The good, the bad and the ugly in books, exhibitions, cinema, TV, dance, music, podcasts and theatre.
VJ night, the war in the Pacific is finally over, and in William Kennedy’s Albany the war of senatorial election is about to begin. The candidates stand up to be counted and the consequences of their election are considered. Small crooks fresh out of crook school and the army rise into the lower reaches of
The Blank Slate, more readily recognised in its original Latin as tabula rasa, is the soubriquet for the view that in the eternal Nature-Nurture debate the scales tip heavily in favour of the environment: when it comes to the human mind, nothing is left to the caprice of genes. Steven Pinker, well known for The
After several acclaimed novels, including last year’s Pulitzer prize-winning Empire Falls, Richard Russo has now produced a volume of short stories. However, the qualities which endear the novels to their readers – a wry sense of humour, vivid characterisation and the sense of lives being lived over time – are less apparent here; the shorter
In the years following the second world war, Tony Crosland, Roy Jenkins and Denis Healey either became Labour Members of Parliament or worked closely with the Labour party. Few parties in so short a time can have gathered three recruits so obviously of prime-ministerial calibre. No other party could have so contrived things that none
Forgery ranked with murder as a capital crime well into the 19th century. Faked texts and signatures could falsify wills and violate the sanctity of property, until photolithography, then typing, devalued the uniqueness of the handwritten text. But a modern forger can still make a decent profit by turning out the fake-historical or fake-literary stuff
In 1760s Bath, the promenade from the Pump Room to the tree-lined Walks of Orange Grove passed a row of luxury shops and a sign reading ‘Mr Gainsborough, Painter’. The artist’s showroom shared the ground floor of a handsome town house with his sister’s millinery shop, and the smell of the perfumes on sale mingled
At the Edinburgh Book Festival this year, Dr David Starkey, the television historian and iconoclast, pronounced that history was elitist – it was about kings and queens and power-brokers rather than the marginal or the dispossessed. He liked big and important subjects. He was uninterested in peasants. Neal Ascherson, by contrast, is deeply interested in
In fiction, as in other branches of the creative arts, reputation is all, or nearly all. One of my most cherished bookworld fantasies involves a bored literary agent plucking A. S. Byatt’s latest (not the internationally celebrated author, but an A. S. Byatt who has laboured on unregarded for 40 years) from the unsolicited manuscripts
The heroine of Margaret Drabble’s new novel is on first sight pretty depressing, and supposed to be so. The opening part of The Seven Sisters is in the form of Candida Wilton’s diary, written from the time she moves to a modest flat in London after the break-up of her marriage. Despite her incongruously glamorous
Some novels are something; others are about something. If fiction is an art, then the former class is more likely to qualify. When, for instance, Lolita is said to be ‘about’ paedophilia, or at least nymphetolepsy, it becomes aesthetically dubious. Hence admirers insist that Nabokov is using H. Humbert’s passion as a metaphor for the
In any discussion about the English judicial system with foreigners, they are always amazed to learn that more than 90 per cent of the criminal cases in this country are tried by unpaid lay magistrates. In a society where an applicant for the most unskilled job is required to be able to produce some paper
Coleridge’s Notebooks have been a companion during most of my mature life and this is a marvellously judged and varied selection, 1794 to 1820, from his 22nd year to his 48th. By that time he had become the loquacious Sage of Highgate, ‘an archangel, a little damaged’. To the end he was a self-observer, still
THE HUMOUR AND THE PITY: ESSAYS ON V. S. NAIPAULedited by Amitava KumarBuffalo Books, in association with the British Council, New Delhi, Rs 175, pp. 174, ISBN 8187890029 In ‘London’, a short essay written for the Times Literary Supplement in 1958, the up-and-coming V. S. Naipaul accurately analysed why his fictions about the Caribbean would
William Trevor is the voice of a civilised Anglo-Ireland capable of apologising for ancient privileges and extensive estates while discreetly lamenting their departure. Laying out and constantly refolding a finely observed landscape (County Cork) of water, rock and sand, of religious divide and class deference, Trevor conveys the baffled rage of Fenian fire-bombers and the
