The good, the bad and the ugly in books, exhibitions, cinema, TV, dance, music, podcasts and theatre.
‘If Charles Darwin had spent the first half of his life in the world of Jane Austen, he now stepped forward into the pages of Anthony Trollope.’ Thus Janet Browne begins what must at times have seemed an almost impossible task: how to write an interesting book about the second half of Darwin’s life. When
I once met a thoroughly heterosexual old naval officer who had been a midshipman on the ship that sailed to Gallipoli with Rupert Brooke on board, the voyage during which Brooke died. I asked him what Brooke had been like. He said at once, ‘He was a god. Extraordinary beauty, law to himself. Like Lord
Long long ago, they used to say that the difference between the Hohenzollerns and the Habsburgs was this. In Berlin, the situation was always serious, but not hopeless. In Vienna, on the other hand, the situation was invariably hopeless, but not serious. It should never be forgotten that Billy Wilder, that most adorable of film
You may never have heard of David Gentleman, because, unlike so many of the over-publicised charlatans who call themselves artists nowadays, he does not believe in personality cults. He is as modest as he is talented, which is saying something. But, even if you do not know his name, you will almost certainly have licked
Forty years ago V. S. Naipaul enraged Indians by describing India as ‘an area of darkness’. He also upset a great many Western liberals who were then discovering in India a land of all-pervading spirituality. Later, he returned to India to write more kindly about ‘a wounded civilisation’ undergoing a liberation of spirit through ‘rage
Books as glossy as this are seldom as good as this. It is a sort of economic miracle in itself: fat, quarto-size, packed with illustrations, maps and plans, wide-margined, legibly typeset, efficiently proof-read, Hong Kong printed and priced under £25 hardback. It would almost be worth buying if it were a politician’s memoirs or a
Finland declared independence from Russia in 1917 during the Bolshevik revolution. The subsequent civil war ended in victory by the White forces under Marshal Baron Gustav Mannerheim, a former officer in the uniform of the Tsar, later to become commander-in-chief of the Finnish army in the Winter War of 1939/40. Mannerheim had been a chevalier
Rumpole is Falstaff on the right side of the law. He is rumbustious, shrewdly distrustful of authority and filled with substantial appetites others find gross. Leo McKern’s television incarnation was unforgettable; his face had been hardened by confronting the world’s absurdities and mangled by the rigorous pursuit of his own pleasure. One was reminded of
After his mountainous Gladstone and Churchill and barely less substantial study of the post-1886 chancellors of the exchequer, Roy Jenkins here enjoys himself in what by his standards is a mere jeu d’esprit. His new book is a collection of essays on 12 cities which he has lived in or often visited and which are
The title is a slight puzzle, a tease. But quickly all becomes clear. Here is a book of painful but fictional recollections recounted by fictional novelist Imogen Bailey, which in turn become a real novel of both power and delicacy. Imogen, a young woman of great sensibility, was traumatised by the loss of her beloved
Ralph Steadman has always employed graphic spatter. The pen jabs, the ink spurts and – yoiks! – how the victims suffer. Eyes popping, they retch, they convulse, they become pinstriped roadkill. The projectile handling has extended from cartoons to illustrations (Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas) to caricature-biographies of Sigmund Freud and Leonardo da Vinci.
