The good, the bad and the ugly in books, exhibitions, cinema, TV, dance, music, podcasts and theatre.
It was one of his own poets who described Charlemagne as ‘father of Europe’, over 1,200 years ago. Pres- umably that is why the publishers call him father of a continent, although in this case the continent was more notional than geographical. About a third of the land-mass bowed down to the big man by
Tom Shone, the ex-film critic of the Sunday Times, is out to pick a fight. The clue is in the subtitle of this book, a surprisingly sympathetic history of Hollywood’s most despised school of moviemaking. To the untrained eye, it will simply conjure up Dr Strangelove: Or How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love
This collection was originally published by Faber in 1993, and was followed in 1996 by Martel’s first novel, Self. Then Canongate bagged the prizewinning Life of Pi in 2002, and now, in the wake of its colossal success, they have republished these four stories, ‘slightly revised’. ‘I’m happy to offer these four stories again to
Loneliness is a pearl of great price among novelists. Fiction, drawing so much of its inspiration from groups, communities and societies, nevertheless cherishes the idea of solitude, of the hero or heroine outcast and apart, thrown upon their own resources for spiritual endurance. Think Robinson Crusoe among his goats, Jane Eyre roaming the corridors and
Joan Wyndham has written two war diaries, and one postwar autobiography; now she completes the picture with a description, part diary, part straight narrative, of her life as a child, a schoolgirl and a student at Rada. Her first three books were the story of an uninhibited bohemian. This one starts gently. Joan Wyndham began
The 9/11 attacks on the Twin Towers were terrific disaster television. No special effects! How about those great shots of real people jumping off to avoid incineration? And here comes the novel, which can be read as the preview of a dramatic treatment for the script of the movie. A novel is only second best
‘You will be in charge, although, of course, nothing will happen, and I shall be back again this evening early,’ Major Henry Spalding told Lieutenant John Chard before riding away from the British supply depot in search of reinforcements that had failed to show up on time. Chard was thus the officer in command when
It goes without saying that the second world war was decided as much on the western ocean as in the sky over England. Indeed the Battle of the Atlantic could be seen as the Battle of Britain in slow motion, its critical period lasting for the first three and a half years of the war.
‘Roy Hattersley,’ said Becky, tilting her head on one side to read the spine of the thick red book I had brought away with me to the house party. ‘The Edwardians. Are there four more depressing words in the language?’ Now, that’s not fair. He may be a bit of a windbag, but he’s our
Hard to credit, but at the Royal Opera the new production of Massenet’s Werther begins with the prelude being played while the curtain is still lowered, no one messing around in front; and when it rises, at the point indicated in the score, we see a honeysuckle-covered wall, with a water spout spouting water, and
Cloaca, Kevin Spacey’s debut as the artistic director of the Old Vic, must rank as one of the biggest disappointments of the year. It isn’t bad, exactly, but I was expecting so much more from the man who electrified British theatergoers with his star turn in The Iceman Cometh six years ago. I sat there
I wish ballet companies due to visit London in the next few months could bring programmes that are as richly varied and neatly constructed as those presented by San Francisco Ballet last week. Artistic eclecticism as well as the ability to respond to a diversity of stylistic and technical demands are two of its most
The experience of the critic is one of constant revision, for nothing remains ever quite the same, least of all old opinions. And of all the major figures of 20th-century art, no one forces us to think again, every time, more than Salvador Dal
Constance Spry (1886–1960) was a remarkable figure who exerted a powerful influence over the taste of generations of home-makers, particularly from the 1930s to the 1950s. Born in Derby, she was brought up in Ireland where she studied hygiene and physiology, with a view to a career in nursing. A natural communicator, she soon found
Kitty Kelley is the Heat maga- zine of celebrity biographers. Spectator readers who may not be familiar with this unpleasant (but very popular) weekly should know that public taste has moved on from Hello!. Heat doesn’t do airbrushed celebrities looking gorgeous in their celebrity homes. Heat gives you the celeb ‘as she [or he] really
The Whig interpretation of history, a relentlessly progressive account of the emergence of our parliamentary system, has long been out of fashion when it comes to politics. But histories of social policy are all too often complacent accounts of ‘the development’ or ‘evolution’ of state provision. This excellent book breaks with that tradition by reminding
Since appeasement is in the air again, this is a timely book. It tells the story of how Lord Londonderry, secretary of state for air in the National government of 1931-5, sought to avert what would be the second world war by befriending the Nazi leaders. Londonderry, 7th Marquis and directly descended from Lord Castlereagh
There is one glorious surrealistic sentence on page 6. Describing Clarissa Eden’s early adventures in magazine journalism, the authors write, ‘Her first published article, in 1944, was a dispatch from Berlin for Horizon.’ Eh? Only it gets stranger: ‘…reporting on what remained of theatre and cultured life in the devastated city’. I knew things were
At the start of this sixth and final volume of Ferdinand Mount’s novel sequence A Chronicle of Modern Twilight, the narrator Aldous (Gus) Cotton is about to take premature retirement from the Civil Service, having found, to his chagrin, that he has been passed over for the promotion that he thought to be his due.