Porno is billed as ‘the sequel to Trainspotting’, which immediately is a worrying sign, like the blow-up doll that stares out from the front cover. Why is Irvine Welsh returning to the territory of his phenomenal debut after all these years? Does it mean he has run out of ideas? And does anyone really want
It is impossible in a short space to convey not merely how good, but how important Geoffrey Hill’s writing is. In his mystic journey to the Goldengrove of his Worcestershire childhood this latter-day Blakean reopens problems which philosophy had long ago abandoned as intractable and which politics in its corruption had discarded. If I had
I have always counted myself a loyal, even an enthusiastic eel fan. I seek them out and buy them whenever I can find them live: they deteriorate quickly and should be killed just before cooking. The French like to buy them skinned. This is a culinary error and usually, though not necessarily, means they are
In September 1946 a 23-year-old Englishwoman sailed for India in one of the first passenger liners to be reconverted from a trooper. She spent the following Cold Weather as the dogsbody with a documentary unit making films about tea gardens in Assam. Fifty-four years on she would describe this excursion into Asia as ‘a huge
EDITH WHARTON’S FRENCH RIVIERAby Philippe Collas and Eric VilledaryFlammarion, £22.50, pp. 149, ISBN 2080107224 London, even in normal years, is rained on for 150 days to Nice’s 60; it receives a paltry 1,500 hours of sunlight in comparison to Nice’s enviable 2,700. And yet, despite the town’s proud boast of having 1,000 hotels and 3,000
The niceties of Saul Steinberg’s cartoon drawings are doodle-related. Figures begin at the nose, become elaborately hatted and shod and strut like clockwork toys; words are transformed into free-standing objects; horizontal lines denote runways or table edges. Often, it seems, the draughtsman’s pen went on automatic, pen-pushing the same old absurdities, perplexities and double-takes on
If Kafka had never existed, critics might now be using the word Warneresque, instead of Kafkaesque, to describe the sort of fiction represented by the three remarkable early novels for which Rex Warner is now chiefly remembered. But then, if Kafka had never existed, perhaps The Wild Goose Chase, The Professor and The Aerodrome would
A. N. Wilson claims that he can imagine nothing more agreeable than the life of a country parson, ‘born in the 1830s with the genetic inheritance of strong teeth’. The Victorians are still vivid to him: from his 1950s childhood, he can recall the last vestiges of their way of life – gas-lit station waiting-rooms,
The big play at Edinburgh this year – the one with Tim Robbins and Susan Sarandon in it – was The Guys, a heartfelt tribute to the ‘ordinary’ heroes of 11 September. Written by a journalist called Ann Nelson, it tells the story of her encounter with a New York fire captain who asked for
Every cavalryman must envy the hero of this book. Between 1936 and 1941 he led no less than five charges on horseback in Abyssinia, the final and most famous being the last cavalry charge that the British army has faced. And he survived to tell his tale. Indeed Tenente Amedeo Guillet is still living, aged
The young author of this survey of our childlike passion for grabbing a thing and shouting ‘it’s mine!’ is good company, generating in easy-going prose the scholarly tensions of an auction room. He calls collecting ‘Noah’s task’: things must not be allowed to perish. The inanimate and the humble are just as much in need
This is a selection of the original letters written in the 1870s by the Victorian globe-trotter, Isabella Bird, to her younger sister, Henrietta on the Isle of Mull. They were posted from the USA, Australia, New Zealand, Hawaii, China and the Malay Peninsula. Henrietta edited them, it is thought heavily, and on her brief spells
This racy tale of plague in the modern era focuses on two outbreaks 100 years apart: Hong Kong 1894 and Surat 1994. Edward Marriott treats the earlier outbreak as an episode of medical detection, in which two competing scientists, a famous Japanese and a less well-known Frenchman, are bent on discovering the bacillus that causes
This is the story of a strange and intense friendship between two orthodox Jews, one a violinist seen as the next Kreisler, the other a clever plodder who falls under his spell, almost wrecking his own life in the process. The two meet as boys just before the war. Dovdl Rapoport, called David, a refugee