There’s a Radio 4 programme, presented by the smug moraliser Marcus Brigstocke, called I’ve Never Seen Star Wars, which gets famous people to do things they’ve never done before, like watch Star Wars. I’m not famous, but before last night I’d never seen Strictly. The very idea of it bored me. I don’t like ballroom
At 9 o’clock last night, I sat down with my take-away curry, flippedback the lid of my MacBook and went to the iPlayer website to catchthe first episode of 21 Up: New Generation, taking care to click thebutton that says ‘Yes, I do have a TV licence.’ One small problem: 21Up wasn’t on. Not until 10.35 p.m., aka
I was pleased to see that June Sarpong had added her weight to Kathy Lette’s petition to get a woman to present the BBC’s remake of Civilisation. I’ve often wondered what became of her after Five Go Dating, a show I used to watch religiously, and one which – if you’re listening, Channel 4 –
Thanks to BBC1’s new World War One drama The Crimson Field, I know now how to fake the symptoms of syphilis. All you need is a red hot needle, to create a genital blister, and some condensed milk, for realistic-looking discharge. You had to do this if you wanted to get sent home from the
‘I thought it was supposed to go on for another half hour!’ said a man in the foyer on the way out. ‘When the alien got burnt to death I thought thank fuck for that.’ Before you get annoyed with me for giving away the ending, let me explain that this is one of those films where
London doesn’t really have a literary hipster scene, but if it did, Ned Beauman would be centre stage. The 27-year-old novelist may look like he’s crawled out of an evolution of man diagram, but he’s very clever and very trendy and, despite having gone to Cambridge, knows a lot about ketamine. His show-offy but energetic
Hearing that rope sales were going through the roof in New York, many of us naively assumed it was bored housewives wanting to recreate scenes from 50 Shades of Grey. Now, after another weekend of wall-to-wall broadsheet analysis of the least sexiest bonkbuster of all time, you have to wonder whether it might have been
UP: SHAKESPEARE IN LOVE Faber’s new Shakespeare’s Sonnets app is rated 12+ on account of its ‘Infrequent/Mild Sexual Content or Nudity’. After watching Andrew Motion’s come-to-bed reading of Sonnet 142 we’re surprised it escaped an X-certificate. Who needs 50 Shades when you’ve got the third sexiest poet laureate (after Ben Jonson and Ted Hughes) wearing
The publishing juggernaut that is Alastair Campbell’s diaries rumbles on, with the arrival of the fourth instalment, Burden of Power: The Countdown to Iraq. The 752-page volume covers the most tumultuous part of Blair’s premiership, taking readers from 9/11 to Campbell’s resignation two years later. This is the sort of book whose reviews are
Up: BAD HABITS 500K to spare? Four pages of calfskin, 1,300 year old manuscript could be yours in the Sotheby’s summer sale next month. In De Laude Virginitatis [In Praise of Virginity], Anglo-Saxon cleric Aldhelm advises the nuns of Barking Abbey to avoid garments which might ‘set off’ the body and ‘nourish the fires of
Do great novelists make great essayists? Not in the case of Jonathan Franzen, at least according to Phillip Lopate, who reviewed Franzen’s new essay collection Farther Away for the New York Times. Lopate is a fan of Franzen’s but feels his non-fiction pieces – though entertaining and interesting – are ‘not nearly as strong as
Now we’ve all had our fill of bunting, bladders and BBC-bashing, it’s time to turn our minds to more high-minded pursuits, starting with a long overdue glance at the weekend’s book pages. And you can’t get higher minded than a Nobel Laureate. 74-year-old Peruvian novelist, and ex-presidential candidate, Mario Vargas Llosa has a new
The Orange Prize longlist has just been announced, followed by the perennial hoo-ha over its right to exist. Is it sexist to have a prize just for women? Is sexism the reason why we need a prize just for women? Does anyone outside the comment boards on the Guardian website actually care? All it is,
More bad news for people who like their reading matter to come with a spine: January sales for printed books were down 16 per cent on last year’s. There are lots of reasons for this — ebooks, better telly, a global pandemic of attention deficit disorder — but what’s often overlooked is modern publishing’s tendency
Every summer when the exam results come out, besides the obligatory photos of bouncing schoolgirls, there’s a story about a five-year-old who’s become the youngest person ever to pass a GCSE. Little Liam, his parents boast, has been doing sums since before he could talk and is now raking in the dosh from his million-selling
After a lacklustre year of books programming, the low point being a serialisation of a middle-class family’s failed attempt to live without internet, Radio 4 has lately come into its own. Already this month we’ve been treated to Beware of Pity (which I wrote about here), the surprisingly enjoyable Gargantua and Pantagruel, Claire Tomalin’s biography
Is it possible to hold a literary award these days without igniting some sort of controversy? The latest storm in an inkwell surrounds the TS Eliot Prize, whose shortlist shrunk after two poets dropped out in protest at its sponsor, the hedgefund Aurum. John Kinsella and Alice Oswald have boycotted the prize, explaining ‘the
Gentleman shopkeeper James Daunt has given a cringeworthy interview to the Independent where he calls Amazon ‘a ruthless, money-making devil, the consumer’s enemy’. I wouldn’t be surprised if the manger of “Quills ‘R’ Us” had said something similar about William Caxton in 1476. Poor James Daunt. He clearly had a certain degree of business acumen
Eurozone crisis, what eurozone crisis? According to Spanish newspaper El País, the real global emergency is the state of literary criticism. British book pages, however, won’t need bailing out any time soon — at least if these splenetic offerings are anything to go by. Tibor Fischer on Parallel Stories by Peter Nadas, Guardian It’s a
Full marks to Radio 4 for deciding to dramatise Stefan Zweig’s masterpiece, Beware of Pity (listen on BBC iPlayer). This is a rare example of a “neglected classic” that actually lives up to the hype. Born in Austria in 1881, Zweig was one of the most famous writers of the twenties and thirties, his novellas