from now, the tenth anniversary of Diana’s death. Tina Brown, a lady who would dumb down Big Brother, was first out of the blocks, her book promising to reveal unheard-of-before secrets. Incidentally, Tina Brown never met
That eminent Victorian George Frederick Watts — Strachey thought of including him in his seminal study but was sadly deflected — is at last undergoing something of a revival. In his lifetime one of the most famous of contemporary painters (though his works never sold for quite the vast sums realised by Millais or Burne-Jones),
When people use the word ‘journalese’, they always do so pejoratively. They are not thinking of James Cameron, Bernard Levin or Walter Winchell. They mean a style that traffics in clichés. The poet B. I. Isherville has derided that kind of writing: Where every heresy is rankAnd every rank is serried;Where every crook is hatchet-faced,And
The Gallery Press, Loughcrew, Oldcastle, Co. Meath, Ireland, www.gallerypress.com ‘August for the people and their favourite islands,’ wrote W. H. Auden in a poem from his early Marxist phase. This holiday season brings from our adjoining island a parcel of poetry better suited to Christmas or some elate private festival, a salvation of riches. Literary
It has often been said that the popularity of J. M. Barrie stands as a warning to those who think they understand the Edwardians and much the same is true of Tom Moore and the Age of Romanticism. With the exceptions of Byron and Scott, Moore was by far the most successful literary figure of
If you haven’t been abroad so far this summer, go and see Pedro Almodóvar’s Volver — it will have almost as invigorating an effect as a weekend in Spain. To see it is to be immersed in a strange and likeable culture, populated by agreeably batty characters whose tale is completely absorbing. So absorbing, in
With a characteristic combination of scholar, impresario, programmer, accompanist, Graham Johnson’s latest set of three CDs explores as an appendix to Hyperion’s complete Schubert songs edition some forebears, parallels, overlaps and influences, to indicate an inviting background landscape. Songs by Schubert’s Friends and Contemporaries could have been merely an exercise in context, and this would
Veiled roman-à-clef novels of this kind are routinely hyped by their publishers as being certain to cause uproar and mayhem. Often they do nothing of the kind and pass almost unnoticed. Rachel Johnson’s acerbic and well-observed bitch-up of life on a Notting Hill communal garden justifies the copious pre-publicity, and I can report that early
We are still living with the images and legends of the crusades. Were they, as the 18th-century Scottish philosopher David Hume wrote, ‘the most signal and durable monument of human folly that has yet appeared in any age or nation’? Were they, as muscular Christians and imperialists suggested in the 19th century, a matchless epic
The Sixties are there in the first sentence of the first chapter of this social, political and cultural history of the decade: On the first day of October 1963, as the earliest whispers of dawn were edging across the cliff tops of the Yorkshire resort of Scarborough, the new leader of the Labour party nervously
‘No thanks. Too much sex.’ Thus an elderly friend dismissed my offer to lend him John Stubbs’s compendious biography of John Donne. His fears are groundless. Stubbs tells us virtually nothing about the paramours who inspired Donne’s youthful poems, partly because no new information is available and partly because the poet’s exquisite testimony on the
Waiting for the second volume of a good biography is a painful process. I feel very sorry for anyone who read Brian McGuinness’s excellent Young Ludwig (part one of the life of Wittgenstein) when it was published in 1988. The philosopher’s exciting story broke off in 1921 and fans have been left dangling ever since
Forgery in painting has enjoyed a long history of scandal and from time to time spills more ink than paint, in part because we all enjoy reading about an art expert or moneyed person getting taken in by a fake. Our pleasure derives from that cocky-smug common-sense feeling that no painting is worth the prices