The good, the bad and the ugly in books, exhibitions, cinema, TV, dance, music, podcasts and theatre.
Said Aburish, a Palestinian with excellent English who worked for years in Iraq, wrote a very good biography of Saddam four years ago. He brought out the full horror of the regime, and showed how Saddam’s hero was Stalin, even to the point that Stalin’s works were Saddam’s bedtime reading (such, at any rate, was
One of the chief characteristics of New Labour, Blairism or the Project — they amount to the same phenomenon — is that many of the cheer-leaders began their careers not just on the far left of the Labour Party but so far to the left as to be outside the party completely. Peter Mandelson and
Just as vulgarity can sometimes transcend itself and become something else (I am thinking of Gillray and Las Vegas), so silliness can sometimes transcend itself and attain sociological significance. Germaine Greer has written a transcendently silly pamphlet about a proposed future for her homeland, Australia. She wants it to become what she calls an Aboriginal
Frank Kermode’s The Age of Shakespeare is an astonishing achievement. In fewer than 200 small-format pages he discusses each of Shakespeare’s works. No comments are less than telling; most are highly original. Examples of the latter include a discussion of familial and rhetorical ‘doubles’ in Hamlet; an account of the unvaried verse of Julius Caesar,
It was comforting in the late 1960s to learn that the composed, sturdily elegant figure of Basil D’Oliveira was in the England cricket team. He was a man, we felt, who would see us through. This absorbing book, significant beyond the confines of cricket, is an account of the suffering and frustrations that beset his
James Surowiecki is a Martian. True, he doesn’t have pointy ears and he writes a financial column for the New Yorker. But only someone fallen to Earth would celebrate the obvious as much as he does. When he ventures out into a city, he marvels at the fact that fast-walking pedestrians don’t bump into each
Lawyers meet lawyers, historians and economists meet their colleagues. They have a defined profession. Creative writers have no defined profession: their concern is human nature in all its complexity. Yet they do bump into each other and are often obsessively interested in each other’s works and lives. Rachel Cohen is concerned with the way their
The saga of the First Afghan War, one of the greatest disasters ever met by the British army, has been told many times before, and I had vowed to throw any book that told it again away in the bin. But Ben Macintyre has found a wholly original angle on it by turning the spotlight
A biography of over 1,000 pages whose subject is the leader of a provincial political party which has five MPs at Westminster and could, if the more alarmist projections from the recent European elections are fulfilled, lose them all to Paisleyites at the next might seem excessive. Yet the story which forms the heart of
Since it was a prime social manifestation of the industrial revolution, the Victorian city more than merits serious attention by historians. It became the symbol of the de-ruralisation of the British (or more specifically, English) poor, and was the vehicle for the rise of the middle classes. These themes and others are discussed in detail
Thirty years ago Sandy Fawkes was a Daily Express reporter following a story in the southern states of the USA. She met a good-looking young man in a bar, and spent the next six days in his company, driving around with him, eating out, and sharing a bed. He was enigmatic and monosyllabic, but sufficiently
Britannia’s Children: Emigration from England, Scotland, Wales and Ireland since 1600by Eric RichardsHambledon & London, £19.95, pp. 388, ISBN 1852854413 In the middle of the 19th century, Londoners grumbled about the number of Italian urchins grinding barrel organs on street corners. Criminals and people-traffickers had brought many of them to Britain and their melody- making
All Archbishops of Canterbury fail. Dr Carey quotes Archbishop Cosmo Gordon Lang’s famous dictum: ‘The post is impossible for one man to do, but only one man can do it.’ It is not simply that there is too much for one man to do. The real problem is that the internal contradictions of Anglicanism have
Philanthropists are a boring lot these days. Your modern seven-figure donor is either resolutely anonymous or else determined to be seen as approachable Mr Average, quiet and unassuming, who just happened to have the chequebook handy. Gone for ever, it seems, is the splashy, domineering article familiar to our great-grandparents, combining a certain Dickensian whiff