A Prison Diary, Volume II: Purgatoryby Jeffrey ArcherPan, £6.99, pp. 310, ISBN 0330426370 A Prison Diary, Volume III: Heavenby Jeffrey ArcherMacmillan, £18.99, pp. 478, ISBN 1405032626 In an extraordinary fax to the Director-General of the Prison Service, Martin Narey, the Home Secretary David Blunkett set down his feelings in an unequivocally forthright manner: I am
This is a brilliant tract against the times. Tallis records how the traditional vocation in medicine is ceasing to be renewed. What he says has a wider application to all professions and, indeed, to work generally. How can Britain sit casually by as a profession which, under oath, brings a lifetime of learning and dedication
Reviewers coming to this book, the second volume of Roddy Doyle’s The Last Roundup trilogy without having read the first, must be a frustration for the author. I had a struggle connecting with Doyle’s character, Henry Smart. The first volume might have endeared him to me and set him in context — it followed his
William Pitt the Younger always was the politician’s politician: an MP at 21, prime minister at 24 and dead at 46, with only two years out of office in between. Pitt dominated British politics for his entire adult life. He lived for the House of Commons and for the daily grind of government service. He
When asked to name a British prime minister other than the present one or Mrs Thatcher, my young adult patients are inclined to reply, ‘I don’t know, I wasn’t born then.’ Such an answer would not surprise Frank Furedi, the author of this attack on cultural populism; it is the natural consequence of an educational
Alice Thomas Ellis is not a person to be trusted — in the kitchen. I am surprised to find this. I have always admired her elsewhere, in her novels for instance. But there is no doubt that when it comes to food she is simply left-wing. She makes steak and kidney pudding without the kidney.
Muriel Spark rightly insists that she is a poet who, as it happens, writes novels, and that she writes novels without ceasing to be a poet. Being a poet means having the ability to recognise that the world can announce more interesting inter- relationships than common sense chooses to notice — unforeseeable collocations, intrusions into
Born in 1956, Ronan Bennett is a Belfast writer of great gifts. His last novel, The Catastrophist, was a tense parable of conscience set in the Belgian Congo at the time of independence in 1960. Havoc, his fourth book, unfolds in 1630s England in the years prior to the Civil War. While Graham Greene is
Without meaning to come the Big I-Am, I’ve got issues with the whole premise of this book, which probably stem from my very healthy level of self-esteem. I mean, once we’re out of our teens (when admittedly I spent rather too many nights pining after a dreamy 19-year-old Oxbridge undergraduate called Max, of all the
A Fine Brush on Ivory: An Appreciation of Jane Austen by Richard Jenkyns OUP, £12.99, pp. 200, ISBN 0199276617 ‘Each of us has a private Austen’ is the first line of Karen Joy Fowler’s readable and ingenious novel. This sentence, and her title, encapsulate her theme. The West Coast book club in question consists of