The good, the bad and the ugly in books, exhibitions, cinema, TV, dance, music, podcasts and theatre.
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
When, in these pages, John Birt expresses wonderment at how the boy from Bootle went on to become the 12th director general of the BBC, to enter the House of Lords and be an adviser to the prime minister it is a sentiment shared by many. The clue probably lies in the brutal Irish Christian
High on the teetering list of all the things that, down the long arches of the hacking years, have dissuaded me from trying to cobble a novel is the dreary business of describing how the characters look. You have a picture of this person or that in your head, and your reader, having coughed up
Rupert Christiansen How embarrassing. The authors of the four books I have most relished this year – Nicola Shulman’s elegant monograph A Rage for Rock Gardening (Short Books, £9.99), Virginia Nicholson’s exuberant Among the Bohemians (Viking, £20), Giles Waterfield’s brilliant satire The Hound in the Left-Hand Corner (Review, £14.99) and Selina Hastings’ fascinating biography of
Readers of the thrillers of the American writer Patricia Cornwell will find elements of her new book familiar but others oddly different. Her novels are fiction closely based on fact; Portrait of a Killer purports to be a work of fact but is founded on fiction. It supposedly unravels the mystery of Jack the Ripper,
It is a discomforting thought that, had the present fashion for kiss-and-tell memoirs, or the intense media scrutiny of politicians’ private lives, been in place a century ago, David Lloyd George might never have become prime minister. Yet, as this masterly fourth volume in John Grigg’s biography proves, he was a towering figure in exceptional
This cracking book is missing something and the want is telling. Jeremy Paxman virtually discounts the possibility that people might go into politics driven by ideas or conviction. These being the spur politicians routinely claim, Paxman’s study becomes a detective hunt for ulterior motive or unacknowledged greed. ‘This fellow says he wants to make the
Whenever, searching through the television channels for something worth watching, I come across a Dad’s Army repeat I invariably stay with it. The series has not dated, partly perhaps because it was dated when it started. Few of us who were young in the 1960s had clear memories of the Home Guard and many of
If Harold Pinter’s plays are about the weasel under the cocktail cabinet, Matthew Parris’s autobiography is about the butchered segment of electrical cable that lies on the dusty roof of the throne of the Speaker of the House of Commons. For several decades this piece of copper wire, unused, long-neglected, has rested above the heads
Art can raise our spirits, stimulate our intelligence and increase our knowledge; it is therefore disappointing that much of our arts writing is so impenetrable. Academics seem to address their peers and forget us; it is like eavesdropping on a private conversation carried on in a foreign language. Despite this, business is booming. In 1910
It was a Catholic priest – Dom Philip Jebb, the ‘fighting monk’ and later headmaster of Downside School – who introduced Richard Cohen (alongside, as it happens, your reviewer) to fencing in the 1960s – just one of the many ironies which this new and full history of the ancient art and modern sport of