The scriptwriter behind Troy, Brad Pitt’s new muscle and breastplate epic, sounds like an alpha-plus idiot. Commenting on his decision to leave the gods out of the film because he thought they wouldn’t impress audiences, David Benioff said, ‘I think that, if Homer was looking down on us, he would smile and say, “Take the
The introductory Apologia sets the scene: ‘These chapters are potentially autobiographical: even when something didn’t actually happen to me, it might have done … The central character — the “I” of each chapter — is myself.’ My Nine Lives is subtitled ‘Chapters of a Possible Past’ and that is what we are given: variations on
Alexander McCall Smith counts Donald Rumsfeld and The Red Hot Chili Peppers among his fans, and has a very cool cat. Mary Wakefield talks to him about Africa and ‘reality’ Alexander McCall Smith wants to show me his cat. ‘I think he’s asleep in the spare bedroom,’ says Edna, his cleaning lady, putting down a
The Ancient Olympicsby Nigel SpiveyOUP, £17.99, pp. 264, ISBN 0192804332Olympics in Athens 1896: The Invention of the Modern Olympic Gamesby Michael Llewellyn SmithProfile, £16.99, pp. 290, ISBN 186197342X So politics should be kept out of sports? Tell that to the Greeks. Two absorbing new books about the ancient Olympic Games, each crammed with information about
Patricia Tyrrell has self-published two novels, both of which were shortlisted for major prizes. The Promised Land was runner-up for the Sagittarius Prize for a first novel by someone over the age of 60, and The Reckoning was a contender for the Encore Award. I am happy to declare an interest here as, along with
Stanley Milgram was an academic psychologist at Yale who achieved a brief moment of fame in the early 1960s as the creator of ‘obedience experiments’. The idea was to discover how far people will act against their own most basic instincts if they are following someone else’s orders. A large sample of ordinary and superficially
Doctor Johnson’s excellent recipe for cucumber: ‘a cucumber should be well sliced, and dressed with pepper and vinegar, and then thrown out, as good for nothing.’ Some readers will doubtless cry, ‘But what about sandwiches?’ There is, as we are all aware, no accounting for taste. Taste is a moot point for readers of James
Jonathan Coe is a novelist — a very good novelist. He is not a biographer; indeed he dislikes biography, as he frequently tells us. Given that, he’s done a damn good job. Poor B. S. Johnson leaps off these pages: pathologically morbid and clinically depressed, wildly superstitious and self-dramatising. requiring perfect love and devotion from
As in warfare and international relations, the Brits punch above their weight in the debate about globalisation and the onward march of the transnational market economy. The Guardian columnist George Monbiot, in The Age of Consent (Flamingo 2003), was the first anti-globalisation campaigner to offer a coherent manifesto for a movement which until then had
Long before the age of irony the novel meted out just punishment, or at least linked effect to cause. These functions have long since devolved to the murder mystery, which combines gruesome reality with superior logic, leaving logic the upper hand. The rules may have changed, but the stereotypes — the small town with its
When I married Tony Parsons in the late 1970s, he immediately took me to live in a town called Billericay in Essex — his ‘calf country’, I suppose, in a Spam sort of way. To say it was a one-horse town would be to insult horses, any one of which with reasonable social aspirations would
Only someone with the strongest self-control can resist looking, however furtively, at people with deformities. This is not very creditable to the human race, perhaps, but it is best to admit that it is so. A book about human deformities is almost bound to appeal to the voyeur in us, therefore, even if we feel
Visits from the Drowned Girl starts out with a gripping idea as old as crime fiction: the bystander. Benny Poteat climbs communications masts for a living. One day, from the top of such a mast out in the back- country, he looks down and sees a girl set up a video-camera on a tripod by
Actors’ biographies, once a comparative rarity and usually ghosted and bowdlerised, spring forth every season. They are often pruriently, dubiously, sensational: we are told that Olivier had an affair with Danny Kaye, that Peggy Ashcroft was a near-nymphomaniac and Alec Guinness a covert gay cruiser, all with scant evidence and with little relation to their
The ‘campaign biography’ has become a familiar enough phenomenon in any American presidential year. So it should be said straight away that this book, with the slightly teasing adjective in its subtitle, is in no way representative of that genre. Far from being a dazzling encomium of the qualities of the Democratic candidate in this