The subject of this intelligent biography was among the founders of the Modern movement in British art before the first world war, and a leading formulator of what he considered to be its principles. A philosopher/aesthetician, he was a friend of Epstein, Wyndham Lewis, Pound, Gaudier-Brzeska, and was thought a great poet by the young
On 19 August 1805, two months before his death at Trafalgar, Vice-Admiral Lord Nelson rejoined Emma Hamilton at their home in Merton after an absence of almost two and a half years. During that time, he had been continuously at sea, at first in the Mediterranean watching for Admiral Villeneuve to break out of Toulon
There was a time when our man at the BBC was the most famous foreign correspondent in India, his broadcasts reaching one fifth of the world’s population. Road-blocks and armed insurgents tended to melt when confronted by Tully-sahib, the man to trust, who understood the problems. For 30 years he trawled the sub-continent, covering its
When Ellen Macarthur was nine she saved her pocket money, by eating less, to buy her first little boat and slept on the floor of her bedroom so as to store the boat’s mast and sails. At 18 she decided that sailing round Britain alone ‘seemed to be the most natural thing to do’. At
Hugh Massingberd ‘It is difficult’, writes A. N. Wilson in The Victorians (Hutchinson, £25), ‘for me to conceive of a more agreeable life than that of a Victorian country parson.’ Reading his brilliantly panoramic, constantly stimulating and humanely wise portrait of an age and the characters who created it left me longing to have been
You don’t have to be Jewish to find this book rewarding, but you do need to be interested in humanity: every page seethes with it. There are no gruesome Holocaust testimonies: the youthful authors of these autobiographies, written in Poland in the years leading up to the second world war, had no premonition of the
Unlike most journalistic cobble jobs, this collection of Nigel Farndale’s interviews from the Sunday Telegraph has a real sparkle: intelligent, irreverent and often unexpectedly kindly. It makes you laugh and, occasionally, it makes you gasp. Over the past five years he has quietly garnered a reputation as one of the best inquisitors, up there with
An awful lot has happened since the Canadian journalist Naomi Klein shot to radical prominence with the publication of No Logo, the first sacred text of the anti-globalisation movement, shortly after her co-religionists besieged the 1999 world trade talks in Seattle. They went on to wreck the World Bank/IMF meeting in Prague and, less successfully,
Indelible Acts is A. L. Kennedy’s first book of fiction since Everything You Need, which was followed by a spell of suicidal desperation. We know all about that from On Bullfighting, her patchily received foray into the world of the matador which was only partly about matadors and partly about herself and her suicidal desperation.
Alistair McAlpine, one-time treasurer of the Tory party, is not a conventional fellow. A picker up of unconsidered trifles, he has in his time collected truncheons, chickens and snowdrops. He gets crazes and then he moves on: whole collections go under the hammer. ‘No object or painting has such beauty that I could not bear
Private collections of miscellaneous oddities, valuable works of art and all sorts of objects, animal, vegetable and mineral, of little if any apparent intrinsic value, are collectors’ emblems of the world in miniature, microcosmic claims to the whole macrocosm. This splendid book, elegantly analytical and lavishly illustrated, makes the collectors’ obsession understandable to the point
Revolutions no longer seem so inevitable, nor the overthrown governments so hopeless, since the failure of the greatest of all European revolutionary regimes, the Soviet Union. In The Fall of the French Monarchy Munro Price analyses, with skill and a light touch, the policies of two celebrated royal failures, Louis XVI and Marie Antoinette, and
Mr William Donaldson, the most subversive and mischievous Englishman since Titus Oates, started his literary career with Both the Ladies and the Gentlemen, a DIY guide to brothel-keeping and the choreography of orgies. He extended it with the Henry Root Letters, in which, posing as a demented if upwardly mobile fishmonger, he entered into a
The cat books I like least generalise: All cats are proud
I am not an avid television watcher, so I did not tune into Who Wants to be a Millionaire? for about a year, but when I finally did, like nearly half the nation (19 million viewers at its peak) I was gripped. At the time I was also rather poor and thinking of going to
During the Cuban Missile Crisis, President Kennedy read Barbara Tuchman’s August 1914. As President George W. Bush prepares for a second Gulf war, he apparently is reading Eliot Cohen’s Supreme Command. Kennedy would have had more fun. Tuchman is a better read than Cohen. She also advances what proved in the circumstances to be important
This is a hopeless mishmash of a book. It is over 600 pages (736 with the notes), and it only covers a mere 24 years of its subject’s life. Some reviewers would say that it was badly written, but the trouble is, it isn’t really written at all. It is hurled together, without any apparent
This book succeeds The Painters of Ireland, published in 1978, which established the Knight of Glin and Anne Crookshank as supreme authorities on the subject. The update adds a further 20 years and takes account of an abundance of new research; but it remains what they describe as ‘a general survey on traditional lines’, a